The Middle-aged Teenager
Apr. 29th, 2013 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselSep-Nov 2012
The Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson - Gollancz, 2009
* * * * / * * * * / * *
My teenage years were, I think, quite unusual, in that they were the happiest of my life. I loved the freedom to do anything I wanted without the responsibility of jobs or the baggage of relationships. So much so that I sometimes consider my life since to be an ongoing experiment in arrested development. I know that the man-child is a common trope (especially in adverts - why do advertisers deliberately seek to alienate half their potential customers?), but I honestly think that I have taken it to a new level. I still do most of the things that I enjoyed doing when I was in my teens - playing games, reading fantasies and SF, composing music. The true marks of a mature adult - sophisticated tastes for fine wine and "literary" fiction, relationships that go beyond good friendship - I seem to have bypassed.
Occasionally, though, I discover something that makes me realise that I have moved on a little, and this trilogy is one. If I had read it as a teenager, the ideas in it would probably have had the same impact on me as Michael Moorcock's writing did (his Eternal Champion and Dancers at the End of Time series continue to influence my fantasy creations to this day). As an adult, I think the setting and the magical system are startlingly original, but now I notice the simplistic characterisation and the lumpen exploration of themes, and they spoil the fun. Try as I might, my teenage self isn't coming back.
Which is a pity, because the background subverts some of the traditions of epic fantasy in an interesting way. It is is set in the Final Empire, a land ruled for 1000 years by the evil Lord Ruler. He has turned the sky red and blighted the land with volcanoes that coat everything with dust and ash. The majority of people are skaa, serfs who slave under the nobility appointed by the Lord Ruler and who are overseen by the Steel Inquisitors, his fanatically loyal priesthood. Any hint of rebellion is crushed by the brutal and orc-like koloss. And at night, the Mist flows through the streets and people cower in their homes, fearing the mist-wraiths that devour anyone they capture.
Vin is a sixteen-year-old street urchin in the capital Luthadel, an orphan who was brought up and then betrayed by her brother Reen. She has found refuge with a gang who consider her to be a lucky talisman. But then she encounters a part-noble gentleman thief called Kelsier, who recognises that Vin, like him, is a Mist-born. These are Allomancers, people who can "burn" swallowed metals to perform eight different powers such as rioting emotions, attracting metals, strengthening the body or detecting other allomancers. The powers come in contrasting pairs specified by the metal and its alloy - thus iron pulls on other metals and steel pushes them away, allowing allomancers to fly through the air and perform other feats using coins. This makes Vin incredibly useful, for Kelsier has an insanely ambitious plan - to defeat the Lord Ruler and free the skaa.
Book 1 (The Final Empire) is essentially a heist movie in which Kelsier and his crew of Mistings (people who can use only one of the allomantic powers) work on a means of toppling the seemingly impregnable Lord Ruler, during which Vin learns to use her abilities. This is well done - the crew are memorably drawn (if one dimensional) and the plan they come up with is a plausible solution to an apparently impossible problem. It is perhaps inevitable that the ending should involve extensions of the rules of allomancy, but the wushu-style fights between allomancers are exciting.
The Well of Ascension is an effective sequel that follows on from the events of book one. Luthadel is beseiged by three armies, while Vin and her aristocratic lover Elend must search for the Well of Ascension, where the Lord Ruler originally acquired his powers. Interestingly, the Lord Ruler is a hero gone bad - he took the powers to defeat a vaguely-described enemy called the Deepness and refused to let go of them when he should have done. Inevitably, the rules of allomancy get expanded again and it becomes increasingly apparent that there is no actual logic to the powers that the metals confer - Sanderson simply invents new ones when he needs them to further the plot or create a good fight scene. Still, the story builds well, the triple threat to Luthadel is nicely handled, and the twist in the tale (although reminiscent of a certain mid-volume book from another series that is not fondly remembered) is at least dramatic.
Which makes it such a shame that things go completely doolally in book 3, The Hero of Ages. The main problem is that Sanderson feels it necessary to explain every single unusual aspect of his world, which requires a completely new form of magic that hasn't been mentioned in either of the previous books and some appropriated scientific ideas that feel utterly out of keeping with the fantasy background. Things are even worse on the character front. Vin is now so powerful that she can no longer carry the story and engages in god games while the narrative focuses on two of the minor characters, one of whom is going through an incredibly tedious loss of faith plot arc. The ending felt rushed and flat rather than transcendant, and I was left unconvinced and utterly unmoved.
To be fair, this is an early work and the flaws are those you would expect from an author who in all probability conceived this story when he was a teenager (the ad hoc-ery of the explanations certainly feels like some of my creations from that period). There are certainly enough original ideas here to justify sticking with Sanderson for a while yet, and if his characterisation improves (as it surely must with practice and maturity), his next sequence could appeal even to middle-aged teenagers like me.
The Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson - Gollancz, 2009
* * * * / * * * * / * *
My teenage years were, I think, quite unusual, in that they were the happiest of my life. I loved the freedom to do anything I wanted without the responsibility of jobs or the baggage of relationships. So much so that I sometimes consider my life since to be an ongoing experiment in arrested development. I know that the man-child is a common trope (especially in adverts - why do advertisers deliberately seek to alienate half their potential customers?), but I honestly think that I have taken it to a new level. I still do most of the things that I enjoyed doing when I was in my teens - playing games, reading fantasies and SF, composing music. The true marks of a mature adult - sophisticated tastes for fine wine and "literary" fiction, relationships that go beyond good friendship - I seem to have bypassed.
Occasionally, though, I discover something that makes me realise that I have moved on a little, and this trilogy is one. If I had read it as a teenager, the ideas in it would probably have had the same impact on me as Michael Moorcock's writing did (his Eternal Champion and Dancers at the End of Time series continue to influence my fantasy creations to this day). As an adult, I think the setting and the magical system are startlingly original, but now I notice the simplistic characterisation and the lumpen exploration of themes, and they spoil the fun. Try as I might, my teenage self isn't coming back.
Which is a pity, because the background subverts some of the traditions of epic fantasy in an interesting way. It is is set in the Final Empire, a land ruled for 1000 years by the evil Lord Ruler. He has turned the sky red and blighted the land with volcanoes that coat everything with dust and ash. The majority of people are skaa, serfs who slave under the nobility appointed by the Lord Ruler and who are overseen by the Steel Inquisitors, his fanatically loyal priesthood. Any hint of rebellion is crushed by the brutal and orc-like koloss. And at night, the Mist flows through the streets and people cower in their homes, fearing the mist-wraiths that devour anyone they capture.
Vin is a sixteen-year-old street urchin in the capital Luthadel, an orphan who was brought up and then betrayed by her brother Reen. She has found refuge with a gang who consider her to be a lucky talisman. But then she encounters a part-noble gentleman thief called Kelsier, who recognises that Vin, like him, is a Mist-born. These are Allomancers, people who can "burn" swallowed metals to perform eight different powers such as rioting emotions, attracting metals, strengthening the body or detecting other allomancers. The powers come in contrasting pairs specified by the metal and its alloy - thus iron pulls on other metals and steel pushes them away, allowing allomancers to fly through the air and perform other feats using coins. This makes Vin incredibly useful, for Kelsier has an insanely ambitious plan - to defeat the Lord Ruler and free the skaa.
Book 1 (The Final Empire) is essentially a heist movie in which Kelsier and his crew of Mistings (people who can use only one of the allomantic powers) work on a means of toppling the seemingly impregnable Lord Ruler, during which Vin learns to use her abilities. This is well done - the crew are memorably drawn (if one dimensional) and the plan they come up with is a plausible solution to an apparently impossible problem. It is perhaps inevitable that the ending should involve extensions of the rules of allomancy, but the wushu-style fights between allomancers are exciting.
The Well of Ascension is an effective sequel that follows on from the events of book one. Luthadel is beseiged by three armies, while Vin and her aristocratic lover Elend must search for the Well of Ascension, where the Lord Ruler originally acquired his powers. Interestingly, the Lord Ruler is a hero gone bad - he took the powers to defeat a vaguely-described enemy called the Deepness and refused to let go of them when he should have done. Inevitably, the rules of allomancy get expanded again and it becomes increasingly apparent that there is no actual logic to the powers that the metals confer - Sanderson simply invents new ones when he needs them to further the plot or create a good fight scene. Still, the story builds well, the triple threat to Luthadel is nicely handled, and the twist in the tale (although reminiscent of a certain mid-volume book from another series that is not fondly remembered) is at least dramatic.
Which makes it such a shame that things go completely doolally in book 3, The Hero of Ages. The main problem is that Sanderson feels it necessary to explain every single unusual aspect of his world, which requires a completely new form of magic that hasn't been mentioned in either of the previous books and some appropriated scientific ideas that feel utterly out of keeping with the fantasy background. Things are even worse on the character front. Vin is now so powerful that she can no longer carry the story and engages in god games while the narrative focuses on two of the minor characters, one of whom is going through an incredibly tedious loss of faith plot arc. The ending felt rushed and flat rather than transcendant, and I was left unconvinced and utterly unmoved.
To be fair, this is an early work and the flaws are those you would expect from an author who in all probability conceived this story when he was a teenager (the ad hoc-ery of the explanations certainly feels like some of my creations from that period). There are certainly enough original ideas here to justify sticking with Sanderson for a while yet, and if his characterisation improves (as it surely must with practice and maturity), his next sequence could appeal even to middle-aged teenagers like me.