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G’day. I'm Adam Collings. Welcome to Stories.
Today I'm talking about Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.
Today I'm talking about Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.
This is the first book in the Mistborn trilogy.
This is a fascinating epic fantasy that borrows from other genres
mostly from the heist genre.
It has been described as Oceans Eleven in a fantasy setting.
The heros of this book are a thieving crew. That in itself was enough to grab my attention.
Now a lot of fantasy stories are all about defeating the big bad dark lord.
The hero has to stop evil from taking over the world.
Mistborn starts off by saying, that’s all in the past, and the dark lord, the Lord Ruler, was victorious.
Now we’re living in the aftermath of a world ruled by him.
As you can imagine - that’s not a very nice world.
This Lord Ruler is ruthless and cruel. Somebody has to take him down
Who better that a bunch of con artists?
The thing is, nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
We get glimpses of back story that lead to the Lord Ruler’s victory at the beginning of each chapter.
Who is this Dark Lord really? What was he really about? We certainly don’t get all this answers in this book,
but there was enough to make me really want to continue with the series.
If all of this wasn’t enough to make a great story, we have a seriously cool magic system.
Certain characters are able to draw special abilities from metals - they call this Alomancy.
Different metals offer different powers.
The idea is that you ingest the metal and as you metabolise it, you get its special power,
but not everyone can burn the same metals. One person may have the capability to burn Steel,
which allows you to push metals,
while another can burn pewter, which gives you increased strength and speed.
Most people are not allomancers and so can’t burn any metals.
But then, once in a while, you find someone who is able to burn all of the metals. These people are called Mistborn.
In a sense, I’d almost describe these Mistborn as more like superheroes than wizards.
We’re not talking Gandalf here.
They can move metals about in a telekenetic kind of way,
which allows them to use coins as weapons, but also they can jump about and almost fly by pushing off stationary metals.
This leads to some epic battles. I tend to picture something akin to Neo from The Matrix.
This would all be amazing to see in a movie,
but Sanderson’s highly visual prose style allows that movie to play out in your head.
As the story goes on we discover a second magic system, also related to metals.
I'm not going to go into this, but it’s also fascinating.
The setting is probably around an early 1800s level of technology, but without gunpowder.
The society itself is interesting. You see a distinct division of classes.
The average people, called Skaa are treated like slaves.
he nobles live a more luxurious life, holding regular balls like you might see in Pride & Perjudice,
at the price of collaborating with the Lord Ruler.
This book has multiple viewpoint characters as you’d expect in an epic fantasy,
but we mostly see the story through the eyes of Vin - a young girl who is new to this whole world of alomancy,
though she has been in thieving crews for most of her life.
She serves as a great introduction into this world. She is also a very sympathetic protagonist.
She becomes our friend.
Mistborn has a reasonably large cast, but I didn’t have too much trouble keeping them all sorted in my head.
This didn't particularly feel like a really long book. I think that’s because It was very fast paced. There were no lags. There was always something interesting happening.
The ending of the book was fantastic.
It brought things to a satisfying conclusion so you didn't feel cheated, as if the book stops before the story is over,
and yet at the same time it had something of a cliff-hanger feel to it.
You get the impression that all is not what you thought, and there could be something nasty up ahead.
I've recently read book two, and I’m just starting on book three. I can tell you that the series continues to be fantastic
If you want a fantasy novel that turns the genre upside down and inside out,
or if you just want an exciting adventure story with colourful characters and some really cool speculative elements
then you’ll like Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
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