Brandon Sanderson and George R.R. Martin are very different kinds of authors. Sanderson is known for pounding out books faster than fans can read the last one, while Martin has been working on The Winds of Winter for the past 14 years. Sanderson is famous for his complicated magic systems and interconnected worlds, while Martin is hailed for his deep character work and willingness to take risks.
But they're joined by their love of epic fantasy, and it's interesting to locate them on a continuum that stretches back to the beginning of that genre. That's what Sanderson did when he recently talked to El Mundo America during a visit to the Celsius 232 fantasy and sci-fi festival in Spain. "Today, the model proposed by Joseph Campbell based on the hero's journey has been broken," he said. "I can get a bit geeky about this, but succinctly, there are three major eras: [The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien, those who followed in his footsteps, like Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, or Robin Hobb, and more recent ones like us who write in response to Tolkien, seeing a tired model and changing it."
"Among these, the precursor was George R. R. Martin, who attacked the idea of the hero's journey and started killing characters left and right. He was a revolutionary, although he could never stand fans guessing his intentions in advance, which led him to change some things in his books."
Joseph Campbell is famous for writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which argues that every hero's journey proceeds along a recognizable path. George Lucas famously drew from it when creating Star Wars, but Martin did indeed throw wrenches into the idea by introducing us to heroes like Ned and Robb Stark before brutally killing them, and introducing us to characters like Daenerys Targaryen, whose journey seems destined to end in homocidal tyranny, at least if his books end in more or less the same way as Game of Thrones did.
Although who knows if that will happen? Sanderson's note about Martin changing "some things" in his books so they'd be less predictable to fans is interesting. You have to wonder what if anything he's changing about The Winds of Winter now that the TV show spoiled some of the important bits; Martin told the Game of Thrones showrunners what he planned to have happen before they crafted the last few seasons of the TV show, but he's hinted that the details could be very different.
In any case, Sanderson went on to talk about about he and his contemporaries are continuing the push the boundaries of what an epic fantasy story can look like. "I think my generation started to think: well, what else can fantasy do?" he said. "For example, in Tolkien and his followers, magic was disappearing. There are very few wizards, very few people with magic. In my generation, the return of magic is very common. Both The Stormlight Archive and Elantris deal with the disappearance and return of magic to the world. And Mistborn is a deconstruction of the traditional epic hero. It's about what would happen if the Dark Lord of the time won, if the hero failed. Authors like N. K. Jemisin have also done this...we work on this idea of deconstructing what our literary predecessors were trying to decipher."
Brandon Sanderson released Wind and Truth, the fifth book in his Stormlight Archive series, late last year and has other things in the pipeline. As for Martin, we continue to wait for The Winds of Winter.
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