Interview with Brandon Sanderson

How does it feel to now have the possibility to share your books with people from around the globe, in different languages?

Brandon: Awesome! Really, I didn't expect to have foreign sales. After all, this was my first book, and I expected it to take some time before foreign publishers were interested. However, I guess the buzz was good, because we've sold in twelve languages so far. (This still stuns my agent. It's rare for a new author to have so many foreign sales.)

In the interest of keeping my head from swelling too much, I suspect that a lot of that success comes from the fact that ELANTRIS is a stand-alone epic fantasy, something very rare nowadays. I think a single book like that encourages publishers to take more of a chance on me. Plus, Tor picking up a new author tends to turn a few heads. We sold our first foreign sale to Russia, and they'd never even seen the book--they'd simply heard that Tor had bought a stand-alone from a new author, and they wanted it.

Without giving anything away, what can you tell us of Mistborn? Are you satisfied with the way the book turned out?

Brandon: Well, I'm posting the sample chapters on my website www.brandonsanderson.com/book.php?id=2&section=10

However, let me tell you a bit about the book. The idea process for this one was a little more distinct than the one for ELANTRIS. This book (the plot at least) came from two ideas.

The first part came from watching Ocean's Eleven. I've always liked movies like this--heist movies like Sneakers and the Italian Job. I wondered why nobody had ever done a fantasy version of this--a kind of Mission Impossible plot where you have a very specialized group of characters, each with a different magical skill.

The second concept that sparked my interest is this recurring theme in fantasy of the young hero who saves the world from a dark power. We've all seen it a dozen times over. My thought was "Well, what if he failed? What if the Dark Lord killed the hero, and then took over the world?"

So, MISTBORN is a book about a world where the dark lord won. The prophecies failed mankind, and a thousand years have passed with the world being ruled by a dark god-emperor. A group of con-men decide that they've had enough, and come up with a plan to overthrow the emperor: They're going to rob his treasury, then use the money to bribe his armies away from him.

The book turned out better than I could have hoped. It really does show off what I can do--it's now been seven years since I wrote ELANTRIS! I think I've gotten better with characters, and my magic in MISTBORN is the best I've ever written. The ideas above were just the spark. As I wrote the book, I found myself focusing more on a couple of the characters, as opposed to writing a true 'heist' book, which would have been more of an ensemble that focused primarily on the plot. Instead, I have that heist as the backdrop to a couple of very interesting characters. The result is something I'm very proud of.

(The book comes out in July 2006. It's already up for preorder on Amazon.)

Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a World Fantasy Award? Why, exactly?

Brandon: Whew! You ask hard ones, Pat. Let's see. . . .

I'll go for bestseller. I've always fallen a little bit on the popular, as opposed to the literary, side of arguments. I do have a Master's in English, so I'm familiar with the literary/award side of things. However, I just would rather have more people reading my books. The bestseller thing would be less about the money, and more about the knowledge that my books are finding their audience.

Honestly, do you believe that the fantasy genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

Brandon: I think it will. You're right about what's happening in fantasy right now, but the thing is, this is still a young genre. We had the 80's and 90's, where a lot of fantasy really was a bit derivative (which I saw with the utmost fondness and respect for many of those authors.)

We've slowly seen sf being accepted, and I think we'll see fantasy gain the same respect. The problem is, we're just do darn popular. If you look at pop media--movies, video games, and the like--sf and fantasy make up the bulk of the top money-makers. That success means that the genres are being accepted by the public more and more, meaning that fantasy and sf readers are becoming more and more mainstream. That kind of success in the currently literary community is a little detrimental.

However, give us a hundred years or so, and I think people will look back on this era and see sf/f as one of the main dominant literary forms of our generation.