Brandon Sanderson is an interesting case; I have only read the Stormlight Archive books (and his wrap-up of Wheel of Time), and though I can totally see his appeal, I would also totally disagree that he belongs up there with the true greats, at least currently.
Reading his books, I feel like I'm in some kind of Marvel universe, complete with quippy dialogue and 'coolness' that to me gives a stink of 'commercialism' that I can't get past.
In the Stormlight Archive, Shallan is the best example of this: Her dialogue is so forcedly hip and witty that cringes abound whenever I read it. To me, it ruins the whole atmosphere and I feel like I'm in a plastic universe, rather than a living breathing one.
His worldbuilding is great, but his worlds are devoid of authenticity IMO.
Within the cosmere universe, there is a one off novella that Sanderson wrote called "The Emperor's Soul". It is quite good, and it won a Hugo award.
I very much disagree about his worlds lacking authenticity. It seems you have some strange suspension of disbelief resulting from Shallan's dialogue (which I find is true to her character and upbringing). I agree some of the writing for dialogue is "off", but I feel much of this results from Sanderson's pace of writing.
You are right that worldbuilding is his strongest attribute. His characters are getting better and better and Stormlight's are his best yet (imo). Keep in mind that he is still evolving and he is prolific. He generally releases 1+ books every year while still being a professor. Martin's books are really solid, when he ever writes them..... Remember this is his opus after a lifetime of writing. (I personally think his Fevre Dream is a great book)
Her wordplay often feels weak (though "hip" seems like an odd way of describing it), but you could probably fit all of it in one page and there are over 2000 pages in the first two books. If you feel disinterested after reading 2000+ pages I'm not inclined to say you should read the next 1000+ page book, but others should note that this is probably not a common opinion. (Shallan does suck the air out of the first book to some extent, but she's great in the second IMO.)
Take this line of dialogue (don't remember whether it's from the first or second):
"Well, she wanted me to get married too", Shallan said. "So I wouldn't call her sexist. Merely... Jasnah-ist?" She paused. "Jasnagynistic? No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?"
Now, without devolving into debating the anachronicity of the terms used here in general - this is a good example of what I am talking about, and perhaps 'hip' was the wrong way to word it, but it goes beyond mere 'bad wordplay' for me. If you can read the above without cringing, all the more power to you. For me, passages like these completely break immersion and leave me wondering whether I'm reading some kind of bad fanfic. And unfortunately, yes, that does color the rest of the reading, because trusting the author to be competent is (at least to me) an important part of staying immersed. And, thusly let down by Sanderson, my mind moves onto the other things that can be seen as flaws.
That being said, I don't feel disinterested: He has several good qualities as a writer. But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either. In the words of Francis Bacon, his books are to be "swallowed", not "read wholly, and with diligence and attention".
If you're cringing at it, I think you must be getting more from it than I am. The only thing I get out of it is the surface level pun, so I feel the same way as with pretty much all of his other puns: slightly baffled as to why they're included. With this one (though not most others), it feels like there might be a second level that English/Literature majors might get around etymology, but if so, I miss it entirely.
Sanderson also clearly gets many orders of magnitude more out of "word shape" than I do, so he might just really like puns. I've also never translated that quote to any of the various forms of sigals Sanderson defines in the series; if you do so, it might well be breathtakingly beautiful.
> But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either.
Forty years later Star Wars hasn't exactly fallen out of favor. Ignore the stilted dialog...it has a "robot" which is really obviously just a trashcan. Mark Twain's books contain a lot of colloquial dialog which is very much not "soaring prose", and they remain popular a century later. Which is not to say that I think Sanderson will be a hot read in eighty years, but I doubt Jordan or Martin will either. While the average library system presumably has a copy of The Dispossessed at one of its branches, the average branch has zero copies IME.
All of which is totally tangential, I just couldn't let it go (and I tried).
Being occupied with word shapes and word plays is fine! You and several other replies to that post focused on the word-play part of it, as if that was what I was reacting to, and I understand that, since I didn't really give you a lot more to work with. What I tried to bring attention to, however, was the way in which sentences like that break immersion. To me, a sentence like this takes me away from the fantasy world that I have so far been presented, and into some kind of (sorry I keep using this example, but it's really how I feel about it) Marvel movie where our heroes are engaged in friendly banter, or to some tumblr fanfic. That could of course be a problem with what I am expecting going into his universe, but I believe it is more of a problem of Sanderson not taking the time to properly refine his ideas before committing them to paper. Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing. That doesn't excuse it for me, though.
I am not looking for soaring prose - Mark Twain is great partly because of his ability to maintain the illusion of a rustic backwater society and the people within it. Star Wars is similar: When they stay within the expectations set up by their own universe, it's great! Trashcan robots are part of this! But as we have seen, whenever the dialogue takes you out of the universe and reminds you this is an illusion, fans do react ("I don't like sand...").
I also recognize that this has evolved way beyond where it started and this interaction on HN has influenced my thoughts about this. So I won't pretend what I'm saying now is 'what I had in mind from the beginning'.
You mean "breaking the fourth wall" a la Deadpool? He at least skirts that line in some places (e.g. Wit/Hoid/etc.). I'd probably class those parts similarly to Shallan's puns: Moderately annoying but tolerable due to rarity.
Or maybe some super-set incorporating both the flat word play and "breaking the fourth wall" all with other willful discarding of immersion? I can't think of anyone else who goes as deep and long into fantasy as he does, and then occasionally casually discards immersion simply to wink at the reader or make a (weak) joke or whatever.
I'm not a fan of this either, though it doesn't happen often so I find it tolerable. That very rarity, though, particularly in combination with the breaks in immersion always seeming gratuitous, does make it feel like an unforced error on his part. If someone's not sold on the 1000 other pages, adding less than five pages of immersion discarding humor seems unlikely to sufficiently sweeten the deal.
> Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing.
I assume his prolificacy hurts the quality of his prose (though that's very much a pass/fail sort of thing for me; he passes, so his prolificacy is a pure win for me), but what I'm talking about (and maybe you are as well) seems more like what I'll describe as "Get an [expletive] editor." In some ways he seems particularly egregious, as I don't know if even one percent of his content feels like it needs to be excised, and what does feels like it could go for free.
Edit: Reading your sibling comment, I'm probably off-base with the above.
> I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.
The dialog generally "feels" reasonable to me, but that's obviously something where tastes strongly vary. One note. Looking at:
> No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?
I, at least, don't know anyone who talks like that. Which is not to say it's good, just that describing it as "hip" does seem quite curmudgeonly :)
I thought it fit the character. I'm not really fond of shallans parts of the story, although I do think they are getting better, but dialogue like that was not out of place. If I recall correctly she has quite a bit of internal worrying and external commentary about how she constantly talks like that, and views it as a negative near the beginning of the books
After many years with more serious read I got back to fantasy in September by starting with Wheel of Time, then all of Cosmere books where I finished Oathbringer just weeks ago with some 10 first Discworld books in between. Sanderson isn't perfect, but his writing improved immensely with each new book. I wouldn't really recommend anything other than Stormlight Archive and might be Mistborn era 2 unless person want to be very Cosmere-aware though.
Still his problem with Shallan is pretty much the same as he had with Mat in first of his WoT books and basically with every other witty character in every of his earliest books. He just wasn't good enough for writing some types of characters, but still tried to include them regardless. I think everyone will agree that he actually become better at this since most of people I talked with enjoy Hoid in SA.
I don't try to justify it, but I think it's not that easy to fix character like Shallan since her character was well defined in first book released in 2010. I guess what we can see in Oathbringer it's attempt to do that although not very good one.
Thanks for the input - though I feel like Shallan is just symptomatic of a larger problem, I could also be wrong and I will give him the benefit of the doubt and keep reading SA.
I would certainly recommend finishing SA since I personally got as much of enjoyment out of it as I only had from ASoIaF. Also I would recommend it even more if you're on first book or not yet get to Shallan's back story in second since a lot of things will make more sense once you know it.
I would want to answer more, but I really want to avoid spoilers. Though I absolutely love her backstory and character development even if I really dislike writing of her in first book.
Now that you point it out, I definitely remember the quippy dialogue from Oathbringer. You should give the original Mistborn trilogy a go or the Reckoners series.
One of the reasons he's my favorite author is that he 1) pumps out solid books almost yearly and 2) his series are very different even though they're all fantasy.
I have heard this sentiment before, and unfortunately I am not convinced that the obnoxiousness of this character was intentional rather than accidental. I don't have much to back this up: basically my hypothesis is that Sanderson is trying to pander to a specific audience, to whom the witty banter he is attempting is appealing, and genuinely attempting to make Shallan 'cool' fits with this hypothesis. Furthermore, as others have also mentioned here, his other attempts at similarly witty characters have also been flawed, so there's that.
Did you get through the second book yet? I pretty much hated the first half of book one when shallan showed up due to way she spoke and acted, but the second book goes into much more detail about her baggage. Other characters also have in universe reactions to shallan that are smiliar to yours
I did read the second one, in fact one of the most jarring passages I found (see sibling comment above) is from this book, so I don't think learning about her backstory solved this issue for me.. But I see you and several others have made this same point so maybe I'm being curmudgeonly.
I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.
Absolutely. I've found I have a really hard time with how he writes action as well. I always feel as though he's describing someone playing a video game.
I recently picked up the Way of Kings but found the way he described the action/fantastical elements really jarring. It was like he felt he needed to spell it out rather than let the reader discover it organically. I've been told I need to struggle through though as it's supposedly a great story.
Might I guess that you are avid gamer or was one before? Since I had exactly same feeling when I read Mistborn and didn't find agreement on it with some people who are far more into books rather than games. Though I didn't have same problem with any other books probably because they have less action scenes.
All his magic systems have well defined mechanics and strict rules behind them so it's kind a expected and I feel like somebody who used to play a lot of games see through it more easily. Whatever it's good or bad depend on your own preferences in fantasy.
Personally I see this as a good thing since opposite would be ever repeating contrived coincidence of just-one-another arcane trick rediscovery. Probably these limits on what magic can or cannot do is one of things that make him improve his writing.
No, but once he start to introduce some "magic" mechanics he literally describe it in details: how exactly it's works and looks like as if he was describing politicking. Also I took "magic" into quotes since in Cosmere books for the reader (!) it's always more like set of additional physics-like laws of world mechanics rather than some mystery.
This is of course a matter of taste, but I really dislike this approach to magic/alchemy that Sanderson has. He's explained it before in an illuminating article [1] about his classification of magic systems in "Soft" (less explained, more arbitrary) vs "Hard" (more logical, there are clear/mechanical rules), and how he prefers the latter. I respect this, but I dislike it. To me, magic isn't rational or logical, and overexplanation ruins it. I prefer Tolkien's subtle approach that magic is unexplained, part of the song that made the world -- and in fact, to some of his characters "magic" is a puzzling word.
"Like a videogame" is an apt description of Sanderson's approach, and not my thing. Even Jack Vance's magic system of memorizing spells, used in his Dying Earth stories and said to have inspired the Dungeons & Dragons RPG system, is more mysterious and mystical than Sanderson's. Which is the way it should be!
It doesn't really work that way in practice, though. Not in Tolkien or in other good fantasy works.
Good "soft" magic is mysterious and often unreliable. It sometimes comes with a price. Main characters often do not understand it and cannot use it, or they misuse it to terrifying or hilarious results (e.g. Cugel in The Eyes of the Overworld).
The supernatural must be unknowable, otherwise it simply turns into the natural.
As you posted yourself it's matter of taste, but I for instance simply can't stand another "Gandalf come and save the day" situation because everyone except very good authors heavily abuse such tropes.
I perfectly fine with this kind of stuff in something like Discworld because of nature of these books and how I read them, but for epic fantasy with more or less serious themes I expect events to have logic behind them. Sanderson's books still have mysteries, but they just served by the ways other than generic "magic". So there is plenty of things to make theories about during and after reading.
Yes, of course, it's a matter of taste. I can't argue beyond "I like reading this and dislike reading that".
Ultimately, to me, literary fiction is NOT like programming, and it's not as easy to explain what works and what doesn't. Mystery and ambiguity are bad things in code but good in literature.
Which brings me full circle to why I dislike Sanderson's approach :)
Yeah, getting too far into the weeds is a quick way to make someone feel like they're reading a D&D rule book, especially if many pages are spent explaining rules that ultimately have no effect on the story.
At worst it turns your exciting adventure novel into a textbook for arcane effects practitioners.
But by Sanderson's First Law, if it were in an appendix he wouldn't be able to use consequences of the rules in the story. Imagine I Robot if the laws of robotics were an optional appendix (although not quite that extreme).
FWIW, I didn't find it over-explained, but I tend towards systems naturally.
He does tack on an appendix, which adds in even more details. I personally like it, but I suppose I was also the kind of kid growing up who would be okay reading D&D rulebooks. :)
Or just stuff the rules in a fun footnotes when necessary. I've always been a fan of that technique personally, although I understand it is generally discouraged.
I think that example is kind of right about Shallan, but I can't think of similar analogues in any of his other books. Though I don't really care for the newer steampunk mistborn trilogy.
Actually I thought most of the standalone short stories in the cosmere book itself were pretty great.
Reading his books, I feel like I'm in some kind of Marvel universe, complete with quippy dialogue and 'coolness' that to me gives a stink of 'commercialism' that I can't get past.
In the Stormlight Archive, Shallan is the best example of this: Her dialogue is so forcedly hip and witty that cringes abound whenever I read it. To me, it ruins the whole atmosphere and I feel like I'm in a plastic universe, rather than a living breathing one.
His worldbuilding is great, but his worlds are devoid of authenticity IMO.