Pocket Book Reviews - The Way of Kings

</a>

ALL ABOARD THE ANCIENT PROPHECY TRAIN! toot toot

I've said this about Brandon Sanderson before, and I'll say it again: Brandon Sanderson is a technically adept writing machine without a soul. Imagine if you were to create the exact inverse of a Kurt Vonnegut or a Hunter S. Thompson.

Every chapter, every book, is crisply orchestrated and plotted - no plot point will go un-resolved. Each scene clearly establishes the stakes, produces a conflict with a well-understood question ("Will Kaladin survive the slave pits?"), and resolves that question with a "Yes", "Yes, and", "No, but", or "No". Every Brandon Sanderson book feels like a clockwork-precise book written by a guy who's read every single book ever written on correct story construction. Which it is - Brandon holds a master's degree in creative writing.

What's the story ABOUT, though? What does Brandon Sanderson believe in? What does he like? Who is he? Who knows! Standard Fantasy Tropes! Ancient prophecies, kings, sacrifice, sword-fightin', the standard biz. What he's about is thinking about unusual magic systems ("What if magic was COLOR", "What if magic was GRAVITY" ), laying out extremely specific rules for those magical systems, and then exhausting every possible clever and unexpected utility and societal implication of those magic systems. You know, like in Avatar: The Last Airbender where the Earthbenders' capital had an earth-powered mass-transit system, because of course they'd have thought of that.

And that's fun. So I'm on board. toot toot.

The original site didn't record this post's date; this one is approximate.