The Problem with Brandon Sanderson (Today)

 I feel like I need to qualify what I am about to say by first stating that I am, largely, a fan of Brandon Sanderson. I have the utmost respect for him for having stepped into The Wheel of Time and finishing it as well as anyone could have following the death of Robert Jordan. I think some of Sanderson's work, The Mistborn Trilogy(the rest of the saga is fine, but not up to snuff) and The Stormlight Archive(up to a certain point), are exceptional examples of what modern fantasy can be.

What I take issue with is the attention that he lends to smaller projects, still largely taking place within his grand "Cosmere" but doing not much to expand and explore that universe. And as such, his magnum opus, The Stormlight Archive, has suffered from his diversity of attention. The care and effort that were so very evident in The Way of Kings though Oathbringer, in the first three Mistborn books, is almost entirely gone.  The heart just simply isn't in the work.

I do not think that that is because Sanderson is running out steam but rather because he is using his furnace and boiler to try and run too many engines. His diversification of his writing, his exploration of smaller, unimportant pockets of his creation make his "great" works suffer as a result. The Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth are some of the novels I have read which are most in need of an editor not just reining in an author but getting them back on track. The needless meanderings, the half-baked character arcs, the lack of payoff when it was promised to us. Other than Game of Thrones (the television series, not the books) I don't know that I have ever experienced such lack of resolution when first shown such promise. It is like he is saving all of the really good stuff for the second set of five books in the Archive but forgot that he needs to make sure that the readers are still along for the ride with him.

And here, I come back to my issue again. If he had given all of The Stormlight Archive the attention it was due, instead of pumping out book after book in order to keep his own press afloat, then we would have gotten something on the same plane as The Wheel of Time or The Lord of the Rings. It seemed he was poised to take up that mantle. But now, I'm not sure that mantle is his to claim anymore and I don't know that I will continue to read his works. 

If he can't keep the promises he makes to us readers, if the team he has around him doesn't have the backbone to call him out when the work is sub-par, to demand more of him in a single a work and not in a mountain of it, then the quality of the books will continue to decline and, despite the sales numbers I am sure will accompany each book's release, we the reader will end up with a shadow of what could have been. An unfulfilled oath, if you will, between author and audience. 

And the genre will be the poorer for it.

JK