![]() Claus Valca – a flyboy born with the right stuff – and his fiery navigator Lavie are fearless racers obsessed with becoming the first sky couriers to cross the Grand Stream in a vanship. “It’s the dawn of the Golden Age of Aviation on planet Prester, and retro-futuristic sky vehicles known as vanships dominate the horizon. I hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and my other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page. This also explains why I prefer Sanderson’s short fiction – short stories are briefer and idea-driven, which plays to his strengths. ** As such, this trilogy would have worked much better in a visual medium. I have heard his prose subsequently improved, but not having read any of his other novels, I cannot attest to whether this is true. * Or at least he wasn’t at the time he wrote this series. You can buy Book 1, Mistborn, from Amazon here. And while Sanderson’s weak prose is not the sole culprit, it’s certainly a major one**. While there are plenty of worse speculative fiction authors, there are also plenty of better ones, both at the pulpy and at the Great Novel ends of the spectrum. Ultimately, while the first book in particular is worth a look if you do like Traditional Fantasy Series, the novels can’t do justice to the nifty ideas they contain. The third book falls in between – while a lot better than the second, the sprawling subplots and the increasingly draggy fight scenes are a far cry from the first book. While it starts with an interesting premise (what happens after the superpowered teenage heroes succeed?), it suffers from an acute case of the Idiot Plot as said heroes spend the book blundering, moping about their love lives, and generally making a hash of things. ![]() The magic system is fresh, the plot is tight, and the fights are well-spaced and thrilling. Going book by book, the first novel is the best. This also hurts his characterisation – for example, I found it hard to remember which member of the heist crew was which, and I ended up skimming one important character’s chapters in book 2 because I found his conversations so inane. Almost any of the speculative fiction authors I’ve read in the last few years – to name a few, Bujold, Kay, Lynch, Morgan, Abercrombie, Vinge, Powers, Martin, maybe even Erikson – could beat Sanderson at the micro level. He is not very good at scene construction (with the exception of action scenes), he is not very good with prose, and in particular, he is not very good with dialogue, which often sounds stilted and didactic. Unfortunately, Sanderson is not very good at the nuts and bolts of writing*. This is visible in the way the first book overlays bits of the heist genre onto the fantasy template the alternatives to the stock fantasy races the magic system that’s almost RPG-like in its depth the little and not-so-little plot twists and more. As such, he is strongest as an “ideas guy”. What distinguishes it is the bunch of clever twists that Sanderson adds to the formula. While there are no elves, dwarves, or orcs, there are superpowered teenage heroes and sinister dark lords. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.Īt its core, the Mistborn trilogy is a Traditional Fantasy Series. After really enjoying a short story by Brandon Sanderson, “Firstborn”, I had high hopes for another set of his works, the Mistborn trilogy (comprising Book 1, Mistborn Book 2, The Well of Ascension and Book 3, The Hero of Ages).
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