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Stormlight Archives 4: Rhythm of War (SPOILERS)


Rhom

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Will be interesting to see which editorial sequence they finish up first, Sanderson or Lynch.

Edit:  Spoilerific talk begins on Page 7 of the thread.

Edit2: My original comment wondering about Lynch is sadly comical at this point.

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4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Call me when Lynch, Martin, or Rothfuss finish their work.  Sanderson just doesn't do anything for me.  

:P

You may be waiting a while for that call. :lol: 

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I tend to agree.  They have great scenes that are generally worth the price of admission, but there is a lot of bloat to get through for sure.  And I feel in some ways that the story is epic in scope for epic sake.  Rarely would I say there is too much world building in a story, but it feels like it here sometimes.

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I, too, gave up not even halfway through Oathbringer. I realized I don't particularly care enough about the story to slog my way through these tomes of mediocre prose.

12 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

Yep, same. I think the third one could have been literally 40% as long as it was and been pretty fun.

Because of Sanderson I've come to dislike the use of 'obviously' in sentences. Probably could cut the book down by 10% by just removing this word from everywhere he has it. :laugh:

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Lynch's fourth book is done, it's just a question of when Gollancz and then Bantam can schedule it.

The Stormlight series started off well but it does feel like it's gone off the rails a bit. Brandon originally wanted Way of Kings to be the longest book in the series and the rest would be a lot shorter, but that hasn't happened and it feels like it really needs to. Oathbringer was overlong by a factor of at least two, and all the tedious scenes of characters sitting around talking about the plot could have been hacked off with nothing lost. Pulling out all the nothing-to-do-with-this-book vignettes and turning them into short stories or novellas would also make the main novels a lot shorter and improve pacing.

As for timescale, on his recent update Brandon confirmed that there'll still be three years between each book and a much larger gap between #5 and #6 whilst he writes the third Mistborn series, putting completion comfortably off in the 2040s.

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On 1/4/2020 at 11:21 PM, Darth Richard II said:

Um, didn't Lynch finish book 4 about a month ago?

A few months ago and Scott and his publisher were having meetings at WorldCon in August to lock down a date, but it hasn't been announced yet.

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On 1/2/2020 at 11:32 AM, Rhom said:

I tend to agree.  They have great scenes that are generally worth the price of admission, but there is a lot of bloat to get through for sure.  And I feel in some ways that the story is epic in scope for epic sake.  Rarely would I say there is too much world building in a story, but it feels like it here sometimes.

I think you pretty much nailed it here. 

It's like young Sanderson dreamed of putting together 10 giant books, and he's going to do it dammit. 

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21 minutes ago, Ninefingers said:

I think you pretty much nailed it here. 

It's like young Sanderson dreamed of putting together 10 giant books, and he's going to do it dammit. 

Agreed.  Its a similar problem to what Bakker had with the ending to The Second Apocalypse.

Sanderson had a tweet in his tweetstorm that night where he finished the book where he said that he finally was writing scenes that he originally envisioned in 1992 or something.

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On 1/7/2020 at 6:10 PM, Rhom said:

Agreed.  Its a similar problem to what Bakker had with the ending to The Second Apocalypse.

Sanderson had a tweet in his tweetstorm that night where he finished the book where he said that he finally was writing scenes that he originally envisioned in 1992 or something.

I get why people think the world-building is too much (and I have real difficulty keeping track of it as well) but I think the criticism is a little unfair while the series is being written. Only when the whole story is done can we really judge what was essentlal to the story and what was not. 

My admiration for Sanderson's work ethic knows no bounds. At the same time I remember reading the phrase "the flight out" in Book 3 in reference to Kaladin riding the winds and shuddering.  Impossible to hear those words and not think of Southwest Airlines. 

Here's my thesis: Sanderson is a great dreamer and architect who is a terrible writer. When he invests the time to polish his prose, he can produce strong prose together with amazing set pieces, clever philosophy and world-building at a staggering pace.  But the pace of his publishing is really affecting the quality of his books.  Book 1 of the Stormlight Archive was much better written than Book 2 which was much better written than Book 3.  This is also true of some of the Mistborn books (the most recent was dreadful prose).  

I also worry that he's writing the same book to some extent over and over again: there are a number of plot similarities between Starborn and Warbreaker for example, despite very different settings.  And this is not the first time I've noticed recurring plot points. 

Plus, when he writes quickly, his characters tend to be unusually bland and two-dimensional. 

That said I've read virtually everything he's written and will continue to do so.  But still I feel like he has the opposite problem to Rothfuss' proscrastination-perfectionism complex. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/27/2020 at 10:07 PM, sperry said:

I know he planned to do it in two sets of 5. Hopefully the first 5 stand alone. Because 3 years between just isn't going to work. With 6 books to go.

Eh, with George we haven't had a new book in 9 years with 2 to go. Same difference, really.

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On 1/30/2020 at 10:02 AM, Ninefingers said:

Eh, with George we haven't had a new book in 9 years with 2 to go. Same difference, really.

Except I still have faith Brandon will finish eventually.

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1 hour ago, Rhom said:

Except I still have faith Brandon will finish eventually.

Maybe:

 

Quote

"That makes eleven books in the Cosmere finished in the last 15 years, less than a third of the full Cosmere sequence. This means, at this speed, I’ve got at least another thirty years of writing to do—putting me optimistically at age seventy-four when I finish. (Assuming I don’t add anything else, like a Mistborn cyberpunk between eras three and four—or a standalone or two, which I’d really like to be doing more.)"

LINK

 

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