Mistborn

Brandon Sanderson is a name in popular fantasy that much like Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind or Joe Abercrombie, is one that has had some ubiquity over the years and always showed up in bookstores in bulk... but for whatever reason, has hit a particular surge of popularity over the past couple years. Specifically with books like Mistborn that aren't exactly new. I tried to get into Sanderson's work a few years back via audiobooks, but never got very far into a single work due to lack of interest at the time.

I took it upon myself to give him a more earnest shot-- I mainly wanted to read Mistborn as a way to get a taste of modern fantasy written past the 1990s, which I admittedly don't read much of. As with anything, if this is the kind of fantasy you enjoy, don't let me hinder that, but here I go:

In a word, I found Mistborn mediocre. It kind of encapsulates a lot of the trends I've noticed in fantasy media over the past decade or two, in that it's a book far more concerned with a cool movie-like plot than it is with language, dialogue, thematic resonance or even having memorable characters (something it tries to have, but fails at). It's a book that puts much more emphasis on its worldbuilding and internal rules than it does on having a driving idea or theme that goes beyond typical fantasy fare (e.g.; having a cartoonishly classist tyrant villain). It's clumsily written from a stylistic point of view, and perhaps contains my least favorite tendencies within genre writing (or any fiction writing for that matter) in that it opts to over-explain everything and repeat itself to the reader as if they're a child that needs their hands held and won't understand anything being read, despite this particular novel's relative simplicity. If this were billed as a YA novel, I'd be a bit more forgiving of this, given the age-range of the intended audience, but this IS an adult fantasy novel, and it never once felt like reading one.

The two main players, Vin and Kelsier, have very base personalities that never go beyond their archetypal qualities, and Vin herself seems to only exist to take orders from the men in the story, instead of having much of her own agency. Though the heist-like plot of it all might sound entertaining at a glance, what the characters aim to accomplish with it felt sloppy from the get-go -- if thousands of years of rebellion couldn't overthrow an immortal god-like leader, why would a group of thieving semi-talented 'allomancers' and a self-admitted half-baked plan be able to, unless absolutely everything conveniently went right? Onto the allomancy itself, Sanderson has had a lot of praise heaped onto his magic systems, and while I can say that the idea on its own here is interesting (bodily alchemy/metallurgy) the way it's written, implemented and proliferated feels like experiencing a video game tutorial. A very rules-heavy system of magic that not only invokes RPGs and card-games, but also kind of misses the point of what magic is. I've always felt that magic was an archaic thing, ancient and hard to understand-- appealing and magnetic for obvious reasons, but dangerous and unpredictable, a force of nature that doesn't always bow to the whims of its user. Here it's used like buffs/powerups you'd encounter in a team-shooter or dungeon-crawler game, with a consistency and repetition that rids it of any potential danger or intrigue. Sanderson teaching fantasy novel writing also has me wince a bit, as if he's training the next generation of writers to adopt his rigid views of what fantasy can be (something I've noticed reading the articles on his website) and that something as unknowable as magic should have extensive rules and logic applied to it.

It's not deep book, and I don't necessarily need it to be (most Sword and Sorcery, pulp and epic fantasy isn't), but the lack of depth coupled with the half-baked premise, super-power-y magic and shallow characters made it feel like it was conjured by a teenage boy. It's fast-paced and easy to read, but it's not particularly well-written or noteworthy. I can't say I was as frustrated reading this as I was with Gardens of the Moon (which had a lot more promise as an adult fantasy novel, making its failure as one more... apparent), but it contains many of the same problems that I have with fantasy of this caliber. Mistborn's status as a 'gateway' fantasy novel is something I can understand, as I can its broad appeal, but I can only take this kind of banality in less lengthy doses. Sanderson being the kind of fantasy writer that insists on having each of his books be upwards up 1000 pages also tells me that much like Stephen King, is in dire need of a better editor.

It's not good.