Brandon Sanderson

Heh. I got all but Zinc, Chromium and Nicrosil. Had to look those up.

Feruchemical metals quiz here. (Not really worth doing one for Hemalurgy since we don't really get much insight into it and half of the metals have unknown powers)

I think it's been too long since I read a new Sanderson book. Luckily Warbreaker and Alloy of Law should turn up tomorrow.

edited 1st Nov '14 5:19:18 PM by JimmyTMalice

You read Words of Radiance? Also no fair, Feruchemy is way more obscure.

Yep, the first Cosmere book I read was The Way of Kings and then I picked up Words of Radiance as soon as it came out.

edited 1st Nov '14 5:47:48 PM by JimmyTMalice

Read Sixth of the Dusk. Pretty interested how the Ones Above were trying to backhandedly Rukes Lawyer their way out of their Alien Non-Interference Clause. That's not something you see very often. Gotta ask, though, was the Aviar's nesting lake a Shardpool? I can't really see how else it links to the Cosmere, save perhaps for the whole "animals with investiture" thing.

So I received my e-book of Altered Perceptions, the anthology in support of mental health that Brandon Sanderson contributed to, the other day.

It has a few chapters of Way of Kings Prime, the first draft of what would become Stormlight Archive. It was interesting seeing how different and how similar the various characters were! Seeing proto-Adolin and proto-Kaladin being friends was fun, but I am glad we got their current incarnations. They're much more interesting.

edited 14th Nov '14 6:11:14 AM by LoniJay

Brandon Sanderson Explains Why Superhero Books Are So Hard to Get Right.

I like him mentioning that The Stormlight Archive started as an attempt to justify Awesome, but Impractical BFS type weapons.

That's like Codex Alera in unlikely starts for awesome series.

Assuming all the books are about the same size as the first one, that's looking like ten thousand plus pages to explain why giant anime swords are practical. Makes me wonder what he'd do with bikini armor.

Gonna ramble a bit on the superhero thing now. I think the thing about riffing on superhero stuff is that it had, relatively speaking, a very short time between the genesis of the now-archetypal characters and the archetypes and tropes being understood as such. Siegel and Shuster invented the fucking genre in forties. Most other genres are gonna have a longer pedigree than that.

Take high fantasy, for instance. Say you want to do a high fantasy thing, no deconstruction, nothing revolutionary, just unabashedly exulting in the genre with its tropes and archetypes. You're gonna put in some orcs and elves and whatever name for hobbits you pick, and that goes back to what Tolkien was putting out in the thirties and fifties, but you're also going to put in some bearded wizard sage guy who's basically Merlin, and wikipedia assures me he goes back to the eleven hundreds, easy. And that big burly warrior guy standing protectively in front of not!Merlin, he could stunt double for Heracles, from back when the archetypal magic person was some creepy lady like Hecate or an outright god.

If you do the same thing with, say, pirates you're gonna be drawing heavily from Captain Hook (debuted 1904), Long John Silver (debuted 1881) and Blackbeard (died 1718). Sci-fi seems like it should be a recent thing, but Mary Shelley published in 1818. And so on. Superheroes are a collective whippersnapper, comparatively. They didn't have as much time as anything else to just exist unironically before shit like Watchmen came out.

Another thing, and I'm not sure how this factors in but I'm pretty much word-vomiting at this point, is the way that superhero archetypes tend to be identified with specific characters more than in most genres. If you've got a thing and a one-legged pirate with a parrot on his shoulder shows up, you're not going to refer to him as "Long John Silver," you're going to refer to him as "the pirate," or "the peg-leg pirate" if the distinction needs to be made. If you've got a thing with a superfast guy in a bright skintight costume, you're going to call him "the Flash" rather than "the super-speedster." The Lord Ruler is the Chosen One turned Evil Overlord, Steelheart is Evil Superman. So it's harder to riff on the archetypes in superhero stuff without riffing on specific characters. You can give give your idealistic flying brick a backstory dating back to his ancestor helping out Paul Revere and keep half of Superman's powers out of his hands and people will still think of him as the Superman of your setting.

edited 31st Dec '14 4:52:54 PM by rikalous

I think you mean ten thousand pages. Anyway, good point on the superheroes. Couldn't tell if it was a negative appraisal of Steelheart or just neutral, though.

Hellza neutral. I probably shouldn't have called the thing I was rambling on about a problem, but I was kind of figuring out what I was talking about as I went so I'm just happy it came out mostly coherent.

And yeah, meant pages. In fact, I fix them both. Yay edit button.

edited 31st Dec '14 4:53:13 PM by rikalous

Another thing with superheroes is that, unless you're working for Disney or Time Warner, you can't actually advertise your book as a superhero story, since the word "superhero" is a registered trademark of DC and Marvel Comics.

Red some Sanderson stuff while I was travelling for the holidays. Legion: Skin Deep and Mitosis: A Reckoners Story were both good additions to their respective stories, novellas that were interesting in and of themselves while still expanding the setting. Sixth of Dusk was neat as well, a new setting with (hints at) a new magic system. It was pretty engrossing as it was, and I'd totally like to see more stories in that setting (though as far as I know that's not likely). I also read Firstborn, a short story available free on Tor.com, which didn't impress me nearly as much. It's fairly generic sci-fi that didn't really grab me, and has none of Sanderson's signature worldbuilding, interesting Functional Magic, or the Sanderson Avalanche — it didn't much feel like a Sanderson work at all, honestly.

I'm about halfway through Words of Radiance now, really enjoying it, as I did The Way of Kings (read over Thanksgiving). Seems to be Shallan's day in the spotlight, as Wo K was for Kaladin.

The interludes have been some of my favorite parts of both books. I'm disappointed at times to see we're back to the main plot rather than following Rysn to other unusual (either by our standards or theirs—dull grass! Soil!) Roshar environments.

WMGS/questions:

So, the man with the black and silver outfit who hunts Radiants for injustice regardless of other good deeds...

although I know from looking ahead (bad habit of mine) that he claims to be a Herald and one of the gods of Szeth's religion, doesn't the King's Wit also wear a black and silver uniform? Wonder if he has a connection to Hoid...or maybe I'm just remembering incorrectly.

There've been several mentions of Honor, Cultivation, and Odium. Makes me curious both how Cultivation is/will be involved in the plot, and if there's a complete list of shards out somewhere.

Any guesses who might be collecting Shallan's sketches, and if her photographic-memory-Blink is a stormlight power or just an unusual natural ability?

Also, since the next installment probably won't be out yet when I finish, should I look for Elantris or the Wax & Wayne Mistborn novels next?

Spoilers for the end. Don't read until you get there:

• The Radiant hunter is a Herald. The fact that you know that he claims to be Szeth's god implies you're significantly farther than halfway, but whatever. There might be a link between him and Hoid, but when Hoid is asked if he's a Herald he just quietly laughs and says no. And we know he's not a Shard, either.
• There's a fan list of Shards (included on our Characters.The Cosmere page), but it's mostly supposition.
• The theory is that Shallan's photographic memory is a passive side effect of her bond with her spren, like Kaladin's windsense. I went into more detail on theories of Radiant powers here. No idea who's collecting them, though. Might be the Ghostbloods.
• Elantris is a good read, though not as polished as later books. Read it a second time and you'll see a lot of things that could have been foreshadowed better. Alloy Of Law is very good, enough that it's going to be its own series (rather than just an interlude between Mistborn: The Original Trilogy'' and the modern series).

edited 1st Jan '15 11:34:39 AM by Discar

One of the epigraphs mentions the Lightweavers' strange mnemonic abilities, so that's pretty much confirmed.

No, I am only about halfway. As I said, I looked ahead. Shouldn't have, but I did.

From looking at that character sheet, seems I should have reread the Wo K epigraphs straight through without intervening chapter text earlier. I'd forgotten they weren't all cryptic death rattles.

For that matter, looking at your other link, I didn't realize there's a separate thread specifically for Stormlight Archives, time to check it out.

If you ask me, Elantris is one of Sanderson's best works.

Really? While the Hrathen and Sarene parts were good, I was kind of annoyed at how much of a Mary Sue Raoden was.

...And Raoden is one of the main reasons why. To be honest, I just really like characters who do stuff, rather than have stuff happen to them. Raoden gets literally the worst fate possible, and rather than moping around or falling into despair like everybody else, he gets off his ass and does something about it. He learns, he helps others, he inspires people. He may not have much in the way of obvious flaws, but I find him an awesome character nonetheless — that degree of agency is something I love in protagonists.

My main problem, as I noted, is a lack of foreshadowing. Most of the twists are too subtle, so while you can pick them out on a second read, it's kind of like "Okay, so her uncle is a pirate. Why are we supposed to care?"

Sanderson does well when he has space to stretch his legs and really paint the worlds and the characters. Elantris is just a little too short to care about anyone beyond the main three. Ironic, since apparently when he first sent it to the publisher, the poor man kept procrastinating on reading it because it was just too long.

I'd read Wo K before I read Elantris, so as far as the whole implacable-determination-to-make-lives-better thing went, he just seemed similar to Kaladin without the other features that make Kaladin compelling. Okay, but not one of favourite characters ever.

The trouble with Raoden is that it's just too easy for him. He's dropped into Elantris with little to no resources or knowledge about the city, and in a matter of weeks he's completely transformed the society there and has figured out a way to remove their curse and turn them into pseudo-gods. That sort of competence is annoying because it makes everyone else in the story seem stupid, like they wouldn't know how to do anything without our main character there to guide them.

I liked that archetype much better when it was done with Kaladin. He completely turned Bridge Four around, but it was shown to be an immensely difficult task that took a long time, ran into many setbacks, and would have killed Kaladin several times over if it weren't for special circumstances. And even then, the plight Kaladin rescued the bridgemen from was never as bleak as what the Elantrians faced. With Raoden, everything goes so well for him that my Willing Suspension of Disbelief just couldn't take it.

edited 1st Jan '15 6:30:24 PM by RavenWilder

Fair perspective. Just not mine.

Got Firefight. Finished Firefight. Literally seconds ago. Gonna need time to organize my thoughts, but it's damn good.