Brandon Sanderson's Towers of Cash

[DaveSumm]

It was a flippant point, I know it’s not good comparing authors in such a way. I was just staggered how much an author could cram in while another works on the same novel for 13 years. 

I also usually defend Sanderson at these junctures, purely because I held off on reading him for years because of comments like the previous ones and assumed he churned out any old garbage. But he really doesn’t, no he hasn’t written anything as good as aSoIaF at its best, far from it. But he’s written some excellent books, many far more focused and better paced than Feast and Dance. And he’s built a hell of a shared universe in the Cosmere.

Ice and Fire is better, but it’s not “oh I reckon he takes 13 times longer to write one of these” better.

[Kyll.Ing.]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Quantity will never ever be superior to quality.  Sanderson may have written… more… but what GRRM has written while lower in quantity is better in quality to anything Sanderson has written.

Keep in mind that they are comparing what Sanderson and GRRM have written since A Dance with Dragons. Nothing of ASoIaF goes under that definition, although some minor spin-off stories do.

By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

Edited March 9 by Kyll.Ing.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

18 minutes ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

Keep in mind that they are comparing what Sanderson and GRRM have written since A Dance with Dragons. Nothing of ASoIaF goes under that definition, although some minor spin-off stories do.

By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

I don’t care.  The Big Macs produced en masse by Sanderson will never equal the fine meals crafted by GRRM.

I’ll eat a Big Mac… but I’m never going to get excited about having done so.

Edited March 9 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Erikson used to write a Stormlight Archive-sized novel in nine months, not four years, and usually superior in quality, if we quickly elide over Dust of Dreams

Speaking of which - how is The God is Not Willing in comparison to the mainline Malaz novels? Any good?

[VigoTheCarpathian]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Speaking of which - how is The God is Not Willing in comparison to the mainline Malaz novels? Any good?

In a word - yes.  Much less discursive and still keeping with the humor and epic stuff that the MBotF series did at its peak.  I thought it was a good blend of what I liked about the OG and the Esselmont books, and I’m excited about the next one.  

Will go on record to say that I like Brandon Sanderson’s books fine, but I have never been excited about one.

[baxus]

17 hours ago, Rhom said:

I can't agree with you here.  They are different sports.  Sanderson and GRRM play the same "sport."

Well, they do and they don't. Sure, they both write fantasy but they write very different kinds of fantasy.

13 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Quantity will never ever be superior to quality.  Sanderson may have written… more… but what GRRM has written while lower in quantity is better in quality to anything Sanderson has written.

I think that you have a lower opinion of Sanderson and higher opinion of GRRM than they deserve.

While I do love ASoIaF as much as the next man, let's be honest and say that parts of it are a slog. Sure, Brienne's travels with Jaime through war torn country have their purpose in the overall story but they are a drag and no amount of praise GRRM may get for "quality of his prose" or whatever will make it any easier to read.

11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I also usually defend Sanderson at these junctures, purely because I held off on reading him for years because of comments like the previous ones and assumed he churned out any old garbage. But he really doesn’t, no he hasn’t written anything as good as aSoIaF at its best, far from it. But he’s written some excellent books, many far more focused and better paced than Feast and Dance. And he’s built a hell of a shared universe in the Cosmere.

Comparing authors to other authors is just dumb. If you read Stormlight Archives and expect it to be like ASoIaF, it will be crap. Guess what? If you read ASoIaF and expect it to be like Stormlight Archives, it will be crap, too. We're talking about two different worlds, two different stories, two different styles of writing etc. We can talk about personal preference, but that's a different story.

11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Ice and Fire is better, but it’s not “oh I reckon he takes 13 times longer to write one of these” better.

This metric is nonsense. How would you scale the duration of writing to quality of the book? Could an author say "I'll take a year longer but my book will be twice as good as it would be if I released it now"?

Edited March 10 by baxus

[Werthead]

14 hours ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

I could be wrong but I think the board might have had some, "wow, George is taking a long time with these books, huh?" discussions before. Possibly thousands of times since around 2002.

[Derfel Cadarn]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I could be wrong but I think the board might have had some, "wow, George is taking a long time with these books, huh?" discussions before. Possibly thousands of times since around 2002.

Also worth noting that while it looked like he wrote the first three books really quickly, he was already writing A Storm of Swords when A Game of Thrones was published.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Also worth noting that while it looked like he wrote the first three books really quickly, he was already writing A Storm of Swords when A Game of Thrones was published.

ACoK, but yes. The first three books took nine years to execute and write (various asterisks there). But clearly even splitting that into three years per book still gives a production time per book far in excess of the time of TWoW.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 hours ago, baxus said:

Brienne's travels with Jaime through war torn country have their purpose in the overall story but they are a drag and no amount of praise GRRM may get for "quality of his prose" or whatever will make it any easier to read.

I enjoyed that.  I also enjoyed Brienne’s  travels in “A Feast for Crows”.  Her naivete, her sense of honor, her closeted view of the world being confronted by… the world make for fascinating reading to me.  

[A True Kaniggit]

For Christmas I received the first three books of the Stormlight Archives.

I didn’t get around to starting them until about a month ago, and I just finished them today. 

I went to look up when book four would be out, and it was a nice surprise for me that four came out in 2020, and five will be out this December. 
 

 

[JGP]

3 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

For Christmas I received the first three books of the Stormlight Archives.

I didn’t get around to starting them until about a month ago, and I just finished them today. 

I went to look up when book four would be out, and it was a nice surprise for me that four came out in 2020, and five will be out this December. 
 

 

Hmn. I peaced out somewhere in the first third of book four iirc. Lemme know if it worked for you, maybe I'll try to try again. 

[Ninefingers]

On 3/9/2024 at 2:12 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Quantity will never ever be superior to quality.  Sanderson may have written… more… but what GRRM has written while lower in quantity is better in quality to anything Sanderson has written.

"Never ever" is a bridge too far for me. 

GRRM is pretty clearly a better writer, but mostly empty bookshelves aren't that fun to read. I think I'm just about to the point that if I were allowed to read only one of their catalogues for the rest of my life I'd take Sanderson. (And I say this as someone who thinks Stormlight is losing its way.)  

 

[Argonath Diver]

I absolutely think there's a great 500 to 600 page action packed book in each of the overstuffed Stormlight bricks. Oathkeeper will likely never see another work of fiction on my shelves that is larger. I don't mind overlong novels - I'm one of the bigger fans of Tad Williams here I'd say and never minded his exceedingly slow-burn middle novels before a crazy couple-hundred-page final act. There are just dozens and dozens and hundreds of pages of Sanderson characters' inner monologues and four-page action scenes that could easily be snipped. Once Book 5 drops, I may attempt another re-read that will inevitably be filled with a significant amount of skimming and unfocused page-turning before the many really fun bits in the series.

He's certainly more beloved in the broader fantasy-reading fanbase than this specific board. I have random conversations for a living over a bar, and a great many fans of his stuff haven't heard of any of the top-discussed names we see here.

A relatively recent convo like this was entertaining - a 20-something couple loved his works and were excited I was aware of the Cosmere, etc. I teased about his completely asexual content and at first the fellow insisted that there were definitely sex scenes in Sanderson's work. They kind of looked at each other and laughed and once neither could recall a specific moment. We had a nice laugh that despite many, many extremely carefully-described beheadings and impalements, we'll never hear more than the briefest mention of Shallan's bed garments or a lingering look across the room between two characters. 

[Werthead]

Apparently the circulating draft of Book 5 is well north of half a million words, and will probably be the longest book in the series.

I don't see this as a selling point at all and just feel weary at the idea. Way of Kings earned its length (more or less) through introducing this whole new, mad world, and it's the shortest of the five so far. Each successive book has featured less and less critical plot movements and more and more diarrhoea of words which don't say very much. Each successive book has less plot than any one Mistborn novel, despite each one being 4-5 times longer.

I am looking forward to the successor Mistborn trilogy, especially if he can execute it as quickly as he thinks he can.

Edited April 30 by Werthead

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

On 4/30/2024 at 12:31 PM, Ninefingers said:

"Never ever" is a bridge too far for me. 

GRRM is pretty clearly a better writer, but mostly empty bookshelves aren't that fun to read. I think I'm just about to the point that if I were allowed to read only one of their catalogues for the rest of my life I'd take Sanderson. (And I say this as someone who thinks Stormlight is losing its way.)  

 

I’ll go back to my food analogy.  Are you going to remember and relish your daily big mac that is always available or your few times dining at a four star restaurant?  

Sanderson is a big mac.  It is dependable and consistent… sometimes it’s fresh and well made… better than usual… but it is never a gourmet meal for all that it is easily obtainable.

Let me put it another way.  Frank Herbert only wrote six books in the “Dune Universe”… KJA has written vastly more than that.  Does KJA quantity ever surpass Frank Herbert quantity based on volume alone?

Edited May 2 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Ninefingers]

And after days of standing outside of the four star restaurant with the lights off and the doors locked, I walked down the street and got the big mac so I didn't starve to death. 

Or perhaps a sports analogy: It's great to have a superstar, but if they're always injured and on the bench they're not as valuable to the team as the guy who shows up and plays every day. 

Fundamentally it's a balancing act. George wrote 3 excellent ASOIAF books and two OK ones that comprise a partially written story. Sanderson has written a couple dozen OK books with several complete story arcs. I'm getting to the point where Sanderson's accomplishments outweigh Martin's (despite me holding 1-3 in very high regard)

YMMV

[baxus]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Let me put it another way.  Frank Herbert only wrote six books in the “Dune Universe”… KJA has written vastly more than that.  Does KJA quantity ever surpass Frank Herbert quantity based on volume alone?

This is a bullshit comparison. Obviously that the original creator is always better than glorified fan fiction. But that would be the case even if glorified fan fiction had "better prose" or whatever.

Btw, your behaviour on the topic of Sanderson's work never ceases to amaze me. To put it terms you seem to prefer - if you don't like big macs, go find other burgers more to your preference, stop boring people who are enjoying their big macs.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

40 minutes ago, baxus said:

This is a bullshit comparison. Obviously that the original creator is always better than glorified fan fiction. But that would be the case even if glorified fan fiction had "better prose" or whatever.

Btw, your behaviour on the topic of Sanderson's work never ceases to amaze me. To put it terms you seem to prefer - if you don't like big macs, go find other burgers more to your preference, stop boring people who are enjoying their big macs.

Ninefingers quoted me… I responded with my opinion.  I have found the Sanderson I have read to be incredibly bland and as such his plethora of bland writing… does not appeal to me.

[baxus]

You sure spend too much time and energy trying to prove that point. We get it, consider your job done, and feel free to ride that high horse of yours to some other thread. Or don't, I'm not board police to tell people what they can and can't do. You may also feel free to remain here and act like a wanker. The choice is yours.

EDIT:

And yes, Ninefingers did quote you, but he quoted your post in which you are once again talking about how you think there are better authors than Sanderson. And guess what? No one holds that against you, no one even said that Sanderson WAS the best author in the world. You are entitled to your opinion, you may be right or you may be wrong, but if there's a reason to come here and reiterate your point again and again I'd be very curious to hear it.

Edited May 2 by baxus