The Way of Kings is the first book in an ambitious new ten-book fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive, by established fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. And what an opener this is.

Anyone who has even a cursory interest in fantasy literature can’t have missed Sanderson’s entrance into the scene over the past half-decade. After breaking into the scene with the stand-alone novel Elantris in 2005, Sanderson went on to publish the three-book Mistborn series.

I wrote of that series after finishing it that it was one of modern fantasy’s best trilogies. And I felt at the time that it highlighted one of Sanderson’s strongest traits as a writer: His ability to plan. When you finish the final Mistborn book, you walk away stunned that Sanderson had referred to and explained events right in the first pages of the first book in the series in the closing chapter of the third.

It is also this ability to plan that Sanderson has brought to his other major fantasy initiative to date: Finishing Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, following the author’s untimely death prior to its conclusion.

It’s hard to imagine a more sprawling and complex fantasy series than the Wheel of Time – or a more accessible one. Fantasy fans commonly compare reading the series to being addicted to crack cocaine. But as I wrote in my review of Sanderson’s first step in completing the series, The Gathering Storm, Sanderson’s planning and writing skills are up to the task of giving fans a satisfactory closure to Jordan’s masterpiece.

I mention all of this to help a reader to understand what they are picking up when they buy The Way of Kings.

This book is nothing less than Sanderson’s first step in attempting to equal Jordan’s masterpiece The Wheel of Time. With The Stormlight Archive, Sanderson is taking his first, masterly step into a journey that will likely take him more than a decade to complete and will see his name listed alongside Jordan, Tolkien, George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb in the pantheon of fantasy greats.

Yes, this book is that good.

In The Way of Kings, Sanderson is taking the planning and writing skills he polished through the Mistborn and Wheel of Time series and applying them to a stunning new and massive canvas.

The Way of Kings primarily follows three characters.

The first is a mysterious young warrior named Kaladin, who gave up a promising career as a surgeon to join the military in search of honour and glory. But his vision does not come to pass, and he passes into slavery, fighting every day for the right to survive.

The second is a man on the opposite end of life’s scales. Dalinar Kholin is a ‘brightlord’ – one of the rulers of the kingdom of Alethkar, and the commander of a brother army to the one in which Kaladin finds himself enslaved.

The third main character is Shallan, a young woman with remarkable drawing skills who successfully apprentices herself to one of the most renowned scholars of the land. But although she does truly enjoy her studies, Shallan has another underlying motive in mind for getting close to this scholar – one on which the fate of her family rests.

The world in which the stories of these three – and many, many other characters – take place, is a complex one. It is a world in which magic abounds, but as in Mistborn, it is magic that has more than a hint of the technological about it. Magic that has rules and systems governing its operation.

Sanderson’s world is also one in which – as in Mistborn – the past is enshrouded in mystery. Nobody is quite sure what or who the mysterious Knights Radiant were, but their relics – magic swords and armour – continue to be used by modern day people. And rumours of a faceless evil banished in the past continue to haunt and inform the present.

Storms shake the land, and there are daily reminders in The Way of Kings that the world it describes is not Earth. There are tiny magical beings everywhere – dubbed ‘Spren’, arising whenever certain emotions or energies are felt. Gloryspren, for example, manifest as golden lines springing up around someone who has just won a great battle. And Windspren flow around with the wind and play tricks on people.

If it seems already as if there are more than a few shadows of the ideas that Sanderson explored in Mistborn present in The Way of Kings, that’s because there definitely are.

Sanderson’s new series shares much structurally with his old one. The author loves mysteries, and at the heart of his storytelling ability is his habit of gradually revealing the meaning behind tiny details in his world. The experienced fantasy reader can pick up the hints he leaves littered throughout his work as to the true nature of everything in his world – and look forward to the inevitable stunning revelations Sanderson doles out like clockwork.

The magic system in The Way of Kings is similar to that of Mistborn, as is the combat. The mysterious past shaped by clataclysmic events, the true nature of which is not yet apparent, is also similar.

And yet all of these ideas are enhanced and magnified for the bigger stage of The Stormlight Archive. They are grander, and fill the heart and the head more than they did in the limited world of Mistborn.

Sanderson’s greatest problem, it is already apparent, will be the same one that Jordan experienced in The Wheel of Time. Sanderson will need to set boundaries around his world-building power, so that when he gets to book five or six of his mammoth series, his plot doesn’t become bogged down with the need to resolve dozens – nay, hundreds, in the Wheel of Time – of complex plot threads.

But we won’t need to worry about this for a while yet.

If there are criticisms of Sanderson’s work, they may be that The Way of Kings could be tighter. The book does seem to repeat some scenes that do not add much in the way of plot or character development; this is a problem for all three of Sanderson’s major characters.

There is also a sense that The Way of Kings is definitely an introductory volume in The Stormlight Archive series. Sanderson kicks off the book with a fast-paced action scene that introduces the reader to the fantastic magic system in his new world; but then spends most of the rest of the book avoiding such awesome displays of action and power.

And yet, it’s hard to criticize the author for doing so. Sanderson rightly needed to leave much to the future so that he could let the sense of anticipation grow throughout this first book and also through his series – he had to hold things back so that he could reveal them later on.

The best way to describe Sanderson’s work for a fantasy reader is to say that it is tremendously satisfying to read. You know what you’re in for and you feel comfortable resting in the hands of an absolute master.

By the time The Way of Kings is complete, much has been revealed about the world in which it takes place, and about its key characters. And yet, it is apparent that the book has only begun to sketch the outlines of a very complex and beautiful picture which will only be complete more than a decade hence.

I read The Way of Kings in a week – staying up late to do so. At almost exactly 1,000 pages it’s a massive tome – and yet I had to devour it all. After that week, however, I am now terribly conscious that I must wait another year, 18 months, or even more (panic!) for the next book to come out.

With some reviews of fantasy books, it is clear that the author has certain strengths that will appeal to certain readers but not others, so a critic such as myself can offer only a partial recommendation – or, more rarely, no recommendation at all.

With The Way of Kings this is not so. The Stormlight Archive is a series that, like Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings epics, every fantasy fan worth their salt must read and be familiar with. This will be one of the giant series that will help shape the entire scene. Take a week off work now and go and buy The Way of Kings. You won’t regret it.

Disclosure: The Way of Kings was sent to this author as a review copy by Sanderson’s publisher

Wow, what an amazing ride!

Hold on tight in the final book of Brandon Sanderson‘s stellar Mistborn trilogy … there are so many revelations and dramatic events coming thick and fast that you’ll be keeping your eyes glued to its pages. I couldn’t stop reading and literally stayed up past 1AM in the morning on several succeeding nights to finish it.

The Hero of Ages is the best possible conclusion to what has become one of modern fantasy’s best trilogies. Looking back over Keeping the Door‘s reviews of the previous two books, it’s clear that I enjoyed reading the first two books greatly. They were highly satisfying to read and contained a very good mix of character development, action and revelations in the magic system and world history.

But The Hero of Ages really ratchets everything up a massive notch. If you thought you knew the Final Empire, if you thought you knew the background to Allomancy, its system of magic, if you thought you knew what forces were behind it all, well you were wrong. You’ve got another, massive, think coming. If you have started reading Mistborn at all, keep going to this fantastic conclusion. It’s worth it.

At the conclusion of The Well of Ascension (book two in the series), Vin inadvertently released upon the world one of the primal beings behind everything. And it’s not a benevolent force, as long-time readers of fantasy might have guessed.

Dubbed ‘Ruin’, the basic reason for the entity’s existence is to destroy things. Ultimately, if it had it’s way, everything.

It’s not hard to understand, when you start reading The Hero of Ages, that Ruin is not too far away from getting its way. The mists so prevalent in the first two books have started killing people again, earthquakes are leveling buildings all over the place, and ash is falling from the sky in increasing quantities, even piling up to people’s waists in some places.

Vin and her husband, the now emperor Elend, have a lot of allies on their side. The Terrisman Sazed, keeper of the world’s knowledge. Various allomances with powerful skills. And perhaps most importantly, armies. With most of the empire now under Elend, he has necessarily to focus on how best to use his sheer manpower.

But as events gain pace throughout the book, it’s not clear whether it’ll be enough to keep The Final Empire running.

What I really found amazing about The Hero of Ages is that the book’s constant revelations about the real nature of events in the Final Empire over the past thousand years make clear just how much planning Brandon Sanderson put into this remarkable series.

It’s no exaggeration to say that even very small details from the opening pages of the first book, The Final Empire, are mentioned and finally put into their worthwhile context in the last pages of the final book. I was left stunned at times as I realised the subterfuge that the author had been undertaking in order to slowly reveal, like an onion, layers upon layers of his world.

The genius of Brandon Sanderson’s work is that even though I now know the full context of the first two books in the Mistborn series, when I was reading them, I didn’t feel as though I lacked context. The series has just gradually deepened throughout its length, without losing any of its dramatic tension or sacrificing its action-packed scenes.

After reading the final Mistborn book, it’s easy to see why Robert Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal was keen for Sanderson to finish Jordan’s epic The Wheel of Time series following his untimely death. Sanderson’s world-building and revelation skills are similar in style to those of Jordan himself.

Finishing the Mistborn trilogy is like finishing Battlestar Galactica, for those who have watched the landmark sci-fi TV series. You awaken slowly from a dream, unsure as to where you really are or what just happened, but knowing that you’re in a place far, far distant from where you began, and stunned by the remarkable journey.

Note: This review of the second book in the Mistborn series contains spoilers about the first. You probably don’t want to read The Well of Ascension or this review before you read the first book, The Final Empire.

There really isn’t much to say about Brandon Sanderson‘s The Well of Ascension, the 2007 follow-up to his highly satisfying 2006 novel Mistborn. If you liked your first venture into the Mistborn universe, and our review suggests that you probably did, you’ll love the second instalment.

In fact, you’ll probably snarl at anyone – for example, your boss, the bus conductor, your spouse – who tries to get you to stop reading it and pay attention to the real world. It’s that good. It’s simply a little nugget of fantasy gold that we couldn’t put down for the week it took to read it.

The narrative of The Well of Ascension kicks off a little after the events of The Final Empire. Arch-rebel Kelsier has died after successfully lighting a fire under the government and nobility of the city of Luthadel, at the heart of the empire. But then the Lord Ruler, that virtually immortal emperor who took the power of the legendary and mysterious Well of Ascension millennia ago and has been abusing his power ever since, has also been knocked off.

His killer, the street thief turned powerful Allomancer Vin, is now hanging out with her boyfriend, the noble Elend Venture, who has taken the reins of power and kingship in the city of Luthadel at the centre of the empire. Allomancy, if you remember, is Mistborn‘s magic system. Its practitioners can ‘burn’ certain metals after swallowing them, gaining amazing powers of strength, sensory enhancements and metal manipulation in doing so.

It all sounds hunky dory. Ding dong, the Lord Ruler is dead, let’s dance happily on the ashes of his grave and end the servitude of the Skaa, the peasant class in the world of Mistborn. But of course, nobody ever got to live happily ever after in the second book of a trilogy.

As the book’s back cover notes: “Evil has been defeated. The war has just begun.”

One of the refreshing things about the Mistborn series so far is its focus (thus far) on just one location. This is no quest series, where a legendary magical item has to be returned to the receptacle from which it was stolen 2,000 years ago by the Dark Lord and his evil minions etc.

Far from it.

In fact, as with the first book, almost all of the events in The Well of Ascension take place in the city of Luthadel. We follow Vin around most of the time as she deals with those attempting to kill Elend Venture and starts to realise that even though she’s one of the most advanced Allomancers around, she really doesn’t know that much about the real history of her powers and the world she lives in.

As the book wears on, it takes a turn for the disastrous. As its blurb notes, no less than three separate armies arrive outside the city walls and dig in for a siege.

But that’s not all. The Lord Ruler might be gone, but there are other supernatural forces out there, and some of them begin to pay Vin regular visits. Hints begin to arrive that Vin and Elend Venture’s problems might not just restricted to the political chaos following the Lord Ruler’s death, but might extend to instabilities in the deep structure of the entire world and its magic system.

Brandon Sanderson

There is plenty of action in The Well of Ascension, and plenty of “aha” moments where small or large secrets and plot elements are revealed to the reader for the first time. Normally the middle book in a trilogy is the toughest one to get right, but Sanderson’s work fires on all cylinders.

The author never makes the mistake of letting his characters get too powerful or too ahead of themselves. The minute they do, some larger problem arrives to cut them down to size and put a realistic cap on their abilities.

I have but two criticisms of The Well of Ascension, and they are minor ones.

Firstly, the political maneuvering is a little bit naïve and simplistic. Most of the time it simply contrasts the idealism of Elend Venture with the crass greed and powermongering of the other powerful players. However, real-world politics is a great deal more complicated often plays different sets of ideals against each other.

Most of the Mistborn world is coloured in shades of grey, but its politics is simply black and white.

Secondly, I would argue that certain aspects of Sanderson’s plot in general is predictable. That doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable to take in, but the more experienced fantasy reader will pick up the more obvious signs he leaves scattered throughout the book as to the real story behind the surface events in The Well of Ascension.

But these two minor quibbles won’t keep anyone continuing their journey in this highly enjoyable series. If you liked The Final Empire, you’ll want to pick up The Well of Ascension quick smart and block out a sizeable chunk of space in your diary for “personal time”.

Brandon Sanderson‘s Mistborn: The Final Empire is a thoroughly satisfying beginning to what I expect will be a great trilogy. The book contains a well-thought-out system of magic and a good degree of complexity to the plot and character development.

The Final Empire demonstrates that Sanderson is an accomplished writer who knows his craft well. Plot revelations and significant events that progress the likeable and intriguing characters are doled out at regular intervals and make the book quite suited to the modern reader. There’s just enough in a chapter to make it to your bus stop every morning and leave you wanting more.

And the book’s meaty conclusion brings its various threads together well.

The copy of the book we reviewed was simply entitled Mistborn, but there are two more books in the Mistborn series: Mistborn: The Well of Ascension, and Mistborn: The Hero of Ages. Online, the first book seems mainly referred to as Mistborn: The Final Empire. The book was first published in mid-2006.

The world of Mistborn is a troubled one. During the day the main slave class, known as the skaa, works its bodies into the ground in mind-numbing servitude while ash perennially falls from the sky upon their heads. Nothing about the skaa is considered sacred; not their possessions, their lives, even their women. Their whole world belongs to the noble class which sits above them.

In contrast to the skaa, the noble class spends most of its time living a life of luxury; attending and hosting splendid balls, conducting trade and playing politics against its own members in an attempt to gain advantage.

At night, however, things change. The mists come out, covering the world in a blanket of fog, and any sensible skaa remains cowering indoors, away from the things which roam abroad; things, it’s rumoured, that can steal your soul. The noble class is a bit more willing to go out at night, due to its higher levels of education and protection, but even nobles aren’t completely sure what the mists hold.

The only ones who do are those called Mistings and Mistborn; humans with special powers that are generated by using the energy found in various metals. Speed, more powerful senses, strength; it’s all there in one form or another. Using such techniques is known as Allomancy. And Allomany is strictly forbidden to the skaa; it’s a magic the noble class keeps for itself.

The arch enforcer of these strict societal rules is the Lord Ruler; the thousand-year-old emperor who rules the world through a combination of Allomancy and bureacracy. But not all are happy with the order he maintains.

Into this world comes Vin, a skaa street urchin who seems to have a knack for surviving by having more luck than those around her. The pages of Mistborn: The Final Empire will see her swept away from her pathetic life of thieving and cringing away from those more powerful than her and into a revolution that aims to topple the noble class and even the Lord Ruler himself from his milennium-old throne.

Brandon Sanderson

I love several things about Mistborn: The Final Empire. The first is the Allomancy magic system Sanderson has created. Creating a good magic system is probably one of the hardest tasks in writing fantasy literature.

Authors have to tread a careful path between the extremes of making their system too powerful, too weak, too esoteric, or too mechanistic. Critics generally praise the One Power system found in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books because it sits in between all of these extremes, and I would say Sanderson’s Allomancy system is pretty good as well (if more limited than Jordan’s vision).

You really care about finding out more about how Allomancy works as the book goes on, and its practitioners are constantly coming up with innovative ways to use it, especially in combat, which delivers a degree of punch to Sanderson’s action scenes. Sure, the characters can fly. But in a limited, controlled way that respects the laws of physics. Fascinating stuff.

The other thing I love about Mistborn: The Final Empire is Sanderson’s sense of pacing. Just as you’re getting tired of one character’s viewpoint, he switches to another. Just as you think you understand the world he’s created, he pulls the rug out from under your feet. Just as a character begins to get comfortable with the world around them, Sanderson puts them through a plot test so they can grow and develop.

Now, I won’t say that Sanderson’s accomplishment verges of the sublime. It doesn’t. The book comes across as very, very workmanlike. This is the vision of a journeyman writer; not a master. There’s no doubt that Sanderson has all the rules of fantasy writing down pat; but at least in Mistborn: The Final Empire, he hadn’t started breaking them yet.

Nevertheless, this workmanlike attitude which constantly satisfies the reader is what most readers are looking for, and I would argue it would be a rare fantasy reader indeed who didn’t get a great deal of pleasure from Mistborn: The Final Empire.

Sadly, I found it hard to buy Mistborn: The Final Empire in Australia. It wasn’t stocked in either mainstream or specialist speculative fiction book shops. I had to order it online from Amazon.com.

Given the amount of poorly written books that are available on shelves, this goes a long way to indicating that Sanderson’s books are probably not as well-known as they should be, given the quality of the author’s prose. It’s a situation I hope to see rectified with the publication of The Gathering Storm, the next book in the Wheel of Time series that Sanderson has penned following the tragic and untimely death of series creator Robert Jordan.

If you haven’t read any Brandon Sanderson yet, pick up this book. You won’t be disappointed.

Wheel of Time fans have overwhelmingly praised the first chapter to be released in the new book in the series, which has been penned by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson in the wake of the tragic death of its original creator Robert Jordan.

Last week, series publisher Tor Books made the first chapter in the new book, The Gathering Storm, available for free from its website. The entire book will be published internationally on October 27 and will be followed by two more to conclude the series.

Over the past week, Wheel of Time fans have posted no less than 380 comments on Tor’s site about the new chapter. The overwhelming response has been that Sanderson writes in a slightly different and less descriptive style than Jordan, but that fans were immediately able to re-enter the Wheel of Time universe and were incredibly excited to be doing so.

“I thought the beginning didn’t sound very RJ-like, but as I read on, I easily got lost in Brandon’s writing and could not personally distinguish the two “styles”. Kudos, Brandon!” enthused one fan.

Another wrote:

“This extract in acordance with all RJ’s previous work is well written. The developement of both plot and character are again suble but compellingly real in that I have the sense of witnessing these events as they unfold. Whoever’s finger prints are on the paper this bodes very well, and if the standard is maintained to the final chapter then we can undoubtedly say that the tale has been done justice to the dream that was.”

Wertzone author Adam Whitehead, writing on popular forum site ReadAndFindOut, which replaced long-time Wheel of Time site wotmania.com several weeks ago, wrote that the first chapter didn’t sound like Jordan, but didn’t sound like Sanderson’s previous work either:

“People expecting this to be EXACTLY the same as Robert Jordan’s writing have missed the point entirely. It was never about that totally unachievable goal, it was about Sanderson not completely screwing up the story and characters. So far we are off to a flying start.”

Most other commenters on ReadAndFindOut, which has an excellent discussion thread about the first chapter, were positive about the release and optimistic about The Gathering Storm, although there were a number of minor criticisms and some people did not enjoy the first chapter.

Warning: Spoilers about the chapter and previous books ahead, as well as plot discussion.

Much of the plot discussion surrounding the chapter has focused on one of the only new plot points that was introduced in it; Rand has a new sword.

The chapter states:

“It looked as if it had been designed speci?cally for Rand—and yet it was centuries old, unearthed only recently. How odd, that they should ?nd this now, he thought, and make a gift of it to me, completely unaware of what they were holding. . . . He had told no one, not even Min, that he had recognized the weapon. And not, oddly, from Lews Therin’s memories—but Rand’s own.”

There appears to be a gradually developing consensus online that the sword may be Justice, the legendary blade of the king, general and ta’veren who united much of the lands west of the Spine of the World long before Rand Al’Thor’s time.

Possessing Justice, so the theory goes, would give Rand a massive advantage in trying to win over the invading Seanchan armies, as their nation was founded by Hawkwing’s son, and they revere Hawkwing himself.

Commentary
After reading the first chapter of The Gathering Storm, I am excitedly awaiting the release of the full book. All the signs are there from the first chapter that Sanderson knows and reveres Jordan’s work extremely well and is dedicated to and capable of producing a stunning sequel to the series.

Yes, if you’re a long-time Wheel of Time fan, you will be able to detect differences between the writing styles of Jordan and Sanderson.

However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I hadn’t read any of Sanderson’s work before, but this week I’ve been reading Mistborn, the first book in his Final Empire series. And I have to say that I am completely hooked. I love this book, and I’m going to be speedily rushing out to read the rest of his books as well.

Knowing that Mistborn is great has given be a great deal of confidence in Sanderson’s ability to finish The Wheel of Time.

However, as many people have noted online, there is also quite a lot of difference between Sanderson’s evolving style in his previous books and the writing in the first chapter of The Gathering Storm.

To me, it appears as if the new book will very much be a mixing of both authors, done in a very respectful way to Robert Jordan’s memory. I suspect it will be a tribute to Sanderson’s respect for Jordan.

What do you think about the first chapter of The Gathering Storm? Did it, as many people have noted, hook you back into Jordan’s epic vision? Or did it leave you feeling cold?