"The Way of Kings"

Michael Whelan's cover art is gorgeous

I learned about Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series from a video talking about his approach to worldbuilding. Sanderson apparently spent years fleshing out the setting, history, and characters before starting "The Way of Kings," and it shows.

A few minor plot details follow.

The series is set on Roshar, which has a few key differences from Earth. Its weather patterns are particularly inventive. Roshar consists of one supercontinent in a vast ocean, and hurricane-like highstorms regularly blow from east to west across the land. Because the storms weaken as they travel across the continent, various societies developed divergently according to the severity of their weather. Fortress-like cities in the east are home to resilient people and trees that have adapted to lie flat during the storms, while the western lands feature more familiar climates, allowing for normal farming as well as conventionally stationary trees.

The novel has four or five primary points of view, with each chapter typically focused on a single character. One is a scholar-in-training, whose teacher is studying "desolations," millennia-old collapses of civilization that have nearly faded into myth. One of the book's central plot lines deals with researching these events. Have primary sources survived? Has the dominant religion co-opted or suppressed those accounts? Are the characters on the cusp of discovering some important truth, some warning from the past, or is there really nothing there? This is the only work of fiction I can think of that has its characters wrestle with the idea that history (and myth) are written by the victor. Great stuff.

There's a lot more I'd like to write about, including the book's geopolitical situation, religion, fusion of industrial and magical technology, strategic weapons that serve a similar role to nuclear deterrence, and so on, but that would get firmly into spoiler territory.

Verdict: Inventive worldbuilding, compelling characters, and a slow-burning plot are a winning combination, and The Stormlight Archive has become my new favorite fantasy series. Highly recommended.