It's good to be king: Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings reviewed

I believe in Brandon Sanderson.

I first heard his name when he was tapped to complete the late Robert Jordan's widely acclaimed Wheel of Time series (Tor Books, 1990-present). Even though I haven't yet taken on that particular fantasy behemoth (please hold your stunned gasps and calls for my head on a pike until the end, thank you), I'm told that Sanderson's work on the series has been an impressive tribute to Mr. Jordan.

My first personal encounter with Sanderson was his Mistborn trilogy (Tor, 2006-2008). Taken as a whole, this was unquestionably the second finest work I read in 2010 and the finest fantasy that I read that year. It's a bold, complex post-apocalyptic fantasy saga with a little bit of Hong Kong kung-fu action. Its world building is solid and detailed. Sanderson's grasp on his characters is truly excellent: in each of them, we see strength coupled with vulnerability played out in a thousand fascinating facets, and yet each of these characters are their own individual. By the time I finished the trilogy, I was genuinely sad; I felt as though I'd just said goodbye to dear friends.

Okay, so Warbreaker (Tor, 2009) wasn't excellent. But I knew that Sanderson was capable of great things, so I was enthusiastic about The Way of Kings, the first volume of his proposed Stormlight Archive.

The Stormlight Archive is an ambitious undertaking, and would be for any author. According to Sanderson's website, his original plan was for it to span ten whole volumes (no telling whether or not that plan has changed). This would put it in a league with such fantasy heavyweights as George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (Bantam, 1996-present), Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth (Tor, 1994-2007), and of course, the aforementioned Wheel of Time.

We're off to a fine start.

The best word to describe The Way of Kings is "epic." Everything about this book is done on a grand scale. As with Mistborn, there's a multinational plot whose roots trace back thousands of years, to a time when gods walked the land with men; a caste system whose strictures are threatened; magic, including what might as well by lightsabers; a continent of flora and fauna specially adapted to survive the harsh terrain; and a cast of fully realized and unique characters with whom you'll laugh and cry, struggle and despair and triumph.

That doesn't mean that Sanderson's delving into the same old territory as Mistborn. Though all of the skills that he perfected there are brought to bear here, Stormlight's world and characters are their own.

More immediately obvious than the book's internal elements is its outward physical size. It's positively titanic, weighing in at over one thousand pages. While this verbosity may be seen as a failure of some other authors who, as the old saw goes, were failed by their words and so used too many of them to overcompensate, let me hasten to assure you that this is not the case with Sanderson and The Way of Kings. This is a big book, but it's so packed with action and character development that there's nary a dull moment. Like a mighty river, this book flows smoothly and rapidly over rocky terrain; like a little inflatable raft on that river, Sanderson relentlessly carries us towards the waterfall finale.

This is the story of the soldier-slave Kaladin, who struggles to keep his team alive against impossible odds while discovering mysterious powers within himself. It's about the plotting scholar Shallan, whose quest for knowledge reveals secrets she never imagined. It's about Dalinar and Adolin, father and son aristocrat warlords who have to face an unknown enemy on the battlefield and unseen threats from their fellow nobles.

It's the story of Roshar, a continent continuously assaulted by sweeping killer storms and divided by nationality, ethnicity, and religion, and the looming threat, centuries-old, that hangs over the whole land.

Themes of leadership, integrity, self-assurance, and whether or not the means justify the ends, abound. Kaladin's quest to survive and lead his troops out of Hell's backyard incorporates an internal struggle against despair, powerlessness, self-doubt, and distrust of authority. Shallan's studies overtly court the discipline of ethics while she contemplates whether or not to betray her mentor's trust in order to help her family. Dalinar follows a strict code of ethics which dictate his every move, while around him people whisper that he's either grown too pompous and self-righteous, or mad, or both, to continue to lead; Dalinar wonders if they might be right. Perhaps more so than Mistborn (itself a cerebral trilogy), Stormlight promises to be a story of ideas.

While Kaladin is probably the "main" character of the book -- and he's a damn good one -- Shallan is the one I want to know more about. And it's worth noting that, while I didn't think much of Dalinar or his story arc in the beginning, by the end, I couldn't help but root for him.

Perhaps more intriguing are the secondary characters: Sadeas, who may or may not have good intentions while he does bad things; Szeth, the mournful assassin; Jasnah Kholin, who clearly isn't telling us everything; Wit, who definitely isn't telling us everything. Hopefully, their stories will be told in full as Stormlight unfolds.

While fairly self-contained, The Way of Kings sets the stage for a truly awe-inspiring fantasy epic that grips the reader's mind and heart. The Stormlight Archive has the potential to be truly monumental.

In Brandon Sanderson we trust.

FIGHT!

A thing you're probably already aware of, but in case you're not: Suvudu's 2011 Cage Match is up and running! (and apparently has been since Friday. huh.)

In the presently running divisions, I'm voting for:

Arlen < Beowulf
Takeshi Kovacs < Jon Snow
Alvin Maker < Thomas Covenant
Gollum > Molly Millions
John Carter > Severian
Mandorallen < Zedd
Jacob Black > Eric Northman
Vin > Logen Ninefingers

I'm still deciding on the next two divisions, where Katniss, Paul Atreides, Martin the Warrior, and Percy Jackson all come out swinging.

The Cage Match is a nice diversion -- it kept me far more entertained than it should have last year, when I was chair-bound for a few weeks from my own battle wound -- and Rand al'Thor battled Jaime Lannister for the title. This year they've got a good line-up going, and I'll be interested to see how the voting goes.

(Personally, I want Vin to take it all. If you've read the Mistborn trilogy, you'll understand why.)

Ranting Dragon 2011 Locus Challenge

Before I call it quits for the week, one more thing:

You should totally participate in Ranting Dragon's 2011 Locus Challenge. Ranting Dragon is some good people, and I reckon they've got a good thing going here to promote excellence in science fiction and fantasy literature.

Me, I'll (hopefully) be doing a guest spot review for them, so be on the lookout for that in coming weeks.

If you're not on board already -- get on board! What are you waiting for?

"Write what you know"

The age-old advice that I've heard since I was a wee little Jeffling, is to write what you know.

Seems pretty sound. Don't you think?

It should go without saying (except that I'm saying it now) that experience enriches writing. You can know about a thing, study the subject all you like, observe it or watch it done, but unless you've actually gotten your hands dirty and gotten up close and personal with it -- if it's a verb, then, unless you've actually done it -- then it could be argued that you can't accurately impart the experience onto the reader.

For example, if you were a construction worker with literary aspirations, you could write pretty authoritatively about the trials and tribulations of construction workers. Your characters would be based on the people you knew. You can make the reader understand the full weight of your sledgehammer, the heat and the sweat, the long hours, the anger and frustration you feel over your corrupt boss and your weak union. You could fill your story with all the beautiful minutiae that we outside of the construction field might miss, that make a story real and true.

Okay, maybe you could risk a little extrapolation -- maybe you're a nurse but you know enough about doctors, or vice versa -- but the old adage "write what you know" taken in its purest and most literal form, pretty much limits us to writing our biographies. And, to paraphrase an old commercial, would you want to read a book about your life?

I don't like to be that restricted.

I don't want to write a book about, say, political and legal theory, small businesses, drives through Appalachia in a very small car, or over-brewed tea. Yet, by the literal definition of writing what I know, those and a handful of other minor misadventures are all I'm qualified to write.

Instead, what I'm writing, Project: Oz can loosely be described as a "fantasy western." There may be some over-brewed tea in there, but not much else that I've personally experienced.

Or is there?

The book has a theme, and that theme relates to that political theory that I mentioned above -- not in so many words, but the relationship is there. The book has characters; some of those characters are based directly on people I've known well, while others are composites. I've had to create a world that strongly resembles our own world in the Nineteenth Century, with a similar society and government, which relates to my backgrounds in political theory and also in history, a topic I've studied both formally and informally for years. Genre-wise, the book would obviously be found in the Science-Fiction Fantasy section of your local bookstore (or just plain fantasy if you've got a really good bookseller), and that's a genre in which I've read extensively for about as long as I've been able to read, so generously we could say that I'm more than passing familiar with its tropes.

Taking a looser definition of the "write what you know" adage, I'd say we're off to a good start.

I've never ridden a horse, but I could just drive up the road and learn. I've never shot a gun, but I know someone who could teach me. I've never been to Texas, but I could hop on a plane tomorrow, survey the Hill Country, and eat some barbecue.

That's all well and good. But one of my main characters is a wizard. Not just a main character -- a point-of-view character. Which means that he's casting spells, using magic. He's using it a lot. He's talking about it. He's thinking about it. And during those portions of the book that he's narrating, you, the reader, are casting spells with him.

Which means that I, the writer, have to know what that's like.

As far as we know, magic of this sort does not exist in our real, mundane world. Okay, well, neither do dinosaurs, but Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990). To prepare for Jurassic Park, I figure Crichton either built a time machine or researched the topic. I can't do the one thing, but I can do the other: I can read up on magical practices throughout history (there's that history thing again!), from prehistoric shamanism through Middle Age alchemy to modern neo-paganism, Simon Magus and Nicholas Flamel and Aleister Crowley. Fiction and myth are practically filthy with wizards from whose experiences I can learn: Circe, Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Prospero, Thoth-amon, Gandalf, Raistlin, Zed, and even Harry Potter are all fine role models.

Clearly, I can know about magic without ever practicing it myself, since that's impossible.

Or is it?

Enter my third-favorite game of all time, Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons, along with its myriad of technology-based followers (World of Warcraft, the increasingly inaccurately named Final Fantasy series, and Fable come to mind) allow one to swing a sword against an angry ogre, match wits with a devious archfiend, and sling fireballs at an evil god, all without ever leaving your chair.

As I realized on the drive home from my last D&D session, I had, through my character, Tym the gnomish sorcerer, used magic in a realistic, simulated problem-solving situation. Tym and I had done it with our staff in hand: engaged in combat, worked with a team, and completed a mission.

I couldn't know what it felt like to have the energy of the cosmos flow through me -- not without some pretty hefty drugs -- but through D&D I could test out the effects of sorcery in various situations.

While I already had a system of magic in place, it was all based on theory and explained how things worked the way they did, not how to implement them. I had, in essence, been doing it wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but there were things I hadn't thought all the way through, and in doing so, I had made my wizard protagonist too powerful.

And that just doesn't fit: he's a flawed character, so shouldn't his magic be likewise flawed? Shouldn't his spells take time to cast? Shouldn't enemies present a dangerous and moving target while he conjures their arcane doom -- they didn't all graduate from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, did they? And does his lightning bolt automatically hit its target? What happens when his aim is off and he winds up setting the room on fire?

These are questions that I'd been periodically asking myself for over a year now. But Dungeons & Dragons let me put the answers into practice. As a character, Tym may not be anything like my wizard protagonist, but the latter -- and the world he inhabits -- learns a lot from the former.

Hopefully, Project: Oz will be a lot better for it.

A word in edgewise

I'm going to try -- I'm going to try really hard -- to get a post in next week for you folks. Probably, it will be a book review, unless another topic just screams for my attention. So, cross your fingers and look for that.

Just in case I don't make it, though, I'm giving you good folks a double dose (technically a triple dose) of posts this week to tide you all over.

In the meantime, have some tea and talk amongst yourselves. ;)

This old house

I'm not going to talk about deep and abiding disappointment regarding last night's Academy Awards. We're not going to get into how Winter's Bone was completely and unjustifiably snubbed. I'm not going to mention how it vividly translates, via a surprising cast of relative unknowns, one of the finest pieces of Twenty-First Century American prose -- a haunting and vivid portrayal of unflagging courage and loyalty in a piece of unknown Americana that most of us would rightly be too afraid to experience for ourselves -- from page to screen.

Nope, I'm not going to talk about any of that.

Instead, I'm going to make a confession: I've been skipping ahead a bit in my reading list. I'm at the mercy of my public library; sometimes, books requested take months to get to me, and sometimes days. I was #23 for Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Doubleday, 2010) for weeks, and then all of a sudden it was on the hold shelf waiting for me. Worry not, dear reader, for I've got Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (Villard, 1998) on my bedside table and will review that, along with some comparative and contrasting material, soon enough. But At Home is what I just finished, so At Home is what I'm going to briefly talk about.

I first heard of Bill Bryson through a friend who had read a few of his books, but they didn't interest me; though I'd made the pledge to myself to read more nonfiction, I had mostly stuck to memoirs about food and the people who prepare it, and Bryson's books all seemed to be travelogues. I later saw him on The Colbert Report, promoting At Home. It sounded a little interesting, like something you would continually mean to read, but never get around to. But then I saw it at the grocery store of all places, picked it up, thumbed through the pages, and decided that it was worth a go. I requested it from my library; eventually, it made its way to me.

The book is something of a surprise. Bryson, the most British of Americans, takes us on a tour of his house, a former rectory dating from the mid-Ninteenth Century, and through this tour explores the history and development of the everyday conveniences we take for granted, focused primarily on the past 250 years and almost exclusively on the Western Hemisphere. But if that sounds dreadfully tedious, let me hasten to assure you it's not.

If you're looking for a technical history, bogged down in the tiny facets of material evolution, look elsewhere. Bryson's history isn't very literal: his history of the fuse box, for example, isn't actually the history of that little gray box many of us have in our basements (my old apartment had it in the kitchen), but rather a more general history of home lighting. His history of the dining room isn't just the history of the dining room but the history of food. His history of the scullery is the history of servitude. His history of the cellar is the history of the building materials we use today and the reasons why we don't use others. His history of the bedroom is the history of sexual relations, and also of death and burial. There's the story of how sedentary civilizations appeared before organized agriculture (a phenomenon which has me convinced space aliens were somehow involved) and there's the story of the daring Brit who made my morning cup of tea viable.

At Home is jam-packed with the minor anecdotes and the epic sagas, humorous and terrible and salacious, surrounding the people who created, developed, fought over, stole, refined, perfected, manufactured, and marketed modern daily life. The story of things, it turns out, is really the story of humanity.

Bryson tends to ramble a bit, and sometimes strays a farther from the point than we might actually like before coming back to it. Nevertheless, it's usually a fascinating story, filled with some characters of whom you've heard and many others you haven't.

Actually, Bryson tends to ramble a lot; while occasionally irritating (you'll find yourself asking where he's going with this or how it relates to that), it's a part of his charm, the same charm that makes this book possible. Seriously. By a less accessible author, this book would be dry as dirt. I think that's part of why he wrote it, actually -- because the story of our homes is actually interesting, if presented in an interesting manner. Bryson's history isn't quite as deep or complete as a dry and dusty history text -- this is, as the subtitle notes, A Short History of Private Life (emphasis mine). At Home is more like a history novel.

So, if you're looking for pure facts, the book is full of them, but they're not laid out in a chronological manner, or even a logical manner. Instead, you'll have to let Bill get around to telling you what you want to know in his own course, for which you'll have to read the whole book. (For ease of reference, and for the extremely lazy and those pressed for time, there is a handy index in the back, along with a bibliography.) Luckily, due to Bryson's easy, friendly writing style, At Home is a surprisingly quick read, and consuming the whole thing is no hardship at all.

I give this book an A-. Take some time, enjoy yourself, and learn a thing or two along the way.

Be ye warned: here there be literature!

Just a trifling little thing: here's my partial reading list for 2011.

First, in order, books you can expect to hear more about in the coming weeks:
(EDIT: A strikeout indicates that a book has been completed, not removed from the list.)

1. The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler (Villard, 2007). I'm not a fan of feminist philosophy and gender studies, but my girlfriend is, and she wanted me to read this. I actually enjoyed the last book she asked me to read, so I'm going to keep an open mind. I'm getting her back by making her read The Hobbit.)
2. Captive of Gor, by John Norman (Ballantine, 1972 -- this is the edition I have; it has since been reprinted by e-reads.com). The seventh in Norman's pulpy Chronicles of Counter-Earth science fiction series.
3. The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson (Tor Books, 2010). His Mistborn trilogy was some of the flat-out, hands down best fantasy that I've ever read, and yes, if you're reading this blog and you haven't read them yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. I will be very interested to see what he does with this, the first book in his proposed fantasy epic.
4. The Shadowmarch series, by Tad Williams (DAW, 2004-2010). I've read the first two books in the series, but it's been years; I intend to start the series from the beginning again.

And then, slightly less orderly ...

• At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson (Doubleday, 2010). I saw Bryson on The Colbert Report and thought the book sounded good; a friend of mine recommended a few of his other books.
• A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah E. Harkness (Viking, 2011). I think I read about this in the local paper.
• The Skewed Throne, by Joshua Palmatier (DAW, 2006).
• The Iron Thorn, by Caitlin Kittredge (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2011). The past decade or so has seen some surprisingly good young adult fantasy, so I'm not thrown off by that label; let the material stand or fall for itself, I say. I was directed to this by Cherie Priest's Twitter (she retweeted it from someone else).
• The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss (DAW, to be released March 1, 2011). The second book of Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles, the first volume of which has had its praises sung widely. I will say that I actually teared up during one scene in The Name of the Wind (DAW, 2007) -- another that you absolutely owe yourself to read if you haven't already.
• The Big Country, by Donald Hamilton (Dell, 1958). The source material for the fantastic film, which I also recommend for stellar performances from Gregory Peck and Burl Ives, and one of the best fight scenes ever choreographed (between Peck and Charleton Heston).
• The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books, 2010).
• Naamah's Blessing, by Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central Publishing, to be released June 29, 2011). The conclusion to the latest trilogy by one of my favorite authors.
• The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, by Stephen Hunt (Tor Books, 2009). The sequel to Hunt's The Court of the Air (Tor Books, 2008), a strange, captivating book.
• Vamped, by David Sosnowski (Free Press, 2004).
• Clementine, by Cherie Priest (Subterranean, 2010). The other book in Priest's Clockwork Century series, about which I've previously raved. Luckily, my library has a copy of this one.
• Prince of Thorns, by Mark Lawrence (Ace, to be released August 2, 2011).
• The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie (Orbit, 2011). Abercrombie writes some really great, gritty, grisly fantasy with flawed heroes and unhappy (realistic) endings, so much that reading his work is akin to emotional masochism. Still, like an addiction, you just keep coming back because you can't resist ...
• The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, by Mark Hodder (Pyr, 2010).
• The Son of Neptune, by Rick Riordan (Hyperion, to be published October 11, 2011). Again, the young adult label doesn't bother me; Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (Hyperion, 2005-2010) was top-notch, whether you're a young reader or old, and The Lost Hero (Hyperion, 2010) kept up the mantle of quality I've come to expect from this author.
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit, 2010). Ranting Dragon's review of this made it actually sound good (which was, in fact, the whole point of the review).
• I, Claudius, by Robert Graves (Arthur Barker, 1934).  This was recommended to me by a friend, who loved it, after I'd watched Caligula (1979 -- one of Malcolm McDowell's best performances).
• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 2005).  The source material for the Coen Bro's. Oscar-winning existential western; I'm told that the book is even better.  I've thought before about reading The Road (Knopf, 2006), which I'm also led to understand is excellent (and in fact once nearly bought it on the strength of its description, knowing nothing more about it), but I've never felt the need to be that depressed.

Whew! So, that ought to get me through to about July. You can expect reviews of some, if not most, of the unnumbered books, too, assuming they make an impact.

If you've got other recommendations, send them my way! Leave a comment here, hit me up on Twitter, or send me an email.