Date: 1998-10-24
Type: Paraphrased
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Reporter: Justin Howell
I asked why Elayne thought even a Forsaken couldn’t break the shield Adeleas and Vandene were holding on Ispan, expecting the answer that Elayne is clue-impaired.
The correct answer is that holding a shield on someone depends not only on relative strength and fatigue, but also on whether the shield is held by channelers of the same sex as the victim. Thus two women (Adeleas and Vandene on Ispan, or Ispan and Falion on Nynaeve in A Crown of Swords ) can hold another woman, but three women just get severed if they try to shield Rand. As a curiosity, it is also possible for multiple people to hold a shield without linking, but this is less strong and less precise, producing basically a layered shield.
Then I asked about Elayne’s Rod of Pleasure, and got a RAFO with the explicit warning that we might not ever get to the FO part.
RJ managed to slip the ‘FO’ into the next book. A careful reading of ‘A Lily in Winter’ answers the question of what Elayne was doing when she was blacked out.
The popular “are you sure we should be able to figure out who killed Asmodean” question used up my second trip through the line. Next time through I asked about the chronology of Eharon and Shiota, since Bashere describes statues from Eharon as being much older than the Shiotan statue put on the cover. We know Deane was born in the village of Salidar in Eharon (Glossary from Lord of Chaos , IIRC), yet part of Bashere’s lecture mentioned that Shiota also was pre-Hawkwing.
It turns out there is a textual inconsistency here. RJ couldn’t remember which comes first (apparently historical details aren’t as engrossing for him as for me), but one was part of the Ten Nations, and the other covered the same area (Illian + Altara) between the Trolloc Wars and Hawkwing. He said the Guide has the correct order, though since I don’t have the Guide I don’t know what that order is. A minor error, really; either that statue was from Eharon and Bashere mentioned much older Shiotan statues, or Deane was Shiotan and the statues were as written.
This glossary entry was corrected in later editions.
As Paul mentioned, RJ mumbled something about Sammael. My interpretation is simply that he meant “right, he’s dead, whatever you say”, but I can see how one might take it more seriously. I’ll believe my favorite male character died when I see him come back in a new body sucking up to Moridin, at which point I’ll go looking for a new favorite male character (Mat or Demandred, probably).
I think the only other WoT-related comment I heard was that if RJ dies before this is done, we won’t find out about this famous last scene since the hard drives of his computers will be reformatted six times and every scrap of paper in his house having anything to do with tWoT will be burned. He seems to feel quite strongly about this… On a related topic we may get an encyclopedia after the series ends, but no endless series publishing all of his notes, analogous to Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle Earth volumes.
I didn’t hear (or hear of) anything else not recorded here or in Drew’s post, though as Drew said,
Someone else who was paying more attention could fill in here.
—Justin Howell
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