Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker
December 5, 2009 at 7:38 pm | In 2 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: R Scott Bakker
Like it or not, one thing is certain: Neuropath is a book about Big Issues. And not the usual ones. If the idea of a novel whose plot and emotional center are both grounded in the latest research in the neurological basis of consciousness sounds exciting, then you should probably ignore the rest of this review and read the book. If it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, I’m not. It sounded exciting to me and I read it for that reason. So if you’re interested, go ahead, because novels about consciousness are pretty thin on the ground. I almost feel obligated to support the book, just to encourage more writers to have the courage to tackle interesting (and very difficult) issues.
Unfortunately while as I’ve just made clear I admire the book a great deal, I also feel obligated to say that I didn’t enjoy reading it and suspect most potential readers won’t either. What went wrong?
From the beginning, Neuropath is playing defense. Before the book begins there’s an author’s note saying that although it is fiction, the novel is “based on actual trends and discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science”. Obviously this was included because Bakker or his editor felt that much of the actual science in the book will not be recognized as such. This is an unusual problem for a science fiction novel. Instead of the usual suspension of disbelief, Bakker is trying to achieve something else, uh, I guess an animation of belief?
I’m guessing that, for this material at least, it’s going to be a lot harder for the reader to be lead towards belief instead of away from disbelief. I can’t say for sure: I came into the book at least somewhat familiar with the research that Bakker based it on so I didn’t really need any hand-holding. But throughout the novel I could see the author straining to be convincing, walking the reader through this or that difficult element of modern cognitive science and trying to anticipate and then address objections.
If you’re read very much science fiction you probably think I’m saying there’s a lot of infodumps, since they are an ever-presence scourge particular to science fiction and fantasy. And yes, info gets dumped. But normally books just dump the info and move on, and as long as it is kept within reasonable limits most of us have learned to deal with it. Here, because as I’ve said the author assumes (correctly I think) that the info he’s dumping isn’t likely to be believed, you end up with these Socratic dialogue infodumps where The Layperson goes back and forth with the Scientific Authority, slowly being led to question their assumptions and glimpse the truth. Bakker does the best he can to smoothly place these within his narrative, but these exchanges feel utterly out of place in a thriller.
I haven’t mentioned until now that this is a thriller, because it’s not. Oh, it wants to be. See, the book is about a neurosurgeon-turned-serial-killer who is old friends with the protagonist, a psychology professor, and…well, mileage varies, but I found it all fairly derivative. After Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, etc. I’m pretty burned out on serial killers. But really, this just isn’t a thriller. I don’t know anything about how Bakker came to write this book, and certainly I could be totally wrong, but my impression is that for Bakker the science came before the story. He wanted to write a novel that contained the science, so he pieced together a thriller story as best he could around the Socratic exposition he’d need to explain the facts. And the thriller is not very good. For one thing, it is crowded out by the science, which gets the lion’s share of the book’s emphasis, so there’s just not a lot of space to develop either the plot or the characters. For another, the expository nature of the scientific sections undermines the tension and sympathy the thriller needs to work well. And finally (but this is the least important issue) the nature of the science itself tends to undermine sympathy with the protagonist.
I don’t really blame Bakker for this, or rather, having set out on this course I don’t know if there was much he could have done differently. Science fiction is great for showing the implications of science, but I don’t think it’s a very good vehicle for science itself. Non-experts must judge scientific claims based on the authority of the one making the claim, and fiction writers, to put it bluntly, are professional liars. Even though Bakker has twisted the story into contortions for the benefit of the science, much to story’s detriment, he’s still working in a literary tradition in which the usual practice is to twist the science into contortions for the benefit of the story, much to the science’s detriment.
Still, Bakker should be saluted for aiming high here, and the maybe some will find the result more enjoyable than I did. For people interested in what modern neuroscience is learning about the mind, I recommend V. S. Ramachandran’s surprisingly readable non-fiction book Phantoms in the Brain, which I suspect was a major source for Bakker. As time goes on hopefully the readership will get to the point where SF novels incorporating this kind of work can be novels first.
The City & the City by China Miéville
December 5, 2009 at 12:59 am | In 2 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | 1 CommentTags: China Mieville
When I heard China Miéville’s new novel was a fantasy / detective hybrid, I was intrigued. I loved The Scar but was not impressed by Iron Council, so I figured changing gears was a good thing. Alas, the result was disappointing. The City & the City is artistically ambitious, but ultimately it ends up neglecting both genres that it hybridizes.
Without spoilers there’s not much to say about the detective story except that it starts out engaging enough but soon becomes extremely predictable. I should probably give career detective fiction writers more credit…it’s a difficult form, demanding a surprising but retrospectively predictable ending. Most fiction tries to hit that target, but with a detective novel, the discovery of the truth, along with the detective himself, is basically the big selling point. Here I’m afraid the plot is not just predictable but very tame, a surprising failing in a Miéville novel. The detective character isn’t annoying but not a major presence either, as he is required to be the reader’s window into this alternate world instead of an interesting voice.
What about the fantasy side? There isn’t much fantasy here, actually. This is a one-difference world, albeit with quite a bit of worldbuilding based off that difference. Compared to the detective elements, it was more interesting, but in the end I felt the explanation to the setting’s major mystery, Breach, didn’t add up.
But the elephant in the room is the one way in which the book’s setting is different from our world: the joined cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma. The cities are intertwined geographically but separated…well, I’m not sure there’s a good word for how they are separated. Politically? Functionally? And it’s more than intertwined. Physically there’s one city. Some areas are wholly in Beszel, others are wholly in Ul Qoma. Some streets have one sidewalk in Beszel and the one across the street is in Ul Qoma. And the streets themselves are often in both at the same time. But despite this proximity, the citizens of one city never go into the other, and in fact never acknowledge the other’s existence. They are taught from an early age to “unsee” the other city whenever some aspect of it enters their visual field.
That’s quite a mouthful, and Miéville spends the first two thirds of the book trying to defend this situation and convince you it’s possible, even close to realistic. And reading the book, it’s clear that he’s getting at something interesting here. When a typical businessman walks down a city street, doesn’t he do his best to “unsee” the homeless man sleeping on the bench? Even though poor people and rich people almost always live in different areas, there’s close proximity and even overlap in areas…
But this is not an allegorical novel. Beszel, although poorer than Ul Qoma, is not an allegory for poor people. Ul Qoma, although Muslim, is not an allegory for the Muslim world. For the novel to really work, we have to accept the novel’s internal reality. Or to put it another way, to really listen to what the novel is saying about human nature, we must first accept that humans could create and maintain the novel’s world.
For me, that proved impossible. It’s too much of a leap from ignoring a homeless person to ignoring half the vehicular traffic on the very street you yourself are driving on. Yes, Miéville doesn’t paint the system was working perfectly, but I felt such a system wouldn’t work as well as depicted, and more importantly even if successfully attempted could never last more than a couple years (in the book the cities have been joined for many centuries). But even worse, Miéville tries so hard to sell this notion that in the end a huge portion of the novel’s prose is dedicated to fighting for this (for me) lost cause, much to the detriment of the characters and plot.
I’ll say this for the book: it might have failed with me, but it was an ambitious failure. Better to fail through overreaching than from insufficient aspirations. I don’t recommend this one but I’ll be eagerly awaiting Miéville’s next novel.
Lighthouse Duet by Carol Berg
December 3, 2009 at 11:44 pm | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Carol Berg
A lot of people, including me, complain that fantasy is obsessed with trilogies. The trouble is, when you go to a somewhat more manageable two-book length, you end up with…what, exactly? Carol Berg’s Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone are published separately but are very much the same story. I’ve gone with what the author calls them on their site here, but “Lighthouse Trilogy” would seem a lot less awkward, wouldn’t it?
Typically I wait until a strongly connected series like this is finished before starting so I can read them all at once. This time was a bit unusual in that I read Flesh and Spirit quite a while ago and didn’t get to Breath and Bone until recently (then I didn’t get around to writing this for at least another month, but that’s another story). I think the gap there expresses my general feeling about these books: well-disposed but unenthusiastic.
This is probably an audience problem, namely I’m not quite in it. These books are written well, but just aren’t quite my cup of tea. I started off really impressed by Flesh and Spirit. The main character’s cartographic magic was an unusual power and the backstory, involving a prince taken by angels to Heaven, raised to adulthood, and then brought back by the character’s grandfather after using map-magic to go there…that sounded pretty wild, in a good way. The “current events” of the novel, involving feuding princes and ominous but somewhat distant evil forces, were more ordinary, but fair enough.
Two things sabotaged Flesh and Spirit for me, and I stress “for me” because I think these were unusually personal responses. First, despite the broad fantasy landscape most of the action centers around a monastery. A Christian monastery, actually, although the religion has the serial numbers filed off, which unfortunately means a lot of the justifications for what monks do and why they do it were lost as well. But ultimately there’s nothing wrong with setting a book in a monastery other than I found the world outside to be far more interesting and so always wanted more of the book to be happening out there.
The second problem was the main character, particularly his drug addiction. Addictions show up enough that if I think hard enough I’m sure I can think of a book I loved with an addicted main character, but generally I really don’t like them in protagonists. Not for any important reason, really, but more superficial ones. For one thing they’re frustrating. For the most part I don’t like having to watch characters do things that I know are going to be disastrous, and having the character know that too but be unable to resist is even worse. I know, I know, Shakespeare called and wants a word with me. Well, like I said, it’s a personal preference. The other and probably more serious problem with an addicted character is that you end up spending a lot of time talking about a storyline that is almost perfectly predictable. If a main character is addicted it always plays out the same way: struggle, rock bottom, go clean, relapse, struggle, victory. The only uncertainty is whether the author is trafficking in “gritty” and thus will omit the victory in favor of indefinitely repeating the cycle.
So while I wasn’t a huge fan of Flesh and Spirit, I liked it well enough, and so I eventually read Breath and Bone. Well, the main character was still an addict. But virtually no time is spent in the monastery! Excellent. Unfortunately, the monastery scenes were swapped for an even more tired setting: magical training scenes. I can’t say I’ve read a fair amount of monastery fiction, I just wasn’t particularly interested by that one, but I feel like I’ve read enough training scenes to last a lifetime. Again, the writing is fine: Berg puts a lot of effort into describing the feeling of magic, the broadened horizons, and so on. I’m sure a lot of people will enjoy it (I mean, there must be a good reason why so many of these scenes get written, right?) but I thought it was boring.
Unfortunately Breath and Bone also revealed new things about the world that made it vastly less interesting to me than the initially presented information. It used to be that trendy fantasy writers would write something that initially seemed like a Standard Fantasy Setting and then try to subvert it. These two books seem to have wrapped around so that they started out with something fresh and new and then reverted it back to the Standard Fantasy Setting. If the whole book isn’t going to be fresh and new I think I prefer the former.
So I guess this amounts to a very long-winded “Your Mileage May Vary”. If you don’t think you’ll care about the issues I had and you like fantasy than I can definitely recommend them.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
December 3, 2009 at 12:04 am | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Audrey Niffenegger
I feel like I’m the last person to read this book. Given that it involves time travel, it’s theoretically science fiction, but really it is more properly filed under romance. I don’t read enough romances to really evaluate it as part of that genre, though, so all I can say is on that score is that while the story can be justly criticized for being melodramatic, Niffenegger is pretty successful in pulling the strings.
You may be wondering how a story that has time travel in it can be anything than other science fiction. Well, definitions of genre vary. The book’s Wikipedia page quotes a critic as saying “uses time travel as a metaphor to explain how two people can feel as if they’ve known each other their entire lives”. So there’s your answer, I guess. I don’t think the book “explains” anything of the sort, but again, I come from an SF background where you start by assuming a spade is a spade. Especially space spades. That doesn’t mean that SF novels don’t have the symbolism, metaphorical interpretations, and so forth, but they are expected to take their surface elements seriously.
I can’t help but approaching it as a science fiction novel, however, and in that role the book is lacking. The time travel is unexplained, but that’s more a relief than a problem. The problem is the plot is a large time travel paradox. If the past and future can’t be changed, yet you can travel into the past, how are we to resolve a case where a man meets and marries a woman precisely because he later time travels back to before they met? The novel shrugs off this concern. If you’re interested in the mechanics of time travel, this isn’t the story for you. Ted Chiang’s story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” actually uses the very same “system” of time travel to rather profound effect.
So, leaving aside the science fiction elements, what’s left? A chronologically dislocated romance between two people that’s written well enough that I enjoyed it even though I didn’t particularly like either of them. The book is so thoroughly about their relationship, to the exclusion of just about everything else, that it feels as though they don’t really have lives. Harry is a librarian, but he never seems to care too much about his job. He doesn’t need a job since he can use his time travel to generate plenty of money, but he goes to work anyway. Not because he is passionate about what he does, but because he wants to live a normal life. His wife, meanwhile, grew up in an extremely wealthy family (complete with servants…how many people had servants in 1980?) and, having completed her liberal arts education, becomes a professional paper sculptor. That’s fair enough, I guess, but little time is spent on this. They put a studio in the house for her and she has puts together a show of her work, but I didn’t get the sense she had major artistic aspirations.
But these criticisms don’t really matter. The book is focused on the relationship and for most people, including me (despite coming in expecting to not like it, I’ll admit), it presents an entertaining narrative. So as long as you’re expectations are appropriate it can be widely recommended.
Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham
October 12, 2009 at 2:43 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Daniel Abraham
The Long Price Quartet is ostensibly a series of four books about a land where men use secret incantations to bind ideas to their will. Called poets, they can imprison an idea into the form of a man, a man bound to their mind. But the idea made manifest, called an “andat”, hates this imprisonment and will escape back into abstraction if the poet who bound it ever lets his guard down. As magical systems go, this is a pretty interesting one. I feel there’s an really exciting story to be told about Mage-Platonists wielding ideas like ordinary people wield knives or screwdrivers: using and discarding as necessary, constrained only by their imagination and their expressive power. But it turns out that’s not the story Abraham wanted to tell.
You can get a glimpse of where he wants to go based on the limitations built into the system. Constraining an idea is extremely difficult, the work of a lifetime. There are very few andat at once, about one per city in a loose collection of city-states. Abraham’s andat are not there to provide action scenes, they are there to help him tell a story about power: its use and misuse, the ethics of wielding it, and, perhaps most of all, how the power to shape society tantalizes but ultimately eludes those who seek it.
Probably the most similar author I’ve read is Guy Gavriel Kay. Like Abraham, he is concerned with societies and cultures and the changes they experience over the passage of time. Kay’s best work, Lions of Al-Rassan, was rooted in an extremely thinly disguised Spain and had virtually no magic at all. Abraham’s setting draws from history in a much more typically diffuse manner, but like Kay’s books his main characters sometimes seem like they’d be more at home in our world than in the one they grew up in. But unlike Kay, Abraham paints his picture across a vast canvas. Each book in the Quartet is short by the standards of fantasy novels, but taken together they span perhaps forty years of chronological time. By The Price of Spring, the final book, the reader has followed some characters from youth to old age. The characters of these books are the highlight, carefully drawn and nuanced, and more than worth the price of admission.
In the end, perhaps the only complaint I have is that the andat, so important to the politics of the books, feel rather underused. The only one given the same amount of attention as the human characters, Seedless, is so fascinating and fun that it was disappointing the rest stay more or less in the background. And more broadly, when thinking about the political and cultural tensions of the books, while the andat are inseparable from them and thus crucial to the overall plot, I couldn’t help feeling the andat were a little superfluous. Oh, the conditions as described require them, but the results mirror countless troubled societies in our own world, so people are more than capable of having these conflicts without the presence of the andat.
But these are minor quibbles to a very strong series of books. Anyone interested in more culturally-oriented fantasy can’t go wrong here, and I’m looking forward to seeing more from the author.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
August 24, 2009 at 1:41 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Cormac McCarthy
There’s definitely something to be said for doing one thing and doing it well. In The Road, just about every word is intended to further evoke its grim, post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Everything superfluous to this goal has been boiled away, leaving a short but very effective book. A man and his son are trekking across the wasteland. If you’ve read enough books, seen enough movies, or even played enough video games, then you’re probably pretty familiar with post-Apocalyptic America. McCarthy doesn’t show you anything new, he just does a better job in showing it than anyone else does.
It’s very close to a perfect book in a specialized sense: the author set certain goals and executed them. If, like me, you hope for more than just momentary immersion when you read novels, you’ll probably come away feeling impressed but unsatisfied. But for many people, the conjunction of setting, mood, and character McCarthy manages in The Road makes it a great novel. You don’t win the Pulitzer Prize if you’re leaving most readers unsatisfied.
Luckily, at its relatively short length, I can recommend it to virtually everyone. You may or may not find it precisely to your tastes, but it’s worth your time to find out.
Thunderer by Felix Gilman
August 15, 2009 at 5:48 pm | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Felix Gilman
This novel is almost a remake of Perdido Street Station, with a Peter Pan subplot. I originally read this observation in Abigail Nussbaum’s review of the book. By the time I read the novel I had forgotten her review, but the connections are so clear that I remembered without having to go back and look. If you haven’t read Mieville’s book, what that means is this is a fantasy taking place in a large and well-drawn city, a city that is in many ways the main character of the book.
The city has a much different conceit than Mieville’s, in that it is a city with thousands of “gods”–not the Greek kind but the strange supernatural forces kind, somewhat reminiscent of the angels in Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God”. That sounded quite interesting, but past the fantastic opening section the supernatural angle is of minimal importance. Yes, it’s involved in the mechanics of the plot, but you could rewrite the book to take place in, say, Mieville’s divinity-less world without any difficulty.
If you haven’t read Perdido Street Station, I think that’s the superior book. Mieville’s language and dark imagination make his novel more interesting, original, and memorable. If you have read it, you may think (as I did after reading the linked review above) a very similar book would still be worthwhile. And you’d probably be right. The book suffers from the same faults as Perdido (namely a plot that is overshadowed by the setting and characters that are not particularly sympathetic or intriguing) but is still an engrossing piece of fiction.
The Peter Pan subplot was much less successful. While it has a more realistic approach to the band of thieves cliche than most urban fantasy novels manage, it felt like it didn’t end up amounting to anything. The book takes the structure of Peter Pan but leaves out most of the ideas that have made Peter Pan enduring and doesn’t add anything of its own.
All in all it’s a decent read, but very much in the shadow of greater works. Not a bad effort for a first novel. I’ll be back to give the author another a try.
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
July 7, 2009 at 1:22 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Robert Heinlein
Individually, Heinlein’s prominent adult fiction is more widely known and read (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers) but I think the argument can be made that his juvenile (or young adult or whatever the proper term is these days) novels have held up the best over time. I haven’t read enough of either side of his work to make any pronouncements on this question, but I can vouch for Citizen of the Galaxy as a light, engaging read. The plot certainly sounds like the sort of wish-fulfillment trash that clutters young adult shelves: Thorby is an orphan captured by slavers has the good fortune to be taken in by a wise old beggar. He learns street smarts on the mean streets while the beggar teaches him reading and mathematics at night, then as a teenager he manages to escape poverty to become a crewman on a trading spaceship, and from there continues to bigger things, all the while on a quest to discover his true identity. This is a science fiction version of a very, very old sort of story, so I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I mention in the end it turns out he is the scion of an aristocratic family and must defeat those who would deny him his inheritance.
I said this sounds a lot like wish-fulfillment. I guess there’s nothing wrong with a little wish-fulfillment escapism in moderation, but particularly in children’s fiction I think it’s the literary equivalent of junk food. What’s interesting is that Heinlein, ever the ideologue, uses this framework to impart some very, dare I say, edifying ideas. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a rollicking adventure story that pulls the reader along for the ride, but this turns out to be a candy coating. The first hint is that as the protagonist’s life progresses through stages from grim existence to ever more elevated positions (beggar, trader crewman, soldier, magnate) he becomes less and less happy. Toward the end, after shocking a long lost relative with a brief account of his early life, he laments that his days as a beggar were the happiest of his life. Every time he achieved a higher status, he became more burdened with obligations and more isolated. This wasn’t poor fortune. Each step of the way, Thorby has the option of rejecting the higher calling (fighting the institution of slavery) he inherited from the beggar who adopted him and living a simple life. His final decision to reject decadence is the climax of the novel. Once he is set on putting the liberation of other slaves ahead of his own life, the book ends. He doesn’t actually achieve any of his goals, and while he has unearthed a sinister conspiracy he has barely begun to try to defeat it. In a normal story, this would be the middle.
But for Heinlein it is the end, because the book is not about the defeat of slavery in human space, it’s about a young man finding a way to live ethically in a difficult world. Unlike a lot of children’s entertainment that pats itself on the back for the most banal of themes (friends are good!), this is genuinely edifying. Unlike Heinlein’s adult work, the message here is broad enough that I think pretty much everyone can agree with it. While this is entertaining for adults as light reading, I’d mainly recommend this for younger readers.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
June 18, 2009 at 2:38 am | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Nancy Kress
If you had an extra seven or more hours every day, how would you spend it? My guess is different people have different answers to that question, but in Beggars in Spain everyone seems to have just one: work like a dog. The premise here, that genetic engineering might allow people to have children who don’t need to sleep, is fine. But Kress feels that the kids would use the time they otherwise would have been sleeping to study advanced subjects, learn additional languages, and otherwise broaden their intellectual horizons. I won’t speak for anyone else, but growing up when I had a snow day and thus didn’t have to go to school, I didn’t study Chinese instead, I just played in the snow with the neighborhood kids, played video games, or watched television. Certainly if you had, say, a hundred kids without the need to sleep, there’d be some overachievers who would use the extra time academically. But Kress says outright that all of the “sleepless” kids are academic geniuses.
I think there was a sentence or two in there that mentioned some possible side effects to the sleep-prevention genetic modification, implying that maybe these kids are smarter or at least have different interests than ordinary kids. But if you want to write a book about super-smart kids, go ahead, but I expect to be told plainly that genetic engineering has made these kids super-smart. The book focuses entirely on not sleeping as the crucial difference.
So that was one problem I had with the book. As things went on, I tried to accept the Sleepless characters as having genetically enhanced intelligence and just deal with it. Unfortunately, there’s a second area of sociological speculation where Kress lost me. Despite the fact the number of Sleepless kids is very low, in the hundreds or at most low thousands, much of the book’s middle section concerns anti-Sleepless hysteria and discrimination. Despite the intellectual benefits that I found so illogical, Sleepless as adults are not really distinguishable from the sort of careerist workaholics that already litter New York, Washington, and other centers of power and finance. Some concern about a strange group with connections to power is quite understandable, but the cycle of violence and distrust depicted in the book seems way out of proportion with the amount of contact the average person would have (none), the real economic influence of Sleepless given their incredibly small numbers (nearly none), and the difference between Kress’ Sleepless and big-shot lawyers, financiers, and CEOs (pretty much none at all). Sure, people grumble about the rich in America, some people even complain about “Jews controlling everything” and such, but these are very low-temperature hatreds and in the latter case it’s backed up by fifteen hundred years of tradition. Let’s not forget that Sleepless are utterly visually interchangeable with normal people, too, so there’s no way to, say, ban them from your shop even if you wanted to do such a thing.
Apart from my inability to suspend disbelief in these areas, the book is pretty good. It’s especially good in the last section, which deals much more directly with issues relating to genetic modification of intellect, albeit with a very predictable storyline. All told it’s an accessible examination of genetic and social engineering, issues I wish would come up more in science fiction.
Mistborn Trilogy by Brandson Sanderson
June 15, 2009 at 11:43 pm | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Brandon Sanderson
The basic premise of the Mistborn trilogy goes something like this: an evil force stalks the land, causing suffering and death. No one can stop it, causing widespread despair. But the ancient prophecies speak of one man who might journey to a distant place and there discover a power that can vanquish this evil. A sage discovers an unlikely man who fits the portents, and through much adversity he eventually does succeed in his quest.
If that sounds like a generic fantasy plot, it is. The twist here is that this all happened a thousand years ago. The hero, upon vanquishing the evil force, made himself the Lord Ruler of the world he had saved. Under his reign the vast peasantry are oppressed in miserable conditions while the opulant nobility carries on at their expense. Generation after generation has come and gone, but he remains, immortal and invincible.
Apparently when the first book in the trilogy, The Final Empire, came out the marketing leaned heavily on this setup as being mind-blowingly subversive. Well, it’s nothing mind-blowing for even a moderately well-read fantasy reader, but it’s certainly a good beginning. On this foundation, Sanderson builds an entertaining heist plot in the first book, a very detailed and well-thought-out magic system, and the usual mix of action, intrigue, and romance. Unfortunately, while this is a work with multiple viewpoints, it has a main character, Vin, who I personally found to be boring. She had a hard life before her unexpected awakening into magic powers, and now she…eh, whatever. Kelsier, Vin’s mentor, is more interesting, but for me at least the attraction here is not the characters.
It’s not really the world-building, either. Sanderson is not much interested in geography, so there aren’t long Tolkienian landscape descriptions. He’s more interested in the society he’s constructed. That would have been fine by me, since I have similar preferences, except the trilogy wastes much of its time on well-travelled ground. For example, the oppressive nobility gained their status because their ancestors helped the Lord Ruler when he was a young hero. Since then, they’ve become fractious, wasteful, and even occasionally rebellious, but he tolerates them due to the fond memories he has of their long-forgotten (by everyone else) ancestors. Obviously this is not how nobility worked either historically or in most fantasy, but alas this fascinating difference was remarked upon and left alone. When it comes to the nobility most of the trilogy’s energies are spent on whether or not every one of them is complicit in the Lord Ruler’s oppression and if so what punishment they might deserve, if not who is and who isn’t, etc. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.
I should mention that Sanderson has built an elegant magic system that is complicated without being confusing. The Mistborn of the title generate magic through the digestion of various types of metal, and much of the power comes from the abilities they gain to magically manipulate metal. Sanderson has rigorously worked out the implications for magical combat, and so the fight scenes are remarkable. Unfortunately these days I have less patience for textual choreography, but if you enjoy fun action there’s no shortage of it here.
What the trilogy does really well, however, has to do with the plot and backstory. Because I’ve already said that I found Mistborn decent but not amazing in the areas we traditionally grade fiction (characters, world-building), this is going to sound like faint praise. But the fact is, there are tons of sprawling fantasy series being written these days and hardly any of them come together in a reasonably satisfying way. Either the author loses control of the story, or the ending makes no sense, or the whole thing is brutally predictable. Sanderson, displaying perhaps the same rigor he used in developing his magic system, has done a superlative job laying out a backstory and plot that never are hard to understand but also steadily dole out surprising revelations. With many series, readers complain afterward that loose ends were left untied. Here, not only are the loose ends tied up, but the whole thing is so well-orchestrated that I never realized the loose ends were there until they were dealt with. Successive revelations forced reexaminations of past events, reexaminations that made me realize things hadn’t been hanging together as well as I (and the characters) had thought, but upon learning this new information everything made sense again.
The result is a story that fits together like a gleaming crystal, each facet carefully polished to achieve the desired effect. This is not my favorite fantasy trilogy since as I discussed before it didn’t cover precisely my personal favorite themes, but it is surely the best constructed that I’ve ever read. In light of this, I recommend that the trilogy be read all at once, for the more you remember from the first two books when finishing the third the more you’ll be able to see everything fit together perfectly.
One last thing I should mention is that Brandon Sanderson has some pretty extensive “behind the scenes” type material on his site about how he wrote the book and the choices he made while writing. It’s kind of like extras you get on a DVD. I’m not sure how interesting it would be to most readers, as it may be a sort of inside-baseball for writers, but I found it fascinating and wish more writers did this.
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