Last year, author Brandon Sanderson released Wind and Truth, the fifth novel in his epic fantasy saga The Stormlight Archive. This book was a big deal for a number of reasons. It wrapped up the first "arc" of the projected 10-book series, giving satisfying conclusions for the story of characters like Dalinar Kholin and Kaladin Stormblessed. It answered long-standing questions about the Cosmere, the interconnected fictional universe where all of Sanderson's adult fantasy books are set. And it totally changed the face of that universe, introducing a massive threat that will presumably spill over into other series.
Fans knew going in that this was going to be a major reset point for Sanderson's works. He's now in the midst of a six-year hiatus from releasing new Stormlight Archive books, as he pens the third trilogy for his Mistborn series and two sequels to his 2005 debut novel, Elantris. We'll still get a Stormlight novella called Horneater sometime in the coming years, but aside from that, readers shouldn't expect another large outing to the world of Roshar until 2031.
A six-year break from any book series can be a tall order, but by and large, fans don't seem upset about it the way they were when, say, author George R.R. Martin took a comparable amount of time between writing A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, or A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. That, of course, is because Sanderson will still be releasing plenty of books in the interim; the man is a veritable writing machine, and short of tying him up and locking all his computers in a vault, it's hard to imagine him going long without releasing more stories.
And yet...
Six years is still a long break between books in a series. Beyond Horneater, none of those other books Sanderson is writing are Stormlight books, meaning we'll be waiting just as long to find out what happens next for Kaladin and Shallan as we did for Arya Stark and Cersei Lannister. But the wait isn't the biggest hurdle that the Cosmere is facing right now. To my eye, it's something much more dangerous: the possibility of this sprawling interconnected series becoming "work" for readers to keep up with, burning them out in much the same way that some fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have become burnt out.
Why was Wind and Truth divisive among readers?
Wind and Truth has inspired an interesting response among Sanderson's fans. Some have loved it for how it brought the larger Cosmere into focus, something which many of us have been waiting to see for years. At the same time, I've noticed an uptick in videos from booktubers and reader comments that they're using Wind and Truth as an exit ramp from the Cosmere. Sanderson took a massive swing by turning the culmination of Stormlight's first arc into a wider Cosmere story, rather than remaining solely focused on the drama of Roshar. And the result has been divisive; as of this writing, Wind and Truth is the lowest-rated mainline book in the series on Goodreads.
I can see both sides of this argument. I have been following the Cosmere closely for over a decade, and I was hungry for the sorts of answers Wind and Truth provided about the larger mythos. At the same time, it's hard to deny that its ambitions to broaden the Cosmere made it feel more like a Cosmere book than a typical Stormlight Archive novel. Looking back on the series, The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance are still my favorite books by far, and that's because they had powerful themes, thrilling set pieces, and a razor-sharp focus on the world of Roshar and the characters at the heart of the tale, rather than nebulous demigods connected to lore so deep you need an online wiki to make sense of it. And that's coming from someone who likes that lore.
If Wind and Truth was the only one of Sandersn's books that had this issue, I think readers may not have gotten quite as out of sorts about it. But the fourth and final book in Mistborn Era Two, The Lost Metal, took a similar tack. Those novels are set on the world of Scadrial as it reaches technological modernity, with gunpowder, trains, and, by the end, weapons of mass destruction. Each book follows the law-keeping duo Wax and Wayne as they delve into one mystery or another. Like Wind and Truth, Sanderson took a wild swing with The Lost Metal by making the mystery Wax and Wayne have to tackle all about the Cosmere and its demigod deities, known as Shards. That one was received much more warmly than Wind and Truth (it's the highest-rated of the Wax & Wayne books on Goodreads), but when you take it together with the latest Stormlight book, it seems to give a firm picture of the direction the Cosmere is headed.
The cautionary tale of the MCU
The first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were spectacular, weaving together various movies to build to a historic conclusion with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. I don't think anyone would argue the first three phases of the MCU didn't deserve their flowers, even if there might be a movie or two in there that haven't aged into beloved masterpieces.
Since then, however, Marvel has been having a rough time. When the pandemic hit in 2020 and Disney launched its streaming platform Disney+, then-CEO Bob Chapek issued a mandate to Marvel to start churning out television shows to support the streaming service. New Marvel shows came out much faster than the movies; there were five shows in 2021 alone, much more than the two or three films Marvel had previously done a year. By the time the pandemic cooled and Marvel started getting people back into theaters, the deluge of shows and films felt never-ending — and so did the amount of prep viewers needed to do before each new entry. That's how we ended up with films like The Marvels and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which required viewers to have watched some of those Disney+ shows in addition to previous movies. Phase 4 of the MCU consisted of 18 shows and movies, nearly as many entries as Phases 1-3 combined at 23 movies total.
In short, it all started to feel a bit like homework. This has had a cooling effect on its films, with many underperforming at the box office to the point where current Disney CEO Bob Iger has admitted that "in our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond — in terms of their time and their focus — way beyond where they had been," and citing Marvel's ballooning TV and movie offerings as an example of where the company "diluted focus and attention." He's talking about the focus and attention of the teams working on these shows and movies, but I think it absolutely holds true for the audience as well.
The signs the Cosmere is in danger of repeating Marvel's mistakes
While Brandon Sanderson is still outputting books at more or less the same rate he always has (plus or minus a Secret Project "Year of Sanderson" blitz), I worry that the Cosmere could run into similar problems in the not-too-distant future.
That Marvel "homework" phenomenon that I mentioned currently applies to some of the most recent Cosmere books, specifically the two I mentioned above. Yes, you can enjoy The Lost Metal just fine if you haven't read Sanderson's other series, but it is a much better book if you've read The Stormlight Archive, The Emperor's Soul, Elantris, and the Mistborn novella Secret History (not to mention all of Mistborn Era One). Wind and Truth functions fine as a capstone to The Stormlight Archive on its own, but it's greatly enhanced by having an understanding of Elantris, Mistborn, Warbreaker, and several other Cosmere works. Hell, the book even ends with the Cosmere equivalent of an MCU post-credits scene by dropping Hoid, the mysterious worldhopper who has appeared in every Cosmere novel, onto the Mistborn world of Scadrial.
And then there's The Sunlit Man, a book set in the near future of the Cosmere which plops a Stormlight character onto a world where he has to contend with a faction from Mistborn, a mysterious Cosmere-level threat called the Night Brigade, and a race of people from a novella called Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell. Oh, and it also serves as kind of a pseudo-sequel to both Wind and Truth and a Stormlight novella called Dawnshard. There's pretty much no point in even reading the book unless you're deeply immersed in Cosmere lore.
These books are a smorgasbord for hardcore Cosmere fans. But they are also becoming self-referential in a way that has me worried. The next Mistborn series is titled Ghostbloods, named after the enigmatic group of worldhoppers who are trying to gather power from other worlds to help safeguard Scadrial from the shadows. The Ghostbloods played an important role in The Stormlight Archive, but we really learned about their secrets in The Lost Metal. By nature, they are an inter-Cosmere group, with members from different worlds. That means that even if the new series is heavily focused on Scadrial, it's all but guaranteed to have heavy connections to the wider Cosmere (and, I'm sure, copious references to other Sanderson works).
If Wind and Truth, The Lost Metal, The Sunlit Man and Ghostbloods are a signal for where the Cosmere is heading, it will likely require readers to keep up with an even greater amount of homework to make sense of it all. If it does go in that direction, then I worry it could suffer a similar fate to the MCU, burning fans out by focusing on the big sprawling picture over telling individually compelling tales with sharp themes and relatable stakes. The Lost Metal walked that razor's edge more deftly than Wind and Truth or The Sunlit Man in my opinion, but so long as the wider Cosmere is at the forefront, this is a challenge each new book will have to face.
I'm still hopeful for Brandon Sanderson's vision for the Cosmere
Despite my concerns, I'm going to stay optimistic that Sanderson is savvy enough to toe that line and keep readers satisfied. In a way, he was caught between a rock and a hard place with Wind and Truth. Yes, he had to pay off this first arc of The Stormlight Archive, but he also had to satisfy fans who had been waiting many years to see the wider Cosmere come into focus. The world of Roshar's lore is connected to that wider picture, and since this is the author's magnum opus, it feels right that it would also dial into the big picture at some point.
The MCU's troubles have shown just how tricky that balance can be. Part of the reason Phase 4 has suffered is that the studio has taken such a long time to weave its disparate stories together. Yes, you have to do "homework" to keep up with them all, but that work is also spread over many more years than during the first three phases. That's how we ended up with Captain America: Brave New World, a movie which serves as a sequel to the four-year-old television show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, as well as the 2021 movie Eternals and 2008's The Incredible Hulk. Wait too long, and you risk fans losing interest in the web you're weaving; dig into those crossovers too soon or too much, and you risk relying on internal references to such a degree that it undermines the power of the individual story you're trying to tell.
At the end of the day, there's one major advantage that the Cosmere has over the MCU: Brandon Sanderson himself. By all accounts, it sounds like many of Marvel's troubles in Phase 4 and beyond were the result of a corporate mandate from their parent company Disney to produce more, rather than a creative-first decision to do what was best for the company's storytelling. Sanderson doesn't have that problem; he's the head of his own company, and no one writes these books but him. He decides what to write, where to spend time, and how to foster the overall vision of his saga. That means it's much less likely to go fully off the rails in the same way that the MCU did, because we can pretty much count on Sanderson to make these decisions with his own creative vision in mind.
Add in the fact that Sanderson is a master storyteller who has been at this quite a long time, and I'm hopeful he'll avoid the MCU's pitfalls. Perhaps he'll take account of some of the divisive reactions to Wind and Truth; he shouldn't adjust his overall plan just to suit fans — that way lies madness and artistic bankruptcy — but there's probably some middle ground to be found where the Cosmere still has discreet, focused stories as well as massive universe-spanning event books. How well Sanderson will thread that needle, we'll find out when Ghostbloods, the Elantris sequels, and Stormlight 6 come out. Strap in for the long ride, or pull the ripcord and get out now; either is an understandable reaction to this crucial juncture in the Cosmere. But for my part, I'll be sticking with it to see what Sanderson has in store.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.