And, as always, the Inciting Peter Ahlstrom was head of my in-house editorial efforts. (Literally in house. He works out of my home.) Peter is responsible for collecting all the comments from various people doing reads, adding his own detailed continuity and editorial notes, and then smoothing everything over once I’ve taken the hacksaw to stories.

The copyeditor was Terry McGarry. At Tor, thanks go to Tom Doherty, Marco Palmieri, Patti Garcia, Karl Gold, Rafal Gibek, and Robert Davis.

Joshua Bilmes was the agent on this in the United States, and John Berlyne was the agent in the UK. Heaps of thanks go to everyone at their respective agencies.

Our alpha and gamma readers on Edgedancer include Alice Arneson, Ben Oldsen, Bob Kluttz, Brandon Cole, Brian T. Hill, Darci Cole, David Behrens, Eric James Stone, Eric Lake, Gary Singer, Ian McNatt, Karen Ahlstrom, Kellyn Neumann, Kristina Kugler, Lyndsey Luther, Mark Lindberg, Matt Wiens, Megan Kanne, Nikki Ramsay, Paige Vest, Ross Newberry, and Trae Cooper.

And, as is traditional, I leave with a hearty thanks to my family: Joel, Dallin, Oliver, and Emily. You guys are awesome!

Preface

PREFACE

The Cosmere has always been full of secrets.

I can trace my grand plan now to several key moments. The first is the emergence of Hoid, who dates back to my teenage years, when I conceived of a man who connected worlds that didn’t know about one another. A person in on the secret that nobody else understood. While reading books by other authors, in my mind I inserted this man into the backgrounds, imagining him as the random person described in a crowd—and dreaming of the story behind the story of which he was a part.

The second moment that helped all this come together was reading the later books in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I was awed by how he managed to tie the Robot novels and the Foundation novels together in one grand story. I knew I wanted to create something like this, an epic bigger than an epic. A story that spanned worlds and eras.

The third moment, then, was the first appearance of Hoid in a novel. I inserted him nervously, worried about making everything work. I didn’t have my grand plan for the Cosmere at that point, only an inkling of what I wanted to do.

That story was Elantris. The next book I wrote, Dragonsteel, was never published. (It’s not very good.) But in it I devised Hoid’s backstory, and the backstory of the entire universe I named the Cosmere. Elantris wasn’t picked up by a publisher until years after that point—and when it was, I had the grand plan in place. Mistborn, Stormlight, and Elantris became the core of it. (And you’ll find stories relating to all three in this collection.)