Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV | Hacker News Reader

Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV

polygon.com

7 pointsvidyesh14 comments

Risky business, creating TV shows out of incomplete book series and Cosmere has several. Granted, technically each of those series are standalone and some like Mistborn are timejumped in such a way that each trilogy can be seen as it's own entity so unlike GOT Sanderson and Apple has more wiggle room.

Also, Sanderson is pretty much the exact opposite of GRRM in terms of quantity of writing so odds are good even Stormlight is finished by the time Apple even gets to the first book.

Cosmere isn't an incomplete book series. It's a "universe" created by Sanderson where all of his novels live. Many of which are already completed series or stand-alone novels. It's like saying Stephen King hasn't finished his "series" since shit keeps happening in Derry Maine.

It was pretty much guaranteed to happen at some point. This is the author whose kickstarter for four ebooks that made $40 million.

Plus the universe just begs for an arbitrarily large number of seasons and spin-offs. There's something for everybody. You almost certainly start with multiple series of Mistborn. From there, you can go in dozens of directions. And there's a built in huge audience. It practically begs for high budget TV adaptation.

I do love reading Sanderson, even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey. Can't fault the magic system building or the action.

Yeah, the books are formulaic, but it's a good formula. "Act 1: Okay, here's a neat magic system with well defined rules. Act 4: surprise, there was an extra rule you didn't know about! Act 5: we killed God with the surprise, extra rule."

It's hard for me to fault Mistborn. It has the tightest ending to a fantasy trilogy I've ever seen. And then, as an afterthought, Sanderson somehow managed to end the Wheel of Time, which frankly I don't think Robert Jordan could have managed to do.

The thing that make the formula click to me is that it is written as a thriller.

By the last 10% of the book/serie he has created a problem you are 100% sure is insurmountable but by the last 5% you realise how small hints through the story could be composed to create a solution.

Mistborn left me breathless at the end. During the last couple of chapters of the third book I uttered many a "holy shit" and "no way" under my breath. Much to my wife's pleasure, who bought the books for me on a whim.

The whole earring thing blew my mind, and it was so obvious from book 3 onwards.

The ending of the Mistborn series is indeed, incredibly tight. The whole series had a roundedness to it that I have not encountered before, every word, theme, event and character has a place in the Bigger Scheme. I think this is because he wrote all 3 books together, so he would regularly go back to book one to make edits based on new things he thought of in book 3.

I think your summary of act 4 is uncharitable. Every book of Sanderson's I've read has been about showing unexpected ways the rules could be combined, not surprise new rules.

> even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey

This is what made early Sanderson so great for me though. I’m constantly inundated by media through which the author demands a soapbox. This can be anything from politics to just the author’s personal preferences.

Mistborn 1-3 was a fairly simple and satisfying plot with likeable (if somewhat predictable) characters and fun world building. Perfect set of books to just pick up and enjoy. Not Shakespeare, but it didn’t have to be.

By the time I got through all the Stormlight books I felt like I had been locked in a room and forced to listen to Sanderson drone on and on in a self-serving tone about his personal power fantasies. The story was more complex, but it also had 100+ pages of fluff nobody except Sanderson cared about. I truly believe that once he got really famous his editors stopped saying “no” to anything, no matter how small.

His short stories are the same way. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is good because it’s short and sweet. It sticks to a classic formula and focuses on imaginative settings, which is what Sanderson is good at. Tress was boring because it tried to be smart and kind of flopped.

Talk about an unpopular opinion. Nightmare Painter is well liked, but Tress is far and away the fan favorite.

If others enjoyed it that’s great, but I personally couldn’t finish it.

This is my concern about Sanderson having full creative control. I know that show runners have developed a reputation for ruining all sorts of adaptions. But I also know that screen writing is different than writing a novel. And prose and characters and dialog have never been a strong suit of Sanderson. He's an amazing world builder. I love the exploration of how magic systems impact society. I can geek out on that all day just like I can geek out on Weir's protagonist's "problem solving" scenarios despite thinking the characters and settings and world building are particularly weak.

Apple has proven with numerous shows over the past few years that they can be trusted with this task. Foundation, Silo, etc. Exciting stuff.

A far better home than Netflix. And Sanderson isn't built for HBO.

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