Absolutely loved Mistborn, and I have Way of Kings waiting on my bookshelf for after my Covenant re-read. Planning to read all the Cosmere novels he writes, love the idea of this background meta-epic he's got going.
Any other fans wanna discuss?
Brandon Sanderson
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Brandon Sanderson
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I liked Mistborn as well.
I haven't gotten Way of Kings yet - kinda hate buying a 10-volume series when only 1 of them is out
Got the Wheel of Time books he wrote - going to have to re-read the Jordan ones though before I get to them as it's been so long since I read them. That'll come after the TC re-read and The Last Dark
I haven't gotten Way of Kings yet - kinda hate buying a 10-volume series when only 1 of them is out
Got the Wheel of Time books he wrote - going to have to re-read the Jordan ones though before I get to them as it's been so long since I read them. That'll come after the TC re-read and The Last Dark
Yeah, I plan to re-read and finish WoT one of these days (in high school I read up to about book 8 or 9 but I've forgotten most of it). It's abig commitment, though, and the memory of those "romances" still haunts me 
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Mighara Sovmadhi
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I like Sanderson's work quite a bit, and he's also a remarkably self-aware fantasy writer. He takes SRD's dictum "magic should not have rules like physics does" and expands it into the much better "if magic doesn't have complex rules, it shouldn't be the solution to the main problem in the story"--something along that line.
Bump!
So I've now read both Stormlight Archive books currently out, as well as The Alloy of Law and Elantris.
The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance are easily his best two books, boding well for the future SA books, which I believe he intends to be his magnum opus. It's an exciting world I love reading in and exploring, and the plot is moving at a breakneck pace. Two books in and I'm wondering just where we will be at the end of the tenth
The more I read of Sanderson, the more his particular flaws become apparent. A lot of his dialogue is wince-worthy, particularly when he tries to make his characters "witty." Shallan from SA is painful, and we're told Sarene from Elantris is witty as well, not that we see any evidence of this. His romances are strange as well, fraught with drama but strangely passionless, with a near complete absence of sexuality. I blame the Mormons
Sanderson's characterisation in general is shallow at best, unconvincing at worst (looking at you, Sarene).
The above paragraph sounds like I'm savaging him. Would you believe I'm a huge fan? What Sanderson does well, he does extremely well. His world building, back story and mythos is always detailed, easy to grasp and fun to discover. His magic systems are innovative and executed with great imagination and sense of fun. And his plotting, post Elantris, is superbly constructed, with third act climaxes being perhaps his greatest skill.
Warts and all, he keeps me reading with pleasure.
So I've now read both Stormlight Archive books currently out, as well as The Alloy of Law and Elantris.
The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance are easily his best two books, boding well for the future SA books, which I believe he intends to be his magnum opus. It's an exciting world I love reading in and exploring, and the plot is moving at a breakneck pace. Two books in and I'm wondering just where we will be at the end of the tenth
The more I read of Sanderson, the more his particular flaws become apparent. A lot of his dialogue is wince-worthy, particularly when he tries to make his characters "witty." Shallan from SA is painful, and we're told Sarene from Elantris is witty as well, not that we see any evidence of this. His romances are strange as well, fraught with drama but strangely passionless, with a near complete absence of sexuality. I blame the Mormons
Sanderson's characterisation in general is shallow at best, unconvincing at worst (looking at you, Sarene).The above paragraph sounds like I'm savaging him. Would you believe I'm a huge fan?
What Sanderson does well, he does extremely well. His world building, back story and mythos is always detailed, easy to grasp and fun to discover. His magic systems are innovative and executed with great imagination and sense of fun. And his plotting, post Elantris, is superbly constructed, with third act climaxes being perhaps his greatest skill.Warts and all, he keeps me reading with pleasure.
^"Amusing, worth talking to, completely insane...pick your favourite." - Avatar
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Mighara Sovmadhi
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Lots of spoilers in this, so don't read unless you've read the books listed in the first sentence...
The more of his non-WOT work I've read, by now Elantris, Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, the original Mistborn trilogy, the two SA books, Warbreaker, and... hmm... I feel like I'm missing something... Well anyway, through all of it, noting the specific use of art and symbols and glyphs and so on, the "epistolary" quality of especially the SA and newer Mistborn books (like they include excerpts from newspapers or fashion magazines in these worlds?!), it's all so immersive... and the Hoid thing is very, haha, I guess "hypnotic," like the scene where he tells the weird runner's story to Kaladin...
Keep in mind, Sanderson has basically promised that the final Mistborn trilogy will involve outer space/interworld travel of a sort of scifi kind. Given his skill at artistic description, just imagine what he's going to do with the concept of spaceships using magic. Not by any means is this a prediction but more a hypothetical example, but consider some crossover situation (since those have happened, with Nightblood showing up in SA2) where a gem was used to balance Stormlight antigravity with various magnetic propulsion possibilities (not to mention chronodynamic alterations) available through Allomancy.
Then consider the Ars Arcanum stuff about Hemalurgy being the Scadrial magic system's most intriguing subspecies when it comes to the question of magic's effect on the Cosmere as a whole. Like, running around in outer space spiking... what? Building spikes for what? But Kredik Shaw could easily be reflected in some kind of Hemalurgic space station or whatever.
Basically, the possibility of future combinations of magic systems being detailed for us, is a huge field of opportunity for the metaseries, as it also would indicate just how powerful the forces in the context of Adonalsium's shattering really were (Harmony was able to move an entire planet around, recall). And so by then we'd be ready for an even more precise summation of the systems. Sanderson seems to enjoy making his ultimate salvation processes depend on a sort of logical puzzle involving the uses of magic in his worlds (just think of the intricate little thought Rand reflects upon when he tricks Moridin into taking up the crystal sword!). So I doubt what we'd be looking for is some kind of climax in which an entity is supposed to be destroyed in a spellcasting free-for-all, like no combo moves say, but still, a sequence of spells maybe, each linking to the next in some logical way, so that when the entire sequence is through, the effect will make perfect sense as what solves the ultimate problem.
The more of his non-WOT work I've read, by now Elantris, Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, the original Mistborn trilogy, the two SA books, Warbreaker, and... hmm... I feel like I'm missing something... Well anyway, through all of it, noting the specific use of art and symbols and glyphs and so on, the "epistolary" quality of especially the SA and newer Mistborn books (like they include excerpts from newspapers or fashion magazines in these worlds?!), it's all so immersive... and the Hoid thing is very, haha, I guess "hypnotic," like the scene where he tells the weird runner's story to Kaladin...
Keep in mind, Sanderson has basically promised that the final Mistborn trilogy will involve outer space/interworld travel of a sort of scifi kind. Given his skill at artistic description, just imagine what he's going to do with the concept of spaceships using magic. Not by any means is this a prediction but more a hypothetical example, but consider some crossover situation (since those have happened, with Nightblood showing up in SA2) where a gem was used to balance Stormlight antigravity with various magnetic propulsion possibilities (not to mention chronodynamic alterations) available through Allomancy.
Then consider the Ars Arcanum stuff about Hemalurgy being the Scadrial magic system's most intriguing subspecies when it comes to the question of magic's effect on the Cosmere as a whole. Like, running around in outer space spiking... what? Building spikes for what? But Kredik Shaw could easily be reflected in some kind of Hemalurgic space station or whatever.
Basically, the possibility of future combinations of magic systems being detailed for us, is a huge field of opportunity for the metaseries, as it also would indicate just how powerful the forces in the context of Adonalsium's shattering really were (Harmony was able to move an entire planet around, recall). And so by then we'd be ready for an even more precise summation of the systems. Sanderson seems to enjoy making his ultimate salvation processes depend on a sort of logical puzzle involving the uses of magic in his worlds (just think of the intricate little thought Rand reflects upon when he tricks Moridin into taking up the crystal sword!). So I doubt what we'd be looking for is some kind of climax in which an entity is supposed to be destroyed in a spellcasting free-for-all, like no combo moves say, but still, a sequence of spells maybe, each linking to the next in some logical way, so that when the entire sequence is through, the effect will make perfect sense as what solves the ultimate problem.