Spirits are essential to just about everything in Roshar, the world of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. When it’s raining, rain spirits come out to splash in puddles. When the wind blows, ghostly, luminescent, mischievous women ride the zephyrs. Fire dances, not figuratively, but literally. And it’s not just physical phenomena, either, that attract spirits in this world: glorious deeds, perfectly logical arguments, and especially creative or beautiful artwork also have spirits associated with them. These spirits are called spren, and you might think they would suggest a world in which the scientific mind could easily shut itself off entirely. After all, it’s hard to imagine a setting where it would be easier or more tempting to answer any new problem with “a spren did it,” and then stop thinking.
And yet, the people of Roshar saw those little spirits and used them to formulate the germ theory of disease hundreds of years early.
[Read more]