Way of Kings: Review pt 1

I've wanted to do book reviews on here for some time now, but I can never get round to it. I have too many unpublished posts that end up distracting me or I start reading something else and the book I want to write about is lost to my thoughts.

But now I have the perfect book to review: The Stormlight Archive Book 1:Way of Kings, By Brandon Sanderson. It's perfect, because it's long, detailed and most importantly I can't go rushing out to become absorbed by the sequel any time soon.

To begin.

Way of Kings (WoK) is a monster of a book; at least the longest I've read in the last few years, if not ever by word count. This will probably put some people off, but I simply scoff at their lack of attention span. With WoK, Sanderson has begun what I believe to be a 10 book series, and if they're all this long it will be comparable only to Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time in length (Which Sanderson has of course taken over completing since Jordan's death). I apologize to any author out their who has written a continual story that is longer, but I've never heard of you. Probably because publishing any 1000 page novel is damn near impossible, especially for a first timer.
Just looking at it you can tell Way of Kings is a massive fantasy epic, set in a strange and original world. Well that is if you were lucky enough to see the US hardback cover, which thanks to our wonderful government and its cleverly thought out taxes, is not available in Australia. Otherwise you've got to read the blurb to actually get an idea of what the book is about, prima facie. Our version of the cover is pretty cool too, a guy in some magical looking armor, with a sword forming out of, or giving off, mist. This doesn't tell you anything other than that it's a fantasy with some magic swords and armor, which is well, most of them, and it's easy to just breeze over a book that looks standard. Even if the art is good, which it is, it doesn't distinguish a book from others with good art.(I do judge books by their covers; we all do. I love good cover art, especially in fantasy. It's the first look at a different world to ours and I find it even gives the book certain feeling that stays with me long after I've finished it.) However...

Way of Kings is most certainly NOT Standard. The world itself, Roshar, and it's ecology, is developed to a level I can only compare to Frank Herbert's Dune. It's not a desert, which I first thought it to be when reading the beginning. No, it's a near fully realized alien world, where people, animals and plants have ingeniously integrated life and culture to the hard ground and raging storms. To be honest, it was at first hard to understand what was happening when it came to the wildlife and plants ; "Wait, what are____? Please explain!" was a common reaction. Thankfully, Sanderson and a team of artists were kind enough to provide us with some useful illustrations littered throughout the novel, and they all (except the last one; I still don't know what that was about, it looked important too) serve a useful purpose. Stick with it, and you get used to the strangeness of everything. It's part of Sanderson's style to charge ahead with the action and fill those little details in as the book goes along. It's confusing sometimes, but when you get to the end of one his books, you feel everything click into place. [As a side note this has affected his Wheel of Time contributions, too, annoying many. I only had one gripe, which was so minor, only a huge nerd would need to go do referencing online to find out what he meant... which I did.] Otherwise I find his style to be, if not preferable to the Great RJ's, at least more exciting. The books combat and action scenes... I'll get to that later.

I honestly suffered culture shock when I started reading. You find yourself thrust headlong into this world with a seriously alien culture. I'm still trying to come up with a real world analogue for even the least bizarre of Roshar's many societies. The religions are all connected heavily to the events of the Prelude to the Stormlight Archive, which is essentially prologue to the series, while WoK has its own. I can't really go into them without giving stuff away, but, suffice to say a couple thousand years REALLY distorts history, which you quickly learn, and is a major them throughout the book. Aside from the brief scene you see in the Prelude, you really do come into this with no idea of what to expect. People look weird and have odd senses of fashion. They swear strangely, kinda like they do in Star Wars, using seemingly mundane words, to us, as profanity. The characters take many things around them for granted, not really thinking about it most of the time. This is very clever, because how could a character look at a tree on Roshar and compare it to ours? Detail, social and environmental comes at you slowly, and you get used to oddities. If you stick with it, I promise you'll find the world as rich and absorbing as in the Wheel of Time, which is a remarkable feat considering how unique this world is.
More posts to come...