Patrick Apr 20, 2012

it was amazing 's review

As always, after reading something by Sanderson, I find myself irritated at how good he is.



So let's take it as a given that the book has all the essential ingredients: character, plot, dialogue, mystery, and action. All of these things are there, some of them merely great, most of them included to exceptional degree.



What truly impresses me though, is that Sanderson has done something extraordinarily unique with this book. Something that just isn't done in fantasy.



First, Sanderson wrote the Mistborn trilogy, an amazingly good fantasy trilogy set it in a unique, carefully-constructed world with a well defined magic system.



Then he moved that world forward 300 years. He evolved it away from the low-industrial/dark-ages culture into a much more modern setting.



This simply isn't done.



You see, here's the way things work:



1. You either write secondary world fantasy which is pretty medievally, or Renaissance-y, or occationally dark-ages-ish. Maybe you go crazy and make it kinda Asian. Or you make it bronze age. That's rare though. Pretty fringe.



2. Your other option is to set something in THIS world. Most of the time when you do this, the setting is modern, which gets you urban fantasy. If you're not quite so modern, you get steampunk. If you go back further than that, it's alternate history. But again, that's kinda rare.



These are the rules. They're not written down anywhere, but generally speaking, that's how things work. This is just the way things are done.



But Sanderson has done something different here. Two somethings, actually.



1. He evolved his world through time, changing the society significantly while staying true to the world he established in the earlier Mistborn books.



(Yeah yeah. There have been a few other authors that have done this. Frank Herbert, for example. But it's so rare as to be practically unique. And in my opinion Sanderson has done it better than Herbert did for the simple fact that I want to read Sanderson's future books in this world, while I just couldn't make it through the second Dune sequel.)



2. Sanderson has written urban fantasy THAT ISN'T SET IN THIS WORLD. Call it what you want, urban fantasy, qua-western, steampunk, whatever. That's what he did.



I read this book and found myself thinking, "What? You can do that? How come nobody's done this before?"



This is what happens with all truly clever innovation. Once someone does it, it seems obvious. It seems like anyone could do it.



But everyone didn't do it. Sanderson did. That's a very special sort of clever.



What's my point?



My point is that this book is good, and you should give it a try.



My other point is that this book does something different, and pulls it off very smoothly, so you should give it a try.



My last point is that Sanderson has now been added to a very short list of authors. Specifically, the list authors whom I wish to kill so that I might eat their livers and thereby gain their power.



So yeah. My hat's off to you, Brandon. Watch your back.



