Brandon Sanderson

[Imagica]

The only way in which his Mormonism effects his writing is he's very very coy about showing sexuality.

That's refreshing, actually. I think I'm fed up with gratuitous sex scenes in fantasy (especially considering that 90% of the authors can't write them well).

[Shryke]

That's refreshing, actually. I think I'm fed up with gratuitous sex scenes in fantasy (especially considering that 90% of the authors can't write them well).

I don't mean sex, I mean sexuality. As in, alot of his romances read like 15 year olds getting together. Or, rather, an idealised version of 15 year olds getting together.

It's only really noticeable when he makes it a focus of the work though. The 2nd Mistborn book (and the 3rd to a lesser extent) were bad for this.

[peterbound]

I don't mean sex, I mean sexuality. As in, alot of his romances read like 15 year olds getting together. Or, rather, an idealised version of 15 year olds getting together.

It's only really noticeable when he makes it a focus of the work though. The 2nd Mistborn book (and the 3rd to a lesser extent) were bad for this.

This

You'll notice that the big mormon authors (Card, Sanderson, Meyers) have a difficult time with the gender relationships. They paint this idealized versions of them. As stated above it reads like 15 year olds hooking up. This is fine in the Twilight books, as they are targeted towards that demographic. But when dealing with the Epic and the Adult, i think you need to take it up a notch.

I think you guys fail to see the social pressure that is put on individuals of that faith when it comes to acting a certain way. This pressure to stay in line, and to create a certain image is evident in the books (at least to me). I could only image a scene at temple.

'Did you read Brother Sanderson's new book?'

'*Gasp* OMG did i ever, and you know what, it had a dirty word in it!'

'OMG, we need to tell the Deacon about this!'

I'm trudging through The Way of Kings now, and i'm enjoying it, but the way that Sanderson is handling Andolin's (sp i'm sure) relationships is annoying. And the Wit's wit is actually pretty stupid.

Stick to clever magic systems and battle scenes, it's what you are good at.

[Larry.]

Brian Evenson was a Mormon when he wrote Altmann's Tongue. Don't think that "problem" could be ascribed to those who adhere to a certain religion ;)

[peterbound]

Brian Evenson was a Mormon when he wrote Altmann's Tongue. Don't think that "problem" could be ascribed to those who adhere to a certain religion ;)

thanks for proving my point:

Per Wiki, so you can believe it or not:

Formerly a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormon Church), Evenson left both the Church and a teaching position at Brigham Young University following controversy surrounding his first book, Altmann's Tongue.

Source Document:

https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/099-86-95.pdf

[Shryke]

There were also Brandon's personal anecdotes about Mormon parents coming up to him post-The-Gathering-Storm saying they thought the book had too much naughty language and sex or something of the like.

[Larry.]

Yes, which is a group/cult pressure and not necessarily a personal one. And yet Evenson's work is very informed by the inherent conflicts within Mormonism and that is part of what makes his short fiction so excellent.

[Imagica]

I don't mean sex, I mean sexuality. As in, alot of his romances read like 15 year olds getting together. Or, rather, an idealised version of 15 year olds getting together.

It's only really noticeable when he makes it a focus of the work though. The 2nd Mistborn book (and the 3rd to a lesser extent) were bad for this.

Oh, I see. Yeah, Mistborn was really awful with its cheesy romance, I hated it :/ Probably one of the biggest reasons I've stopped reading the series.

I'd take no romance at all over badly written one, but I'm sure there will be quite a lot of it in his future works anyway. Hmm, come to think of it, are there any really well-written romantic relationships in recent epic fantasy? Nothing comes to mind ATM.

[Old Nan]

What, Nynaeve and Lan wasn't well-written? :leaving:

I thought Jaime and Cersei's relationship was quite sweet, but we didn't really see it develop. And ASOIAF isn't an epic fantasy, though it might develop into one.

[Imagica]

Eh, never read Wheel of Time, so can't comment on that (although I've heard a huge number of complaints about the portrayal of female characters in that series). And ASOIAF doesn't have much in the romance department... Jaime and Cersei were sweet only from Jaime's POV - in a recent discussion of their relationship most conceded she only loved her image in him, not Jaime himself.

Oops, I think I've went totally offtopic. Sigh.

[Liadin]

I have tried to write before, just to see what its like, and i know what you mean, it IS difficult :P So sorry for that. But my point still stands that Brandon Sanderson is liked alot for his originality, because so much in the fantasy genre has already been done, so when something truly new and interesting comes along, people will like it.

Heh, for all that came off like an author ranting about how many people think writing is easy, I'm like the majority of wannabes and seem to lack the stamina to finish a novel. So.

You're rational about this, Migey, so none of my comments were really directed at you. I see a lot of people calling Sanderson a "great" author, or one of their favorites, or something along those lines, and that stands out to me. But then again, a lot of it is what I'm looking for in a book. With Mistborn, some of the concepts were original and I quite enjoyed his extended look at how religions are formed and deification and so on, but the plot and characters were fairly standard, with only a few original twists. I really don't care about magic systems at all; my ideal in epic fantasy is magic-free secondary worlds. So, I personally would rather read an author who uses conventional tropes but creates really 3D characters and worlds than an author who has more original ideas but is meh in other areas. And I value originality in character and plot far, far more than originality in worldbuilding and magic. YMMV.

I don't mean sex, I mean sexuality. As in, alot of his romances read like 15 year olds getting together. Or, rather, an idealised version of 15 year olds getting together.

Agreed, there's definitely something off about the romance. Coming from a fairly conservative area myself, I can understand the pressures at work. I'd be uncomfortable with my family reading something I'd written that contained sex, cursing, or violence (when I was younger I did show family members stuff that had fairly typical fantasy-violence in it and they were horrified). It's easy to forget, reading books that are somewhat edgy like Martin's, what the more mainstream, respectable approach is. If I lived in and was being read by the Mormon community in Utah, I'd probably not write sex scenes either. It's not (at least in my experience!) about being shunned, it's just about being respectable and behaving according to community standards, and conservative communities have conservative standards. (Read up on "Christian fiction" for the more extreme end of the spectrum.)

That said, we've talked about this before and concluded that Sanderson's problem isn't so much that he doesn't include sex scenes (or cursing, who cares? And there is violence of course), it's that his characters show no indication of chemistry or desire. They just behave like rather obsessive friends. Some people really like sex scenes; I'm perfectly happy with fade-to-black so long as we see some good chemistry between the characters.

[Roland_85]

The Hero of Ages

...

The Hero of Ages is the conclusion to the Mistborn trilogy, and it is a truly apocalyptic novel. The world is ending so badly, that it is a miracle that anyone survives at all. Elend and Vin's battles seem more and more inconsequential when the sky itself is black with ash, and the mists leave only a few hours of unobscured light. It is a book of revelations and ancient secrets resurfacing through Ruin's lies and the Lord Ruler's misdirections. An interesting detail in that regard is that for a time the reader knows more than the characters about the forces of the world, due to the little snippets of information at the beginning of each chapter. In The Final Empire those were excerpts from the journal of Alendi - the original Hero of Ages whom Rashek killed to become the Lord Ruler. In The Well of Ascension they were parts of the final letter written by the Worldbringer Kwaan - the one to initially discover Alendi only to later realize that the prophecies have been manipulated. Here though the excerpts are omniscient. They are written from cosmic perspective and deal with the changes Rashek made with his godlike power, as well as the nature of Ruin, Preservation, Allomancy, Pheruchemy and the new third metal art - Ruin's own Hemalurgy which steals powers and transfers them to another host through the application of carefully places spikes.

The Hero of Ages suffers from the same flaw that The Well of Ascension had - it is too long, and not dense enough plot-wise. Just like the second part, it plays the stalling game, by dealing with two major story-lines and a few minor ones, and switching between those fast enough that not much progression can happen in any one chapter. Of course, the book's redeeming quality is that it is chock-full of revelations, and although those are often highly implausible leaps of logic, they are still very cool - the nature of the mists, the truth about Vin's ability to pierce copperclouds, Ruin's machinations, what Rashek did to the world, and more, and more besides. In truth, the ending of the series is epic in the purest sense of the word, and I was flying through the las fifty pages with the speed of true ecstasy.

In terms of style, Sanderson doesn't always deliver with even quality. There are moments of brilliance, but there are also places where the emotional impact just isn't happening, and unfortunately the final battle is one of those. It works, because it's cool and awesome, but the sacrifices and losses somehow don't connect the way they should. Still, characterization is vastly improved. Vin and Elend are no longer the insecure creatures of The Well of Ascension, while Spook is given a lot more personality than he ever possessed in the series. He effectively becomes an almost main character in The Hero of Ages, and the result is surprisingly good. Unfortunately, the insecurity and constant whining have not been removed, but only transfered, like hemalurgic spikes, and implanted into Sazed. The Terrisman has become annoyingly faithless and apathetic, but at the same time obsessed with telling us how faithless and apathetic he has become. And there is way too much of him in the book to be healthy.

...

8/10

[Radio Changes]

Well, I read the Way of Kings and to be honest, I absolutely loved it. And that sort of disturbed me.

Now that I've started a huge, epic series from the beginning, with the first book out and now having to wait for the entire series, it's sort of daunting. I mean, I started GRRM, what, a year ago, and Erikson a little bit before that. I started Erikson right when Toll the Hounds came out. I've only had to wait, what, a year for aDwD. All the other series I love, I've read them when they were ALL out, The Black Company, The First Law, Farseer, and well, this is the first time I've encountered a series that, after reading the first book and loving it, I'm realizing that even if Sanderson is as prolific as Erikson, I'm going to be waiting TEN years until this f*cker is finished.

And well, a decade to someone who is 19 years old seems like forever. Hell, it probably seems like forever to everyone, I'm just not as experienced as some in dealing with the idea.

So I'm really happy that I really dig this series, but it's filled me with a strange existential angst a lot of you probably used to have, and then gotten over, because there are surely people here who picked up AGOT when it first came out and have had to wait all these years, but wow, it's a new feeling on my part.

And I'm desperately scrambling for a different series to fill the void. I might just reread Malazan to pass the time until I get the money or find an actual series at the library I can commit to.

I might just start WoT for the hell of it.

[Humble Asskicker]

I'm going to be waiting TEN years until this f*cker is finished.

You're going to have to wait longer than that. Sanderson plans to write a non-Stormlight novel after every other Stormlight book. And right now he's focused on finishing WoT.

Even more bleak, it is probable you will have to wait a decade or so for Song of Ice and Fire to be completed, if indeed it ever is completed.

On the bright side, though, the waiting isn't such a bad thing after a while. You realize there are so many good books out there, it really is silly to obsess over just a few.

And you can't go wrong starting WoT. There are a lot of rough areas to endure. But it's very much worth it overall. Despite all the complaining that goes on (I love ragging on it too), it's a very good series. And it's put together beautifully (in the sense that it's fun and almost awe-inspiring how well RJ calculated and put together all the pieces over decades).

[Basileus777]

Sanderson said in his latest blog post that after he is done with WOT, he intends to do 2 Stormlight books every three years, with a different book as a break in-between.

His plans are:

* A Memory of Light (March 2012.)

* Stormlight Archive Book Two (Late 2012 or early 2013.)

* Stormlight Archive Book Three (One year after Book Two.)

So it's a long wait, but if he can actually meet that pace...we'll that'd be pretty damn impressive.

But yeah, I enjoyed Mistborn and Warbeaker, but TWOK has me eager for the next book in a way that I wasn't expecting. Even if it takes a while, it's not like Sanderson hasn't been putting out a bunch of other books to read. He just published two last year and two this year.

[Liadin]

Hmm. Is Sanderson ending these books on cliffhangers? Mistborn #1 tied up nicely (maybe the publishers weren't sure whether they'd continue?); #2 had kind of a cliffhanger but not on GRRM levels.

Because in my case, I don't do well reading multiple books by the same author within a short time period anyway. If I read three books within a few months of each other, most of the time I'll just become hypersensitive to all of the author's weaknesses. So, minus cliffhangers a year between books wouldn't be that bad.

[Grogsmash]

Hmm. Is Sanderson ending these books on cliffhangers? Mistborn #1 tied up nicely (maybe the publishers weren't sure whether they'd continue?); #2 had kind of a cliffhanger but not on GRRM levels.

WoK doesn't really end on a cliffhanger but it leaves alot of mysteries unresolved and hints of things to come.

[Basileus777]

The Way of Kings doesn't really end on a cliffhanger. Each of the main plot threads and character arcs come to some sort of resolution, even though there are tons of stuff still up air the air.

[Radio Changes]

Yeah, basically, it's one of those "Aww hell, things are gonna get wild" sort of endings. Like, the initial problems are resolved with characters but the overall conflict has literally JUST begun.

Actually, the epilogue of WOK has the same effect that the epilogue of AGOT had on me.

[Gormenghast]

And I'm desperately scrambling for a different series to fill the void. I might just reread Malazan to pass the time until I get the money or find an actual series at the library I can commit to.

I might just start WoT for the hell of it.

Bakker is probably a better choice, if you liked the more deep and quirky parts of Malazan. Bakker is almost more ruthless and wild than Erikson.