Reading Railroad

With so many projects going on in my life, I’m finding it increasingly helpful to make lists and schedules, even if I don’t strictly stick to them.  One of those areas, oddly enough, was reading.  I’ve started to feel like my approach to reading was getting scattered.  I have a lot of half-finished books that I really should wrap up, and I kept thrashing around for new book ideas without any sort of plan.

So I took an hour the other day to dig through several book recommendation lists and create a list of about 20 novels that I’m going to try to read this year.  Since many of those are the first books in series, that could end up being a lot more than 20 books if all goes well.  So I’ve got my reading list lined up, and my new rule is that for every new book I read, I’m going to finish up one of those half-read ones.

Anyway, if you care for a few recommendations, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

• Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold — I was really excited to finally read a new book in the Vorkosigan universe, although it was a bit disappointing that Ivan, not Miles, is center-stage in this one.  It’s still a pretty entertaining read that actually comes in the timeline before Cryoburn (which was the previous book released in the series).
• Devil’s Lair by David Wisehart — An interesting revisit of Dante’s Inferno as a group of Dante’s contemporaries journey to Hell to recover the Holy Grail.
• Spirit’s End by Rachel Aaron — A solid end to the Eli Monpress series.  I highly recommend these books: the characters are quite engaging and the fantasy world is definitely different than the norm.
• Red Country by Joe Abercrombie — The latest book in his First Law universe, Red Country is more of a Western than anything else.  It’s still pretty brutal, but actually not as dark as his previous books.  It’s also not as good, in my opinion, but I still enjoyed reading it.
• Prince/King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence — Now talk about dark, here you have a series where the main character is as anti-hero as you get.  He’s a prince-turned-assassin who travels with murderers and is hell-bent on revenge.  And yet, he’s a guy you end up rooting for, because there is something about him that is redeemable.  And as an added bonus, the fantasy series takes place in a far-future earth, so there’s a bit of post-apocalyptic vibe going on.
• The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks — I love Weeks’ stuff, and this second book in his color-magic series picks up steam from the first.  It’s still a weird magic system and world, but I’m kind of on board with the concept.  The prison escape sequences were my favorite.

As always, I’m up for more recommendations from you guys!

Guest Post: Professor Beej’s Birthright

Some of you probably know MMO/geek blogger Professor Beej. He’s a good friend of Bio Break, and when he asked to do a guest post about his upcoming novel, Birthright.  Beej is attempting to self-publish using Kickstarter to fund it, and he’s hoping you can help him out.

When World of Warcraft was first being developed, I didn’t care one iota about Blizzard’s soon-to-be megatitle. I was content with Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Star Wars Galaxies.

In fact, I was a little irked when I read about this new and revolutionary technology Blizzard was going to be using for WoW’s dungeon content. It was called “instancing,” and for an old-school, open-worlder like me, it sounded like blasphemy.

Why did every group need its own private copy of a dungeon? Bah! Bah, I said! Sure, you were locked away from kill-stealers and other griefers, but at what cost?

WoW launched in 2004, and instances were a major hit. People loved not waiting on spawns or worrying about griefers. No more camping lines and social etiquette; no more post-midnight alarms from your guild leader telling you that Korfok the Unintelligible had respawned.

Outside of quality-of-life changes like cross-server groups, party-size limits, and automatic dungeon finders, instancing has been pretty consistent across MMOs for the better part of a decade. Anyone familiar with modern MMOs should be familiar with the technology.
So when I started worldbuilding the Technomage Archive (my upcoming trilogy, which begins with the novel Birthright), I took the old adage to “write what you know” and ran with it. What I know are MMOs, and I wanted my novels to somehow represent my fourteen years of experience with online gaming and communities.

Which means that instancing could–and should–make an appearance.

Luckily, Birthright is hybrid-genre SF/F–think Ender’s Game meets The Lord of the Rings. That in itself presents more than a few worldbuilding challenges; however, it also opens up just as many possibilities. As an author, I’m not limited to a single genre’s narrative conventions anymore.

Since The Technomage Archive is a fantasy series that wears the shiny, technological veneer of science-fiction, there is no magic. Everything is based on technology or science in some way, shape, or form.

Instances, then, are pocket universes that fall within the control of the titular Technomage Archive. People can move between Instances through various portals that exist at fixed points in the world, and part of the conflict in Birthright arises from the loss of control of these Instances.

Before, the technomages could control the growth and evolution of the Instances, these synthetic universes. They could be as large as a planet or galaxy, or as small as a library. The Archive used them for such mundane tasks as adding wings onto school campuses, or for more specialized tasks like sequestering and isolating a prison of dangerous criminals.

Now, though, new universes are spontaneously and naturally being created, which should be impossible. Even the controlled, synthetic universes aren’t obeying the laws and rules built into them.

And unlike Star Trek and Star Wars-style, galactic-level conflict, this fundamental breaking down of the laws of physics is literally happening right on top of everyone.

They just don’t know it.

While Instances in MMOs are limited by the technology and gameplay mechanics of the games themselves, the idea behind the technology is what intrigued me. Creating multiple versions of the same reality has so much storytelling potential, I couldn’t resist exploring it.
I mean, in WoW, each expansion has its own storyline where certain NPCs kill the big bads, with the “merry band of adventurers” helping. Each Instance in the game is just as valid as any other. We’re all the hero. We all win.

But in Birthright, that isn’t the case. When these gameplay mechanics are excluded, there isn’t a single common ending for all realities. There are any number of realities stacked on top of one another, some created and some natural, and throughout the Technomage Archive, they’re all coming to a head.

I want to explore the real-world implications (if you’ll forgive me the use of that term) of this kind of God-playing–not just the creation artificial intelligence like in I, Robot or virtual reality like in Neuromancer, but full-on synthetic universes made of real-as-you-and-me organic matter. I want to explore the question that when the very foundation of your reality is both real and created, is there even a distinction anymore?

And if I hadn’t been an MMO gamer for the last fourteen years, I never would have had the chance.

Summer reading recommendations

Wow, I’ve really been slacking in sharing some of the books I’ve read during this past year.  Um… sorry?  It’s always on my to do list, because we’re all geeks here, and I like to evangelize a few of the titles that have delighted me.

So if you’re looking for a good summer read, here are a few I’ve read recently that get my thumbs-up of approval!

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

This is a weird hybrid of a book.  It’s part contemporary fantasy, part X-Files, part The Secret World, and part Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It starts out with a woman suffering from total amnesia who finds a letter she wrote to herself before whatever happened happened.  I really don’t want to spoil much, except to say that she finds herself plunged into a secret organization in London that takes care of the many supernatural threats and situations that pop up on a regular basis.  It’s interesting and quite funny at times, and I really hope there’s a sequel.

First Shift — Legacy by Hugh Howey

If you’ve read all of the five Wool novels (and you really, really should), it’s time to head back to the world of the Silo with the first of a prequel series that show how things got that way.  It’s interesting to me how Howey reveals a lot while still creating mystery and surprises all over the place.  Please do not read it if you haven’t read the other Wools first, though.

Zero Sight and Zero Sum by B. Justin Shier

Here’s an out-of-the-blue surprise for me.  Shier is an actual medical surgeon who decided to write the kind of contemporary fantasy novel he wanted to read, and actually created a pretty darn good series.  It’s set slightly into the future where the world’s started going downhill, and where a teen discovers that he has actual magical powers.  He’s then recruited by a magic school and makes best friends with a vampire and…

Okay, it sounds totally like a ripoff of Twilight and Harry Potter, with some X-Men thrown in.  It sounds like that.  But it isn’t.  I normally hate books with vampires as main characters, but this one does such a good job portraying how icky and freaky vampires really would be that I was captivated by it.  It’s not a perfect series, but it definitely has a lot of interesting ideas and has me wanting the third book in a bad way.

The Anathema by Zachary Rawlins

Rawlins continues his Central series with this second book, and it’s even better than the first.  The story of a special school outside of our normal universe that trains super-powered individuals who go on to join one of many special cabals in the real world has a hard edge that I haven’t seen in other “magic school” books.  Probably the most unsettling thing is that you don’t know just how good or bad any of the characters are, as everyone is practically a double-agent of some kind, and the good guys are capable of some pretty awful things.  But it’s definitely right up there in story and characters, from the vampire whose skin turns to hard ceramic forever when she’s injured to a scary lady who can move in and out of shadows but loses more of her memories with each use.

When I was done with this book, I picked up another Rawlins title, Paranoid Magical Thinking.  It’s not quite the same caliber, but it’s worth a read.  PMT is about a pair of fugitives who find themselves in the city at the end of the world, a place that’s really off in so many ways and is inescapable.

Percepliquis by Michael J. Sullivan

The final book of Sullivan’s fantasy series of two thieves who get caught up in events way over their head.  It’s a good ride and one of those rare modern fantasy series that isn’t “mean,” but has characters you like, actions you respect, and fight scenes without tons of gore.  The whole series is worth a read.

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Moving from fantasy, here’s a rip-roaring scifi opera adventure about a hard-boiled detective and a gung-ho hero who have to unravel a stunning plot set in the inner solar system.  It’s the start of a series and wonderfully done.

Woolgathering

One of the things that I absolutely love about the Kindle is that it’s taking me back to the era of my childhood — and cheap books.  Books got pretty expensive for a while there, and a few years ago I was dumping up to $30 per book store visit for two or three novels — or just one if it was a hot new hardcover.  But back when I was young, I used to haunt secondhand bookstores and library outlets where I could pick up a stack of stories with money leftover in my allowance for a malt.  No, wait, that was a different generation.  A Go-Bot, perhaps.

My theory back then — as it is now — is that no matter how good a book looks or how highly acclaimed it is, there’s still a good chance it won’t do the trick for you, so why not pile the odds in your favor with a bunch of books instead of one or two?  In short, when I’m paying $15 for a book, I’m far less likely to take risks with unknown qualities, but if they’re free or just a few bucks, then sure, fill my bag up!

That’s what the Kindle store is to me now.  Sure, I still pick up the odd hot new release, but I’m finding that when I’m out shopping, I’m frequently pilfering the freebies and discounts for surprisingly good deals.  That’s what brought me to Wool, a rising star in the Amazon Kindle charts and only $0.99 to boot.  Why not take a chance, especially with all the five-star ratings going on?

Glad I did, too, because it turns out that Wool is not only a gripping little post-apocalyptic tale, but the first of a series.  Author Hugh Howey apparently uploaded Wool, a short novella, to the Kindle store without great expectations, but when it started to outperform all his other works, he decided to make this into a multi-part series, each with a dollar-priced novella that would pick up the story from where it left off, but from a different character’s point of view — and he wrote several of them during last year’s NaNoWriMo challenge.  Wool 4 just came out not too long ago, and I know he’s already half-finished with Wool 5, which I think will be the last of the series.

Wool works because Howey gives us a radically different type of post-apocalyptic tale and couples that with really gripping revelations, mysteries, and plot twists — all within a quick read (each Wool novella took me between one and two hours to read).  It’s set in the Silo, where apparently the last of humanity has lived for quite some time, unable to go out into the toxic world above, and under severe penalty of even talking about the outside.  It’s fascinating to see how Howey sets up the Silo to be a functioning community without the typical post-apocalyptic references we’re used to seeing.  For instance, we have no idea what happened on the outside, how long it’s been since the Silo was founded, or why there’s an “uprising” every few generations among the community.   Because we’re reading the POV of characters who are born and raised completely within this environment and know no other life, we as readers are outsiders with privileged information that have to struggle to understand where the characters are coming from (which is a good thing).  For instance, the characters only know of most animals because of pictures in children’s books, but most think they’re just fairy tales drawn up by artists instead of the reality we do know.

The change of character POV between installments is jarring, but there certainly is a central plot line going on, and eventually a main protagonist bubbles up to the center of the rising events.  I’m really not into spoilers, but I like how this character — and all the others — are certainly flawed even while trying their best to do the right thing.  The shifts in POV, like they do in George RR Martin’s books, help us to understand motives and aspects of these characters that weren’t easily understandable before.

Anyway, I just wanted to recommend them to you, because the Wool books are great, cheap, and a little bit different:

• Wool
• Wool 2: Proper Gauge
• Wool 3: Casting Off
• Wool 4: The Unraveling

Book Report: A to Z in communicable diseases

I haven’t done a “what I’ve been reading” post for a very long time, and there are a few book recommendations I’d like to pass along.  Cool?  Cool.

The first is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, a novel that’s both been received with wide acclaim AND has quite a bit to do with us MMO players.  The conceit is that it’s a dystopian future where the world has gone to pot and most everyone now lives in an online world called OASIS.  OASIS consists of many themed planets (including MMO conversions like Azeroth) that function as learning environments, homes, businesses, and games.  One day the creator of OASIS dies and leaves behind a contest to find three hidden keys and gates — the person who does so will inherit OASIS’s parent company and billions of dollars.

The interesting catch to this contest is that the creator was obsessed with his childhood in the 80s, and left behind an 80s-themed “almanac” as a clue.  Because of this, contest participants have become obsessed with 80s culture and brought about an 80s revival in the 2040s.

What follows is an entertaining romp through cyberspace, MMOs, and plenty of references to 80s movies, TV shows, video games, and other pop culture lore.  Since it all takes place in this huge MMO, it’s not uncommon for people to be flying X-Wings, stomping around as MechaGodzilla, and diving into classic D&D dungeons while leveling up.

This is one of those books that I really hope gets made into a movie some day.  There’s a lot of affection for geek and 80s culture, and if you’re into these things you’ll be delighted with it.  My only nitpick is that sometimes the writing isn’t as smooth as it could’ve been — I often caught myself thinking, “This is exactly how I write” and I usually expect better from what I read.

I’ve also been doing a lot of diving into Kindle-only books, since many of them are cheap ($0.99 cheap) and sometimes surprisingly good.  One that I found and highly recommend is The Academy by Zachary Rawlins.  It’s best described as Hogwarts-meets-The Matrix, but it’s more than that.  It starts out with an average teenager who gets attacked by werewolves and wakes up in a special academy dedicated to training superpower-sensitive warriors and scientists.  The thing is that their powers come from being able to handle nanotechnology with inherent abilities, so it’s not so much magical as it is high-tech.

The Academy is extremely rough around the edges — it needs another pass by a good editor to catch typos and spacing errors, and the lead character isn’t engaging at all.  What does make this gripping, and it is, is how interesting this world is and how atypical everyone is in it.  At first glance, it’s setting the scene for the good guys (the Academy-trained Operatives) versus witches and werewolves and the like.  But the good guys aren’t so good and often are just one shade above pure evil, and it’s hard figuring out who’s trustworthy and who’s just using who.  Also, everyone is divided between houses and major factions, all of which are vying for new recruits from the Academy, which means that your friend today might be your enemy tomorrow.  Or your enemy now, except you just don’t know it.

It’s the first part of a series, and I think the second comes out in the spring, so I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

10 Best Books I Read In 2010

Before the old year is too, y’know, old, here’s a quick list of the best novels I read last year:

1. The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks — Dark and gritty fantasy about a pair of assassins that constantly surprised, entertained and even showed a thoughtful spiritual side.

2. The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson — I got into Sanderson big-time this year, and really appreciated his unique takes on magic and clever plotting that left several surprises to be revealed.

3. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombe — His writing is almost too brutal and crude for my taste, but this spin-off from his First Law trilogy was a gripping ride from start to end.

4. Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull — For a kid’s series involving fairies, Fablehaven was really well-written and imaginative, and even after five books I felt it ended too quickly.

5. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch — A really promising start to a series about a master thief who ends up fighting the world.  A bit slow at the beginning, but it picks up in a major way.

6. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi — Scalzi’s entire series is great, but this first book about future warfare using senior citizens was just plain fun.

7. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane — Slightly better than the great movie, the book is a whodunit that doesn’t really tell you the rules of the game.

8. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson — A very unique tale of immortal beings who are broken in a fundamental way, and yet left to live in a prison of their former glory.

9. The Warded Man by Peter Brett — Brett creates a world where mankind is constantly under siege by demons, and only with a rediscovered form of magic can they start to fight back.

10. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss — This wasn’t the first time I read TNOTW, but I’m finding myself drawn back to it on a regular basis.  Cannot wait for the sequel this year!

Step Right Up To The Front Of The Class — It’s Book Report Time!

It’s been a while — a long, long while — since I last stepped up to the front of the class for a book report, so I figure I should remedy that.  I haven’t been reading as voraciously as usual, and part of that reason is a general frustration for books that come recommended and yet bore me silly after the first couple dozen pages.

Completed:

• Best Served Cold – I’m a tentative Joe Abercrombie fan, because while I do love his writing, his imagination, and the gritty feel of his worlds, it’s almost too dark, depressing and cynical to love.  The First Law trilogy was excellent for the most part, but it ended abruptly and somewhat anticlimactically.  Best Served Cold is set in the same world, but it’s an off-shoot with a new character, an angry female warrior who is betrayed, left for dead, and embarks on an epic journey of revenge.  It’s wild to see how her vengeance both shapes the events of the world around her and how it brings more misery and suffering, but it kept me reading right up to the end.
• The Girl Who Played With Fire/The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Okay, for some reason these are insanely popular all around the world, and while I found them decent reads, I don’t see what the fuss is about.  The English translation feels a bit clunky, on top of a plot that is far from nail-biting — I guess I can be gracious and say that it is intriguing, but not to the point where I couldn’t put it down.  I haven’t felt the urge to read the third book yet, so… yeah.
• The Passage - Another huge best-seller, and one I should’ve been on board with.  An apocalypse caused by truly scary, near-unstoppable vampires?  Yeah, it’s a good setup.  And then the author just draaaaaags everything out far too long, gives us characters that aren’t that relatable, and ends on a limp note (it’s the first part of a series, apparently).  I liked a lot of the things in this novel, but a spiritual successor to The Stand this is not.

Unfinished:

• Finch – I’m probably going to finish this book, although it’s a little too dreary for my taste.  It’s basically a detective murder mystery set in a weird fantasy city where mushroom people have conquered the locals and are keeping them under an oppressive rule.
• Bright of the Sky – It was free on Kindle, always a plus, but after the cool opening chapters set in our future, it jumped into a fantasy world that I didn’t find too appealing.
• The Magic Thief - Hoping for a bit of the Harry Potter vibe here, but this author writes way too quick, stilted and dull to keep my interest.  Can’t believe it’s a series.
• Containment – Another free Kindle book that I never heard of, this is a mystery/thriller set on a Venusian colony in the future.  I’m not attached to the characters, but I kind of like the vision for it.
• The House of the Stag - Apparently this author is hot stuff, but I really couldn’t get into it at all.  Pass.
• The Lost Fleet: Dauntless – Horribly-written military scifi.  Characterizations were way off.
• Foul Moon – I know everyone just loves and loves the Dresden Files, but I’ve been slogging my way through his second book without seeing the fun.

Currently In Progress:

• The Way of the Kings – It was funny to see MMO Gamer Chick write about this, because I’m in the middle of reading it as well.  Brandon Sanderson has quickly risen to the level of “I’ll read anything — except Wheel of Time — that he writes, sight unseen.”  He’s just an easy read, and fulfills my cardinal rule of novel writing: Something interesting must happen in every chapter.  I can’t believe it’s only the first book of a series, but hey, more for me.  Sanderson comes up with yet another nifty magic system (this one to do with gems) that takes this outside of typical fantasy humdrum.

Battle for the Harry Potter Throne: Fablehaven vs. Tapestry

I may be a 34-year-old man, but I don’t mind getting childish now and then — especially when it comes to literature.  I’ve always loved and appreciated young adult novels, feeling that they’re somehow more free to be imaginative than some of the adult stuff out there.  As such, over the last month or so I’ve been digging into two YA fantasy series that have come highly recommended: Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven series (5 books in all) and Henry H. Neff’s Tapestry series (3 books so far).

With the absence of any more Harry Potter novels, it seems as though there’s this worldwide talent search to crown a new fantasy series as “the next Harry Potter”.  I guess that speaks to a void in some folks’ lives, although personally, I don’t see why there’s a desperate need for more Harry Potterness.  Both Fablehaven and The Tapestry are brought up as Harry Potter heirs, but that’s kind of a disservice to the authors.  I don’t think they wrote these books trying to out-Potter J.K. Rowling, but just to have fun in the field of fantasy, as many YA authors have done before and since.

Still, I can see why some people try to make the Potter connection, as they share themes (themes, I might add, that often pop up in YA fantasy).  There’s the young child (or children) from the regular world who discover that there’s a whole ‘nother world hidden around us — in the case of Fablehaven, it’s magical creatures hidden in preserves; in the case of the Tapestry, it’s the remnants of Old Magic that still course through pockets of the world.  The children come to a special place to learn about this fantastic world, and in so doing develop magical powers and special abilities of their own.  Then there’s a huge overarching enemy that threatens the safety of the whole world, and for some reason, only the kids are able to stop it.

But really, neither Fablehaven nor The Tapestry follow the Potter template, but instead choose to forge their own paths.  Fablehaven is more concerned with fantastic creatures from classic mythology — fairies, dragons, ogres, demons, etc. — while The Tapestry dabbles in dozens of fantasy tropes, from inner magic to cool gadgets (namely, the struggle between magic and technology, or nature and technology).  Only The Tapestry features a school for gifted kids like Harry Potter, although this school isn’t the focus of the series, and in the second book is abandoned for a good chunk.

I grew to love three things about Fablehaven.  The first is that Mull is pretty imaginative, and keeps coming up with cool new twists and locations and secrets to spill, tying all sorts of things together over the course of five books.  The second is that by having two main protagonists with two wildly different personalities and focuses — the girl has “light” magic and often is seen with fairies and other girly creatures, the boy has “shadow” magic and consorts with monsters — it markets itself to both genders fairly well.  The third is that Mull finishes each book with a series of discussion questions for parents to ask to their kids, often revolving around morality and tough choices.

I’m still trying to get a handle on The Tapestry.  As a story, it moves rapidly fast at points, throwing in gobs of new locations and events with little to no immediate follow-up.  You begin the books expecting it to be about a group of kids who get the Harry Potter schooling experience, but that’s quickly abandoned for larger happenings.  By the end of the second book, everything’s progressed so fast and far that I felt like it was the end of a seven-book series, and it gets really dark, really fast.

Both series have their darker moments, mind you, and don’t shy away from deaths and torture and hard questions.  But The Tapestry is actually a little frightening and gory — although I am starting to like it more than Fablehaven (the characters have more personality, for one thing), and am really interested to see where they go with the third installment.

Anyway, both series get a thumbs-up, and I think I’ll be moving on to read The Passage after this.

Reading the Rainbow

I haven’t done a reading-related post in a while, but rest assured, I am still devouring novels at a steady pace.  One of the areas where the Kindle continues to shine is being available to fill time when I’m feeding my daughter in the morning or at night (why do we say “in” the morning and “at” night instead of the other way around?).

Here’s a quick list of what I’ve read over the past couple months, and my thoughts on them:

• Fablehaven series (Brandon Mull) – This series has been called “the next Harry Potter”, a term that’s overused, a bit unfair and also a bit spot-on.  It at least showcases the imagination, adventure and fun with magical escapades that readers loved in Potter, and I’ve enjoyed each successive book more than the last.  Fablehaven revolves around secret preserves in the world that safeguard magical creatures, both good and bad, and a pair of siblings that get drawn into that world.  I found that these books strike a good balance between being accessible for younger readers while still fascinating for all ages.  So far there are five books in the series.
• Assassin’s Apprentice (Robin Hobb) – Read the first few chapters, got bored and drifted off.
• The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss) – A third read-through of one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels.  Cannot WAIT until next year’s sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear.  If you haven’t read this book, you absolutely must.
• Blockade Billy (Stephen King) – A new short story/novella about baseball… really, nothing that exciting.

Book Review: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

After reading the Mistborn series and now Warbreaker, I’ve grown a healthy measure of respect for the writing talents of Brandon Sanderson.  His novels might not be slam-bang-awesome from the very start, but they progressively get better and better the deeper you get into them.

I appreciate three things about his style.  The first is that, as a fantasy writer, Sanderson doesn’t settle into the tired tropes of familiar elements (wizards, elves, dwarves, Big Evil Sauron-Thing), but instead creates really unique yet accessible worlds with systems and new types of “magic” that aren’t always spelled out at the beginning of the books, but have to be learned as you go.

The second is that Sanderson plays against one’s expectations, and that makes the twists and discoveries in his stories delightful.  He really is pretty clever by getting you to unconsciously accept one thing that ends up being totally not what you’d expect by the end.  It says a lot about us as media consumers that we buy into these expectations so very easily, because we’re fed them over and over again by pretty much everyone.

The third is that he tackles concepts of religion through fantasy in surprisingly thoughtful ways.  A lot of scifi and fantasy writers forget that one of the greatest  reasons their genre exist is to give a new perspective on familiar real-world elements, topics and issues.  Religion in most fantasy novels is a character giving lip service to whatever deity they worship, and that’s about it.  In both Mistborn and Warbreaker, I saw Sanderson explore how religions might come to be, the nature of miracles and predestination, and the struggle with figuring out what is actually real and what is myth.  From a minister’s perspective, it’s intriguing to read that.

Anyway.  Warbreaker.  Excellent book that literally kept me up until 4:00am in the morning to finish the last 50 pages or so.  It’s a tale of two nations who are in a state of cold war with each other, until events start to throw things out of control.  You have a princess from the lesser nation who is shipped off to marry the “God King” of the greater nation as part of an old treaty, her sister (another princess) who goes to rescue her from this fate, various shadowy elements working in the city, and a pantheon of reborn gods who are locked away in a refuge for a nebulously-defined purpose.

Sanderson creates an interesting type of magic for Warbreaker that utilizes both colors and “Breaths” (everyone has one Breath, but they can be given and traded away) to do interesting things, from giving inanimate objects limited life to returning corpses from the dead as loyal zombies.

I’d have no problem recommending Warbreaker for a fantasy flavor that adds to the palette.  It’s also pretty cool that Sanderson has made Warbreaker available online for free, should anyone wish to read it that way.