It seems inevitable that any time I finish a fantasy series I go into Philosophical Fantasy Reader mode, whereby I try understand my strange love of and hatred for the genre, and even worse, try to reconcile the series I love with the series I just read and the series I love with the series I think I should love. For some reason, I find it very hard to read three or more books by the same author in the same world and then just talk about that series. I always have to speak of Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind and whoever else. So here we go.

I've read lots of fantasy series. Serieses. Serieseses. That is an awkward plural. Whatever. Too many, most likely. Through it all, the two series that I love the most, the two that have brought my life to a grinding halt while I turned page after page well into the hours when I should have been asleep, are Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth. The part of this that gives me trouble, though, is that, throughout all the series that I've read, the two that have pissed me off most, that have made me fire up the web browser, find a fan site, grip the keyboard irately, and pound my hatred out on keys, are Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth.

Now, there are plenty of caveats and qualifications. I certainly found it within myself to hate on George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones to some extent, and I do adore Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. But nothing, nothing, makes me want to tear a book in half like reading Jordan and Goodkind, and no characters have made me care about their fates as much as the ones crafted by those two authors. Perhaps I love those series because they're fucking enormous, encompassing literally along the lines of 8,000 pages each. Perhaps it's like family and friends; you enjoy the company of them most of all people because you know them best, but holy fucking shit can they annoy the hell out of you with minimal effort - also because you know them best.

Still, I keep coming back to my knowledge that Jordan and Goodkind are so heavily, horribly flawed at times. Jordan tells the same dumb joke five times a fucking book, and Goodkind pens twenty page Objectivist monologues. Jordan's female characters are horrible bitches almost to a woman, and Goodkind bludgeons you over the head with rape and violence long past when it was established who the bad guys were. Jordan creates characters that you love, and then neglects them while he writes books about new ones you don't give a shit about. Goodkind creates characters that you love, and then neglects them while he writes books about new ones you don't give a shit about. But goddamn if I don't love to read their deeply, irrevocably flawed books.


Which brings me to Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, which I just finished. It's composed of three books, each with a definite beginning and end, though they all tie into the series as a whole. Sanderson is something of an up and coming author in the fantasy field, and is rather prolific. Additionally, there's a pretty direct connection to the whole Jordan / Goodkind discussion, as he was hired as the man to finish penning Jordan's last three Wheel of Time books. I read Elantris, his debut, before Mistborn, and it was pretty decent. Not amazing, but solid. Mistborn is an improvement in virtually all regards - plot, characters, world building, prose.

The series' magic system is of particular interest. If there's no such term as "hard fantasy", ala hard scifi (or in other words, science fiction with good, hard science to back it up), these books merit the creation of it. Allomancy - and feruchemy, and hemulurgy - the book's magic systems, are creative and imaginative and have rules. They require the user to ingest and then "burn" metals, with the metal burned corresponding to the power that it confers. Each base metal has an alloy that also burns - e.g. iron and steel - each pair has a push and pull - in the case of iron and steel, literally, as one lets the user push metal and the other lets her pull it - and so on. Even early on in the series, when you - and the characters - don't know what all the rules are, things still behave by them. Everything makes sense eventually, and it always feels like Sanderson knew the rules all along (I'm sure he did), he didn't just paint himself into a corner and then find a way out. This stands in stark contrast to Goodkind's magic system, which is, simply expressed, "Richard has awesome magic and can do absolutely whatever the fuck he wants whenever the fuck he needs to, which will conveniently let me work my way out of any plot corners I paint myself into."

He also defies fantasy convention in a number of other ways. The world of Mistborn is a dystopian place, the skies perpetually clouded by ash from the world's volcanoes, with flakes of ash steadily falling day and night. Plants are brown, the night dominated by fearful mists, the bulk of the population enslaved, and the ruler of the kingdom a brutal dictator who is immortal and all but invincible. The main character is a female, and she actually grows stronger than her male mentor / competition, who has been doing this for longer than her, which is something of a reversal of the situations found in Jordan and Goodkind, wherein a hapless male finds he is born with incredible power and quickly outstrips the women around him who have been doing this shit for their entire fucking lives (see: Jordan, Rand & Aes Sedai; Goodkind, Richard & Aes Sedai whatever the fuck he calls his Aes Sedai).

The plot is something of a take on your standard fantasy, "band of ragtag adventurers thrown together by fate must defeat an ancient and mysterious evil force bent on destroying the world for no real reason." Fuck me am I ever sick of typing that phrase out. Mistborn follows it loosely (sigh), but does have the nuts to kill off some characters and to throw a few twists in there. I'd probably put plot down as the weak point, but it isn't bad.

The characters are lovable. The romance is believable and not ridiculously drawn out and might give you a few warm fuzzies (but not too many). The artwork on the covers (paper backs, anyway) is not horrible and insulting to my sensibilities. The world is solid, the impacts of the magic system broad and deep, the slang surrounding it perfectly picked. The pacing is solid, the action well written.

And this is my issue. I feel like, critically, Mistborn is a better series than The Wheel of Time or The Sword of Truth. Its magic is far more creative and unique, it takes bigger risks, is more unconventional, dares to kill main characters, begins, finishes, and ends, and has bad guys that aren't simply evil incarnate and female characters that are likable and not Objectivist lecturers. Yet I still never really cared like I did while while reading WoT or SoT. I only stayed up late reading the books at the very end of the series, and then not very late. It never put my life on hold. I liked the characters, but when some of them - even central ones - died, I went, "huh," and then I kept reading, with barely a pause. When I finished Wot and SoT, I scoured the internet for fan sites and interviews, I bought all the dumb books that were offshoots and blatant money grabs. I wanted more. Badly. When I finished the last book of Mistborn, I put it down, rolled over, and went to sleep. I was done with the characters and the world.

I suppose you can take that as my review. Intellectually, I can say to you that Mistborn was creative, unconventional, and well put together. The characters were likable, the world building solid and intriguing, and the plot decent enough. As far as actual enjoyment goes, well, don't expect it to mandate that you put off the rest of your life while you stay up late reading.