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Best brandon sanderson books ranked install#

In the grand scheme of the story, they’re really trying to find out Steelheart’s weakness. So even though these Epics are seemingly immortal and all powerful and they have their own special abilities, the most interesting thing is:Īnd when they find out their weaknesses, they can kill these Epics. The central preoccupation of the characters, the Reckoners and David, while they try to fight the Epics, is trying to find out and exploit the Epics’ weaknesses. What I love about Steelheart is that he follows these three laws relentlessly and that translates to a really cool interesting book. You can look at any great fantasy story that has magic at its core and you can see that these three laws are very much at play. Why am I bringing this up in the context of a book we’re meant to be enjoying as readers?įirstly, I’m bringing it up because Sanderson is bang on the money with his laws of magic. Law 3: Expand upon what you already have before you add new stuff.What the magic can’t do is more interesting than what it can do. Law 2: The limitations of a magic system are more interesting than it’s capabilities.

Law 1: A writer’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.

Sanderson came up with three laws for writing magic in the fantasy genre: What I really love about this book can be summed up by some of Brandon Sanderson’s own advice to writers in the fantasy genre. The book kicks off when David manages to find and join the Reckoners and devise a plan for fighting back. Since then, he’s spent every waking moment of his life researching Epics and trying to find their weakness. We see the world through the eyes of the main character David, a teenager who watched his father murdered by Steelheart. He’s basically invincible and he can kill whenever he wants.Ī city of people living in fear, an underground subclass of people, then a further underground rebel group of people called the Reckoners who have spent years trying to find out each Epic’s weakness so they can fight back.

Best brandon sanderson books ranked install#

One Epic in particular, Steelheart, is so powerful that he’s managed to install himself as emperor in the city. And then – instead of using their powers for good like you would normally imagine in a superhero story – they used their powers for evil. The book is set in this dystopian otherworldly Chicago where many years previously a huge burst in the sky, called Calamity, gave powers to otherwise ordinary human beings. Steelheart is a superhero story with a massive twist because the superheroes, or Epics, are actually the bad guys. And Steelheart is definitely one of those books. I love books that turn conventional genres on their heads.

This was my first foray into Sanderson’s work and it hooked me immediately. It might be my favourite superhero story in any medium, not just the novel. Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson may just be the best superhero story I’ve ever read.