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Mists and myths and magic, oh my
Sep. 21st, 2022 12:11 pmOn the recommendation of several people–plus some curiosity about what the fuss was about that snuck through my attempts to steadfastly ignore the Brandon Sanderson Kickstarter Discourse–I picked up Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first book in the Mistborn series, which is apparently a trilogy that is then part of a larger series called the Mistborn Saga.
This book fits pretty squarely into two fantasy sub-genres that are particularly beloved by me, “Teenage Girl Has Magic Powers, Overthrows Evil Government” and “Lovable Rogues of Criminal Underworld in Gritty Mercantile City Plan Heist,” so it is no surprise that I found this book to be a lot of fun and will probably check out the sequel as soon as spooky season is over (I have spooky season reading to do for the rest of spooky season, and this is pretty squarely epic fantasy, not horror/gothic enough to qualify as spooky season reading despite some effective spooky elements).
The main magic system, Allomancy, was interesting–it’s definitely a very “hard” magic system (unsurprising given that I’m pretty sure it was Brandon Sanderson who coined or at least popularized the notion of “hard” and “soft” magic systems), and has many of the flaws of “hard” magic systems, like filling the book up with a lot of magical jargon and Capital Letters, and giving a little bit of the vibe that there will be a companion RPG released sometime in the next 18 months (it’s not in “the RPG came first” territory, which would force me to judge it as bad). This is a thing that I think is essentially baked into a certain type of fantasy adventure book and if you it as given that this is that kind of fantasy adventure book, I think it was handled pretty well. One thing that helped was that the magic system–technically systems, plural–was believed by the characters to be “solved” but it wasn’t really, leaving us at least some measure of mystery to unravel and providing a reason to pay attention to the explanations. (Coming off the Locked Tomb series it felt a bit like being spoon-fed information, but compared to the Locked Tomb basically everything feels like being spoon-fed information; I think this might actually just be regular-level “introducing your audience to the world you made up” exposition.) It also was clearly well planned out and internally consistent, which is important if you’re going to go the hard magic route.
The plot is essentially thus: A thousand years ago, a hero rose to save the world from something called the Deepness. Nobody really knows what the Deepness was (I assume this will feature prominently in the sequels) but defeating it plonked an entity now known only as the Lord Ruler on the throne. The Lord Ruler sucks enormously and rules over what is now a colorless fiery wasteland with extreme violence. Society has exactly two classes–the nobility, which seems to encompass minor nobility whose fortunes have fallen to constitute the closest thing we have to a middle class, and the skaa, an enslaved working class who are all considered the property of the Lord Ruler and are “rented” out by the nobility to mine and farm and all that basic stuff. In addition to the thousand years of oppression, the Lord Ruler seems to be using some kind of magic depression powers to keep everybody too despondent to rebel.
Enter our local Thieves With Hearts of Gold, led by a guy named Kelsior, a skaa with magic powers. Skaa are not allowed to have magic powers and are subjected to extreme reproductive control to try to stomp out any Allomantic bloodlines in their population; nevertheless, there are still quite a number of skaa who are Allomancers. Kelsior gets a reputation that borders on the mystical for two reasons–one, he can use multiple kinds of Allomancy instead of just one, and two, he escaped from some prison mining pits that nobody ever escapes from. He is one of our main viewpoint characters and is basically the Big Damn Hero.
Our protagonist, Vin, is a teenage street urchin of the sort whomst nobody would ever think would be a Big Damn Hero except people who read lots of books about teenage girls/street urchins/teenage girl street urchins overthrowing the government. Vin is resilient, extremely emotionally damaged, and, unbeknownst to her, an extremely powerful Allomancer (this is hereditary and related to her Mysterious Parentage, in tried-and-true street urchin heroine fashion). When she joins the crew, after getting over her initial bafflement at being fed and clothed properly and spoken to like a human being, she is given the job of pretending to be a noblewoman and infiltrating the nobility’s interminable series of balls, so as to glean information about their weaknesses and spread destabilizing rumors.
Vin does a pretty good job of this despite a number of elementary blunders of openness that I wouldn’t pull at an average dinner with extended family, let alone if I were A Literal Spy going undercover. These were the most annoying and least believable parts of the story to me, but they seem to have been necessary to establish the Obligatory Romantic Subplot between Vin and the heir of the most powerful of the Great Houses, a philosophical-minded reformer who reads subversive books and… well, mostly sits around waiting to inherit so he can run his House less horrendously than his father does. Perhaps it is my inherent dimwittedness about these matters, but despite having a pretty strong familiarity with various fictional and historical Nobility Customs, I completely missed when Vin and Eland went from “talking to each other at balls” (one of the main activities at parties of all kinds) to being in enough of a “relationship” that they could be said to have broken it off. Honestly, Eland was a perfectly fine character but the only reason I could determine for there to be a romance there is that it is still illegal in publishing to go to print without one.
There are a number of other things that are done well enough to make up for the pasted-on romance. The action scenes kick ass. The “trying to recruit people to a rebellion and get them to do things” stuff features a very realistic vacillation between “people think this is impossible, so you can’t get them to do literally anything at all” and “the people who have decided it’s not impossible after all now believe it’s impossible for them to fail and will go recklessly off-script at a moment’s notice because they think victory is inevitable,” which definitely made me cry in organizer. The stakes are high and the violence is gruesome; the secrets have secrets. All in all it’s quite fun.
This book fits pretty squarely into two fantasy sub-genres that are particularly beloved by me, “Teenage Girl Has Magic Powers, Overthrows Evil Government” and “Lovable Rogues of Criminal Underworld in Gritty Mercantile City Plan Heist,” so it is no surprise that I found this book to be a lot of fun and will probably check out the sequel as soon as spooky season is over (I have spooky season reading to do for the rest of spooky season, and this is pretty squarely epic fantasy, not horror/gothic enough to qualify as spooky season reading despite some effective spooky elements).
The main magic system, Allomancy, was interesting–it’s definitely a very “hard” magic system (unsurprising given that I’m pretty sure it was Brandon Sanderson who coined or at least popularized the notion of “hard” and “soft” magic systems), and has many of the flaws of “hard” magic systems, like filling the book up with a lot of magical jargon and Capital Letters, and giving a little bit of the vibe that there will be a companion RPG released sometime in the next 18 months (it’s not in “the RPG came first” territory, which would force me to judge it as bad). This is a thing that I think is essentially baked into a certain type of fantasy adventure book and if you it as given that this is that kind of fantasy adventure book, I think it was handled pretty well. One thing that helped was that the magic system–technically systems, plural–was believed by the characters to be “solved” but it wasn’t really, leaving us at least some measure of mystery to unravel and providing a reason to pay attention to the explanations. (Coming off the Locked Tomb series it felt a bit like being spoon-fed information, but compared to the Locked Tomb basically everything feels like being spoon-fed information; I think this might actually just be regular-level “introducing your audience to the world you made up” exposition.) It also was clearly well planned out and internally consistent, which is important if you’re going to go the hard magic route.
The plot is essentially thus: A thousand years ago, a hero rose to save the world from something called the Deepness. Nobody really knows what the Deepness was (I assume this will feature prominently in the sequels) but defeating it plonked an entity now known only as the Lord Ruler on the throne. The Lord Ruler sucks enormously and rules over what is now a colorless fiery wasteland with extreme violence. Society has exactly two classes–the nobility, which seems to encompass minor nobility whose fortunes have fallen to constitute the closest thing we have to a middle class, and the skaa, an enslaved working class who are all considered the property of the Lord Ruler and are “rented” out by the nobility to mine and farm and all that basic stuff. In addition to the thousand years of oppression, the Lord Ruler seems to be using some kind of magic depression powers to keep everybody too despondent to rebel.
Enter our local Thieves With Hearts of Gold, led by a guy named Kelsior, a skaa with magic powers. Skaa are not allowed to have magic powers and are subjected to extreme reproductive control to try to stomp out any Allomantic bloodlines in their population; nevertheless, there are still quite a number of skaa who are Allomancers. Kelsior gets a reputation that borders on the mystical for two reasons–one, he can use multiple kinds of Allomancy instead of just one, and two, he escaped from some prison mining pits that nobody ever escapes from. He is one of our main viewpoint characters and is basically the Big Damn Hero.
Our protagonist, Vin, is a teenage street urchin of the sort whomst nobody would ever think would be a Big Damn Hero except people who read lots of books about teenage girls/street urchins/teenage girl street urchins overthrowing the government. Vin is resilient, extremely emotionally damaged, and, unbeknownst to her, an extremely powerful Allomancer (this is hereditary and related to her Mysterious Parentage, in tried-and-true street urchin heroine fashion). When she joins the crew, after getting over her initial bafflement at being fed and clothed properly and spoken to like a human being, she is given the job of pretending to be a noblewoman and infiltrating the nobility’s interminable series of balls, so as to glean information about their weaknesses and spread destabilizing rumors.
Vin does a pretty good job of this despite a number of elementary blunders of openness that I wouldn’t pull at an average dinner with extended family, let alone if I were A Literal Spy going undercover. These were the most annoying and least believable parts of the story to me, but they seem to have been necessary to establish the Obligatory Romantic Subplot between Vin and the heir of the most powerful of the Great Houses, a philosophical-minded reformer who reads subversive books and… well, mostly sits around waiting to inherit so he can run his House less horrendously than his father does. Perhaps it is my inherent dimwittedness about these matters, but despite having a pretty strong familiarity with various fictional and historical Nobility Customs, I completely missed when Vin and Eland went from “talking to each other at balls” (one of the main activities at parties of all kinds) to being in enough of a “relationship” that they could be said to have broken it off. Honestly, Eland was a perfectly fine character but the only reason I could determine for there to be a romance there is that it is still illegal in publishing to go to print without one.
There are a number of other things that are done well enough to make up for the pasted-on romance. The action scenes kick ass. The “trying to recruit people to a rebellion and get them to do things” stuff features a very realistic vacillation between “people think this is impossible, so you can’t get them to do literally anything at all” and “the people who have decided it’s not impossible after all now believe it’s impossible for them to fail and will go recklessly off-script at a moment’s notice because they think victory is inevitable,” which definitely made me cry in organizer. The stakes are high and the violence is gruesome; the secrets have secrets. All in all it’s quite fun.