Book #55

Mistborn
by Brandon Sanderson


I've been keeping an eye out for this author's novels, because he's the guy writing the 12th book of the Wheel of Time from Robert Jordan's notes. I wanted to see if he had the authorial chops to handle the task he's taken on.

Short answer: Maybe.

I found Mistborn, the first in a trilogy, and bought it, and now spent 8 days reading it -- it's fairly long, and it's been a busy week of school seminars and home repair. It was really good; apart from the whole WoT thing, Sanderson is definitely an author I'd want to keep up with. The second book of this trilogy is already out, as is a stand-alone novel, his first; this book was a discounted re-release to promote the publication of the last book in the trilogy. So I'll be looking at Powell's for the sequel and the separate novel.

The positives: the writing was strong, though a bit plain; the magic system and the world were outstanding, one of the best fantasy settings I've seen in a while -- comparable in some ways with WoT, which is probably why he was tapped to write Book 12. The concept is that there is an absolute dictatorship ruling this world, a single world-spanning empire with an immortal god-king at the head. The world has turned ugly, with volcanoes spewing a constant stream of ash and smoke into the sky, blocking most of the sun's rays and leaving the people with brown plants and a world coated in black ash, which falls like rain. The empire has divided people into nobility and peasants, and the peasants suffer just as they did in the feudal system of the Middle Ages: they exist only to serve the nobility, who slaughter them wholesale just for amusement, and who work very hard to crush their spirits, mostly with great success.

The book is about a group of people, thieves, who try to organize an uprising in order to overthrow the all-powerful emperor, slaughter the nobles, and free the people -- and make themselves impossibly rich in the process. The cast of characters were mostly good, though some of the secondary characters were a bit cliche -- a soldier who tries to think like a philosopher, but honestly, his philosophical questions are a bit ho-hum (The best one was: if the Lord Ruler is actually a piece of God, as his reputation has it, then doesn't his divinity make his actions morally right, and thus make our insurrection the wrong thing to do?), and then there are the overweight bombastic politico, the quiet organizer, and the cantankerous old man. But the main characters were much better, and the magic system -- which is based around metals, which the magic-users ingest and then "burn" to gain magical powers -- was both subtle and intricate, as well as being basically straightforward and easy to follow.

The plot was great, though again, there were little cliche moments that irritated me slightly -- I could have done without the love interest, for one, as the lowborn main character falls for the one noble with a heart of gold. But the ending was outstanding, and the image of the villains -- the Inquisitors, horribly powerful, immortal servants of the Lord Ruler -- was inspired: instead of eyes, they have steel spikes driven through their heads, with the tips protruding from the backs of their skulls and the square ends of the spikes right where their eyes should be. That was fantastic.

So basically, Sanderson has the imagination to keep up with the Wheel of Time, but not really the storytelling skills, at least not in this book. Unfortunately, the imaginative parts of WoT are already done for him, so this doesn't play to his strengths. I'm hoping his other books show better writing.