It's Day 4 of the Week of Sanderson here at Winter Is Coming, and we've got an exciting one for you today. Last month we had the privilege of interviewing Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling author of The Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, and a number of other books, including the final three volumes of The Wheel of Time. We've been previewing excerpts from this interview each day, leading up to the release of the entire thing later this week.
While Sanderson has written dozens of books across genres and age ranges, what he's best known for is the Cosmere, a fictional universe where all of his epic fantasy stories take place. I say epic fantasy, but at the Cosmere's current stage, that's evolving. Sanderson has written more than 20 books set in this universe to date. Readers been following worlds like Scadrial in Mistborn and Roshar in Stormlight over years or even centuries, watching them go through a number of technological and cultural changes. The longer the saga goes on, the less it feels like a traditional epic fantasy. With novels like Rhythm of War spotlighting the science of the Cosmere and future book series like Ghostbloods set in a modern milieu, it almost feels like some of Sanderson's Cosmere works are becoming science fiction.
What does this mean for the future of the Cosmere? Is there still room in this universe for epic fantasy, or are we in its sci-fi era for good?
Keeping epic fantasy in the Cosmere
"There's a whole lot that I've thought about on this for many years," Sanderson said. "One is that I don't want to leave behind epic fantasy completely, though I do think that as I move forward, you're going to see two types of epic fantasy in the Cosmere. One...takes place outside the current timeline. When I jump back and I do Hoid's backstory, we're back to epic fantasy, though it'll be Bronze Age. And [the other is] things like, not necessarily the voice of, but things like Tress of the Emerald Sea, where you see touches of, the rest of the universe has hit the science fiction era and there are science fiction things here, but you know, this planet is not there yet and whatnot. I think you'll see mostly those two types of things."
You can already see the groundwork being laid for this future in some of Sanderson's novels like The Sunlit Man, which is set during the space age of the Cosmere. The upcoming novel Isles of the Emberdark is also set during this space age. But even though those books take place in the Cosmere's future, don't expect them to feel like hard science fiction. Sanderson promised "a lot more Dune-style" books in the Cosmere's present timeline, stories which meld science fiction and fantasy in interesting ways.
"Dune is such a strange beast and I love it for it, right? A Fire Upon the Deep has a bit of this same feel where it's like, is this fantasy or is this science fiction? Well, Dune is science fiction, but man, it feels like an epic fantasy," Sanderson explained. "Dune is what proved to me that you can put guns in something and still have the feel of that epic fantasy that I love. Because Dune feels more like Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time then some other fantasy books that are strictly fantasy do...so you'll see me doing some things like that as well."
This isn't the first time that Sanderson has talked about the possibility of writing more sci-fi in the Cosmere. During a 2022 interview with YouTuber Daniel Greene, Sanderson said that he didn't feel he was "equipped really well" to write true hard science fiction, in the vein of say, Arthur C. Clarke or Kim Stanley Robinson. Those sorts of books are very different in terms of tone and style than the sort of imaginative fantasy Sanderson loves to write. So while we may see Dune-style Cosmere books in the future, don't hold your breath for the Cosmere equivalent of Red Mars.
"I still don't think I'm equipped to write true hard science fiction," Sanderson said when I brought up this previous interview. "I respect it greatly. But I feel like, as I've always said, kind of the difference between what I do and what hard science fiction does is hard science fiction takes what we have and extrapolates realistically to a future, and I take a future and then I justify it with the mechanics in-world, right? And that's a very different thing."
Transitioning a whole fictional universe from being explicitly epic fantasy to something broader is no small task, and Sanderson is being extremely thoughtful about how to approach it. There are many dangers, not the least of which is that the lore and magical mechanics of the Cosmere are dense enough that encyclopedias could be written about them. This is something Sanderson is very conscious of at the moment as he's working on the third era of Mistborn books, titled Ghostbloods.
"The biggest challenge I will have is I don't want my books to read like technical manuals," he said. "There are some people who love that. I let myself do some of that with Navani in [Rhythm of War], and I love it. But I have to be careful that every book doesn't read like a hard science fiction where you have to have a PhD in the Cosmere to understand what's going on."
We're halfway through the Week of Sanderson, but there's still plenty more to come before this journey reaches its destination! This weekend we'll release our full interview with the Stormlight Archive author, his first full-spoiler interview about the Cosmere since the release of Wind and Truth. In the meantime, make sure not to miss any of our previously released excerpts about Ghostbloods, Wind and Truth, and the upcoming short fiction collection Tailored Realities.
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