The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson

April 24, 2022

Humanities

Author #

Brandon Sanderson is a prolific writer and creator of worlds. His main works are the creation of the Cosmere universe. His other works include finishing the Wheel of Time series after the passing of Robert Jordan (The series is now an epic fantasy on Amazon Prime Video).

His works are considered to be a part of Hard Fantasy largely because of Sanderson’s Laws of Magic.

He, his wife, and a small team operate Dragonsteel Entertainment which seems to be highly engaging with the community. There is a large community fan site called 17th Shard. Recently he announced to the community that over the pandemic years he wrote five unannounced books. These were set to release through a crowdfunding campaign that reached over forty million USD before closing out, but has continued to grow in subsequent rounds of participation.

Background #

There are multiple sets of stories within the Cosmere:

Sanderson recommends that people start with the Mistborn series, of all his works.

Concepts & Motifs #

At this time I’ve only read the Mistborn and Stormlight Archive sets so I won’t be writing about Elantris or Warbreaker.

Spoilers Ahead!

Mistborn #

It is a fantasy heist story about a young woman who is recruited into a team of thieves planning to rob the Dark Lord of their world.

Mentioned before, this is the best set to dig into first. If you want more insight into Sanderson’s intent there is also an annotation series for Mistborn.

Hard Magic: all three magical systems are based on the utilization of metals. To me this was the first introduction to Sanderson’s approach to having “hard magic”. The story paces well in the discovery of these abilities. The characters grapple with information suppression around the materials and practices required to express magic. Much of the magic is outwardly expressed, but there are many “internal” forms of magic that become quite interesting.

Class: there is a lot of interplay between the nobility (by birth, decedents from the “Lord Ruler”) and the skaa, which is a form of oppressed slave class. This is used as a foil to examine prejudice and discrimination in ways that are generally clever and long arc in nature.

Censorship/Suppression: The “Lord Ruler”, to maintain power, prevented technology advancement to ensure that his military strength wouldn’t be undermined. This is implemented through the “Steel Ministry” which is a form of religion/corporation that actively suppresses cultural advancement without approval. The nobility are ruled via the Steel Ministry, but don’t necessarily have direct interaction with the “Lord Ruler”, so there is a form of indirect/blind interpretation of the absolute powers intent. This allows Sanderson to dig into human nature to create market/cultural niche/segmentation.

Religion as a Weapon: The “Steel Ministry” is a religious form of cultural suppression, and the opposite of it would be the acolytes of Kelsier. Sanderson pushes past charismatic leadership into the realm of religious zeal for creating cultural strife.

Stormlight Archive #

During reading it felt like there was just so much packed into this set of books related to challenging issues for individuals (and our culture as a whole). In trying to find some quotes I found a discussion documented on Tor that was extremely thoughtful and identified (better than I could) several of the motifs in detail. Compared to the Mistborn series the Stormlight Archive is certainly far more dense in terms of exploring individual character flaw, as well as the flaws of large groups interacting together. Stormlight Archive feels like the structured magic and epic storytelling of Mistborn with a deep thematic intent to examine difficult topics related to how we internally process stimulus.

Mental Illness: Sanderson digs into depression, anxiety, trauma, self harm, and a variety of other challenging topics under the umbrella of mental health. The characters he depicts experience trauma in different forms, internally process it (even if avoidance), and often times foil their processing via interaction with other characters. In the aforementioned discussion on Tor they make the point:

He’s giving his readers who live with mental illness a toolbox filled with ways to re-contextualize their experiences, and to cope with the reality of their existence.

Further, a commentary on the ability to relate to the characters:

They are less than ideal as epic fantasy heroes, yet they still manage to be heroic and honorable. They’re enviable and they inspire others, despite their self-perceived cracks and flaws.

Even further, there is a lot of healing magic in the Stormlight Archives. However, Sanderson allows for the use of this mechanism to heal physical wounds as a plot device but doesn’t lean on it as a mechanism to heal or absolve the struggle with mental illness.

Depression: Apathy vs. Emotion: Kaladin as a character struggles with depression, specifically apathy when not able to commit to an identified cause. He has periods of self proclaimed normalcy when his purpose is clearly identified, but when that distraction of purpose wanes he struggles with a baseline of depression. The emotional connection to purpose, and its ability to draw attention away from depression/apathy resonated strongly with me personally (and likely would for many others in “western society” given our hustle culture).

Combatting Hopelessness: Characters often hit their limit for managing a stimulus and due to Sanderson not throwing in simple distraction they have to build mechanisms and strategies for managing the emotional state.

Stigma: Kaladin and his relationship with Syl examine stigma associated with mental health, specifically Syl’s observations on Kaladin’s mental state. Other character interactions explore this as well

Jumping Off #

If you’re interested in jumping into a detailed universe that is sufficiently lengthy but involves similar structure then you should consider digging into hard fantasy or hard science fiction. If you’re looking for more hard fantasy then jump over to:

Consider that hard science fiction is an incredible mine of literature to dig into, notable works that are similar to Sanderson’s style are:

If you like the motif of religion as a weapon then you might wanna dive into the Dune franchise, which recently is popularized by a modern film.