Benjamin J Newland

The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson


I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s work in 2009, and not in the usual way (by reading his postmortem completion of Robert Jordan’s monstrosity). In Elantris, a standalone novel, I found his creativity within the realms of fantasy to be amazing. In his Mistborn: The Final Empire trilogy he proved he could sustain such creativity over an impressive number of pages. Besides his apparently bottomless supply of innovative magical systems, most fascinating to me was the way he completed an entire story in the eponymous first book of the Mistborn trilogy, only to have the entire novel be a kind of subtle critique of storytelling in general. At the end of book one the hero has triumphed, the evil emperor is cast down, and we all realize that the emperor wasn’t that evil and that killing him has just screwed the world big-time. It’s like the Rebel Alliance finally managed to kick Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine’s asses only to discover that hey, maybe they weren’t doing such a bad job of ruling the universe after all. Oops.

Anyhow, I was in Bellevue the other day keeping myself occupied during a snow storm while my lovely wife practiced for an upcoming concert. Wandering the shelves at Barnes & Nobel, I chanced upon the New Fiction shelf and found to my delight that Brandon Sanderson had a new novel out, and that it was set in the world of Mistborn.

After choking up an entirely too-large wad of cash (seriously B&N, I like your stores, and you served me well that day, but neither of those things is worth what has essentially become a 50% markup over the now-normal price for a book), I set-to reading the cover materials. It seems that even when returning to one of his already established worlds, Sanderson can’t help getting creativity all over everything.

The Alloy of Law indeed takes place in the world of Mistborn, in the very same city in fact, but 300 years have passed since the world-altering events that ended the original trilogy. Some of the magic of that original world remains, but some has been lost. And time marches on, of course, so that what was once a creative re-take on standard sword-and-sorcery fantasy has become a unique mash-up of western and steam-punk settings. It’s not tongue-in-cheek Victoriana by any stretch, and the setting works in support of and service to the story as it should. Still, I like me some railroads and gaslamps and was thrilled to see Sanderson treat the genre to his particular madness.

The novel ends satisfactorily, but leaves plenty of room for more in the same vein. Here’s hoping Sanderson taps that vein again soon.

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Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks


The first thing I wanted to know was "what's a Bobo?" I didn't raise my hand though, because it was the middle of the Bishop's address at Diocesan Convention and it didn't seem like question time. The Bishop had just mentioned Brooks' book as containing pertinent information for Episcopalians. This was last October; it tool me a few months to get to it.

To answer the obvious question, a Bobo is Brooks' created term. He makes it out of Bohemian and Bourgeois. His thesis is that these two broad cultural forces—the conservative, wealthy, establishmentarian bourgeois and the intellectual, reactionary, counter-cultural bohemian—which used to be so much in opposition to each other are now reconciled. From the 1850s through the 1950s the bourgeois and the bohemian were opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Since the 1960s the newly risen meritocratic upper middle class has united them in ways that show up in consumption patterns, marriages, and spirituality.

It's an interesting thesis, and Brooks writes with deft use of anecdotes and plenty of amusing turns of phrase. I don't often laugh out loud when reading non-fiction, but he had me at several points. It isn't scholarly cultural analysis, which he admits in the introduction, but for broad strokes his argument gives insight.

A particularly interesting point for me is that this book was published in 2000. Before the dot-com crash. Before 9/11. Before the housing bubble popped. You'd think these events would render the book hopelessly out of date. There are certainly blind-spots, but on the whole much of what Brooks says still holds true, despite profoundly changed circumstances. In fact, I found myself putting more trust in his conclusions precisely because he'd drawn them without knowing what would happen in the next decade. If you can make a point about culture that still carries water after the culture is profoundly diverted by external events, then maybe your point carries even more water than you first thought.

If you're interested in some lightly used populist analysis of the new upper-middle class, give the Bobos a read.

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Rule 34 by Charles Stross


I looked at the cover of this book a long time, once I'd picked it up off the "new fiction" shelf at the Puyallup Library. I was having cover deja vu—couldn't remember the story when I read the jacket material, but it looked so familiar. I ended up taking it home based mostly on the blurb where the author was praised as a "master of the near-future." Near future sci-fi is very hit-or-miss for me, so I was curious about what mastery in the niche genre read like.

I'm recommending this book mostly because I want someone else to read it and tell me what the hell...? I'm a pretty astute reader; I've had lots of practice. This one, however, left my brain spinning, and I can't decide if that was on purpose or not. I enjoyed it. Glad I read it. Still not sure if the author mismanaged his (admittedly) complex plot or if I just couldn't keep up. Someone let me know.

Meantime, let me tell you something about this novel that is, in my experience, almost completely unique: this novel is written in the second person.

[Technical note, since even my really smart friends are asking: 1st person is the "I" perspective, 3rd person is the "he/she" perspective. Both common in novels. 2nd person is the "you" perspective, as in "You walk into the room and smell blood, which is how most of your Mondays begin, now that you think about it." The only other books I can think of that do this are the Choose Your Own Adventure books I read as a kid. Can you think of another?]

Of course I noticed the 2nd person perspective right away, and was aware of it throughout. This isn't a great sign, novelistically speaking; you'd rather people notice your story and not your writing. And yet, is it even possible to write in the 2nd person and not have it be constantly noticed? It's just way too rare.

My second concern was that the author had done this just to stand out. I can understand the impulse, having studied the publishing context the past couple years. The more I read though, the more I thought it worked. I'm pretty tolerant of oddity in novels, so your experience may differ, but I liked it, if only for the variety.

The author doesn't pull a single punch either. He's already made you uncomfortable by choosing this unusual perspective, but then he piles on by writing multiple points of view. Not only are you being forced to experience the novel as one of the main characters, your are being forced to adopt the perspective of different main characters each chapter as the author rotates through his approximately three POV characters.

How can there be approximately three main characters? Damn good question, because he's not done messing with you yet. First you're forced into the odd 2nd person perspective, then you're forced into a multiple POV situation, THEN he makes the characters people you probably can't identify with. First chapter I'm a lesbian cop with career issues, second chapter I'm a bisexual muslim man with a family, third chapter I'm a predatory psychopath on meds. And there is no shortage of graphic scenes to illustrate these different life-choices. Let me tell you, as a Standard White Male, all of this required some serious mind-bending.

The approximate part comes in when you realize over the course of the early chapters that there is some kind of maybe-artificial-maybe-guided computer intelligence at work, and occasionally there's a chapter from that perspective that isn't clearly identified. Three main characters? Four? You have to finish the book to find out.

There's a lot going on here. It may be that you'll find the novel a failure as a work of literary entertainment, but you've got to appreciate the madness involved in even attempting such a thing. I may buy a copy just so I can have this conversation every time someone stands in front of my bookshelves.


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