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Blogocentric Formulations #832100 added October 29, 2014 at 9:42pm
Restrictions: None
Sanderson's Many Trilogies and Triumphs
 
PROMPT: Write about an author who you think is on the cutting edge of his or her genre.
Even though I'm not totally in love with all of his books, I think Brandon Sanderson is on the cutting edge of the fantasy genre. I've been listening to a lot of his Writing Excuses podcasts where he's talked about wanting to be known for in-depth worldbuilding and unique fantasy systems in his fantasy writing. I'm in the middle of reading my third book of his from three different series, and I've been really impressed by the detail and development he puts into each of his worlds.
| ASIN: 0385743564 |
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Amazon's Price: Price N/A
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Steelheart is the first book of his I've read and still my favorite. It's more science fiction than fantasy, and I freely admit that I'm a sucker for superhero stories. He found a way to come up with a world and individual powers that still felt fresh to me, despite being a huge fan of comics for most of my life. And the way he writes action and incorporates the use of superpowers into an action sequence is incredible. He wrote a short story called "Mitosis" to bridge the gap between Book 1 and Book 2... and Book 2 is due out at the beginning of next year. Even though it's technically a young adult series, this is the book that hooked me on his work.
| ASIN: 0765326353 |
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Amazon's Price: $ 22.70
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The Way of Kings is the second book of his I read, and the first installment of his signature series, The Stormlight Archive. I was less impressed with this work because it's really long (1,008 pages in hardcover!) and I think he got a little too enamored with his own worldbuilding. He's projecting this to be a ten-book series (the second was 1,088 pages, by the way), and he's just coming off finishing up another epic series (he was handpicked to finish The Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan's death), so I think he's a little more focused on laying the groundwork for the series and less focusing on a defined narrative for the first book. It's not that it's a bad book (the characters were compelling and the world was interesting), but I felt like I was reading a very, very, very long prologue rather than a complete book.
| ASIN: 076531178X |
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Amazon's Price: $ 26.99
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Mistborn: The Final Empire is a book I'm in the middle of reading, but I had to take a little break. Not for any fault of the book; I just reached a point where I needed to take a break from the fantasy genre. This was the fifteenth consecutive fantasy novel I'd read, and I hit a saturation point where I just couldn't read any more fantasy stories without taking a break and reading something in a different genre. So far the worldbuilding and magic system have been very good, and I'm excited to see how it ends.
Overall, I may not absolutely love every single thing Brandon Sanderson writes... but the one thing I can say is that so far none of his books have felt redundant or like retelling of other fantasy stories and tropes. I consider him on the cutting edge of the fantasy genre because - whatever he comes up with - it's so far always been something I haven't seen before.
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