The first few chapters are about what bluestream (supposedly) is, a step by step guide on doing one's first shaping (which mostly seems to consist of willing things in the correct way), the most elementary or common uses of it (light, heat, and motion mostly), and brief descriptions of the kinds of things one can do when one is more learned.
The broad categories each get a chapter. Agriculture, construction, transmutation, healing, and thermo-kinetics.
'Transmutation' sounds a lot like chemistry with magic, since it talks about elements and compounds and so on. 'Thermo-kinetics' similarly sounds a little like physics or engineering. None of the knowledge contained therein is particularly impressive by Cam's standards.
The book describes how one becomes a shaper: One sits in the stone circles. About 70% of the time the person who goes into it will enter sensory deprivation for five days and wake up a shaper. The other 30% experience intense pain that bypasses all known anesthesia.
Apparently statistics show that it's completely random, not disciminating by age, gender, race, health, education, personality, sexuality, or anything else they could think of to investigate. Nobody knows why the stone circles do this, or how to get it to work with a different arrangement, a different kind of stone, etc.
no subject
The broad categories each get a chapter. Agriculture, construction, transmutation, healing, and thermo-kinetics.
'Transmutation' sounds a lot like chemistry with magic, since it talks about elements and compounds and so on. 'Thermo-kinetics' similarly sounds a little like physics or engineering. None of the knowledge contained therein is particularly impressive by Cam's standards.
The book describes how one becomes a shaper: One sits in the stone circles. About 70% of the time the person who goes into it will enter sensory deprivation for five days and wake up a shaper. The other 30% experience intense pain that bypasses all known anesthesia.
Apparently statistics show that it's completely random, not disciminating by age, gender, race, health, education, personality, sexuality, or anything else they could think of to investigate. Nobody knows why the stone circles do this, or how to get it to work with a different arrangement, a different kind of stone, etc.