It's hard for me to fault Mistborn. It has the tightest ending to a fantasy trilogy I've ever seen. And then, as an afterthought, Sanderson somehow managed to end the Wheel of Time, which frankly I don't think Robert Jordan could have managed to do.
By the last 10% of the book/serie he has created a problem you are 100% sure is insurmountable but by the last 5% you realise how small hints through the story could be composed to create a solution.
The whole earring thing blew my mind, and it was so obvious from book 3 onwards.
The ending of the Mistborn series is indeed, incredibly tight. The whole series had a roundedness to it that I have not encountered before, every word, theme, event and character has a place in the Bigger Scheme. I think this is because he wrote all 3 books together, so he would regularly go back to book one to make edits based on new things he thought of in book 3.
This is what made early Sanderson so great for me though. I’m constantly inundated by media through which the author demands a soapbox. This can be anything from politics to just the author’s personal preferences.
Mistborn 1-3 was a fairly simple and satisfying plot with likeable (if somewhat predictable) characters and fun world building. Perfect set of books to just pick up and enjoy. Not Shakespeare, but it didn’t have to be.
By the time I got through all the Stormlight books I felt like I had been locked in a room and forced to listen to Sanderson drone on and on in a self-serving tone about his personal power fantasies. The story was more complex, but it also had 100+ pages of fluff nobody except Sanderson cared about. I truly believe that once he got really famous his editors stopped saying “no” to anything, no matter how small.
His short stories are the same way. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is good because it’s short and sweet. It sticks to a classic formula and focuses on imaginative settings, which is what Sanderson is good at. Tress was boring because it tried to be smart and kind of flopped.
Plus the universe just begs for an arbitrarily large number of seasons and spin-offs. There's something for everybody. You almost certainly start with multiple series of Mistborn. From there, you can go in dozens of directions. And there's a built in huge audience. It practically begs for high budget TV adaptation.
Also, Sanderson is pretty much the exact opposite of GRRM in terms of quantity of writing so odds are good even Stormlight is finished by the time Apple even gets to the first book.
blinded•1w ago
tstrimple•1w ago