JOURNEY BEFORE DESTINATION - THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE IS PEAK FICTION

BLAKE MORRISON - Writer, 2nd Year, English and Japanese

"What is the most important word a man can write? It’s the next one. Always the next word."

A little over a year ago, I started reading The Stormlight Archive, the ongoing epic fantasy novel series by Brandon Sanderson. This was unprecedented for me. I hadn’t read anything by Sanderson before. I hadn’t even read many fantasy novels other than the short and simple ones I read as a kid, and those hardly count given how little I remember of them. Before Stormlight, my understanding of fantasy as a genre essentially started and stopped with The Lord of the Rings. Sure, I’ve also read some fantasy manga and watched some fantasy anime, but other than a few notable exceptions like Berserk, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Made in Abyss, most fantasy anime and manga that actually have fantasy settings and not just fantasy elements are highly derivative isekai series or dragged out shonen series that often make me feel like I’m wasting my time. It’s not simply the length of these shonen fantasy series I’m adverse to. Rather, I dislike how much of their runtime is spent on battles with obvious outcomes and on showcasing the special abilities of every newly introduced character and on cookiecutter evil organizations and blah blah blah. It doesn’t help that most fantasy anime have soft magic systems, which means that the rules of the system aren’t rigidly defined, which means that the character with the stronger will and the better friendship speech is probably going to win any given fight. Like they say: where there’s a will there’s a power of friendship speech. But enough about anime. Until a year ago, I thought fantasy stories were mostly The Lord of the Rings clones or trash isekai anime, and in hindsight, it’s obvious that was because the only fantasy stories I had consumed for the past five years were The Lord of the Rings and fantasy anime and manga. The Stormlight Archive illuminated just how ignorant I was. If the average seasonal isekai series is the nadir of modern fantasy, then Stormlight is the shining pinnacle.

Interestingly, Brandon Sanderson himself claims that Stormlight is his one novel series that he doesn’t have a concise pitch for. This makes some amount of sense, as starting right with the series’ first entry The Way of Kings, every main book is structured as three novels in one, with three main perspective characters dealing with their own trials and tribulations. It might not be concise, but I think that one can still pitch The Way of Kings as they can any great book, albeit with a separate section for each main character... And one more section for the unique setting because it’s fascinating enough to merit it. The Stormlight Archive takes place on the continent/world of Roshar, a fantasy setting unlike anything you’ve ever seen in fiction. With the exception of the lands far to the west, there are no wide open plains of grass or even the soil to grow them in. Roshar mostly consists of rocky terrain, and what hardy plants there are growing between the cracks have evolved to recede away from any movement towards them. Instead of soft-skinned and furred mammals, crustacean-like creatures of chitin and carapace crawl through the lands. There may seem to be little believability to this setting at first, but that all changes once you learn that every few days, what’s known as a highstorm sweeps across Roshar from east to west. The highstorm is at its strongest when it first hits Roshar on its eastern edge, tearing through the land in a stormwall several hundreds of feet high that can toss the occasional boulder with the force of its winds and rains alone. Flora that retreat into the cracks of rocks at a touch. Fauna covered in protective shells. All of Roshar’s ecology uniquely evolved under the influence of the highstorms. And that’s just the tip of the stormwall of what makes Roshar unique.

In Roshar, each and every natural phenomenon and human emotion attracts what’s known as a spren. Think of spren as incorporeal beings. They’re essentially spirits that embody the phenomenon or emotion they accompany. Just to name a few: rain attracts rain spren, appearing as long blue cylinders with black eyes that grow out of puddles, anger attracts anger spren, appearing as pools of bubbling black tar, and wind attracts windspren, appearing to whoever they choose as flying ribbons of light and can mimic voices and the appearance of small objects blown about in the wind. Spren are generally considered to not possess a will of their own, but some exhibit strikingly personified behavior. For instance, wind spren often appear where they are not wanted and seem to play pranks on humans by sticking certain objects to surfaces when someone tries to pick them up. It is in Roshar, this world of storms, crab monsters, and spren, that we find our main characters of The Way of Kings. Kaladin is a former squad-leader in the Alethkar army, the most fiercely militaristic nation on Roshar, who was recently branded a slave in that very same country. Alethkar is waging a war with the Parshendi, an intelligent race of carapace covered bipeds, in retaliation for the latter’s assassination of their king five years ago. The Alethi have gathered their forces in the Shattered Plains, the homeland of the Parshendi practically at the eastern tip of Roshar, where the highstorms are fiercest and the landscape is barren and desolate. It is this so-called War of Reckoning that the Alethi wage against the Parshendi that Kaladin is brought to at the start of the book. Kaladin, along with groups of the other slaves of the Alethi armies, is forced to run ahead of the Alethi forces during battles without any weapons, armor, or shields. Their purpose is to place bridges across the many caverns separating the plateaued landscape of the Shattered Plains so that Alethi armies can cross and engage the enemy, facing down waves of Parshendi arrows that kill them in droves. But no matter how many slaves fall, there are more to take their place. This is the hell that Kaladin finds himself in, sentenced to certain death by the army he once served.

But a tiny light shines through the darkness. Ever since he arrived at the Shattered Plains, Kaladin has noticed a mischievous windspren, one that seems to follow him, plays pranks on him, and mimics his grumblings at it to stop. This guy just can’t catch a break. But then it stops simply mimicking his voice and starts forming words of its own. They are simple words at first, expressing simple thoughts, but they are signs of intelligence nonetheless. Already at the lowest point of his life soon after the book begins, Kaladin is suddenly confronted by the mystery of this intelligent windspren. How is it communicating with him? And for that matter, how did Kaladin end up as a slave? And how did he end up as a soldier in the first place despite training all his youth to become a doctor? These are questions that The Way of Kings answers in a slow drip feed, like the slow rise of water behind a dam. Eventually, after over a thousand pages of buildup, that dam bursts in what is perhaps the best executed and most emotionally affecting climax I’ve ever experienced in fiction. Although The Way of Kings features two other main characters, Kaladin is the main main character, so to speak. Each book in the series has a central “flashback character” that has much of their backstory explored in flashback chapters placed throughout the book, and Kaladin is the flashback character of The Way of Kings.

The other main characters are Shallan Davar and Dalinar Kholin. Shallan, the youngest daughter of a noble house down on its luck, has been sent by what remains of her family to save them from ruination by stealing a soulcaster, a rare non-manufacturable device that can transmute objects and the elements, to put it simply. Dalinar, one of the ten highprinces who rule over Alethkar, finds himself disillusioned with the protracted War of Reckoning and the other highprinces who continue to wage it not out of vengeance for their late king, who was Dalinar’s older brother, but out of avarice and vanity. The Way of Kings switches between the perspectives of these three characters, often slowing the pace of each individual character arc a bit too much for even the most patient readers, but at the same time expanding the scope of the story to a wide spectrum of eastern Roshar’s social classes. Kaladin is a commoner turned soldier turned slave. Shallan is a sheltered noble turned thief masquerading as a scholar. Dalinar is the late king of Alethkar’s brother, figuring as the main character of the highest social class in the book but also the one with the most experience as a man in his middle years. Stormlight isn’t the fantasy story of naive heroes setting out on a quest for adventure. It’s about scarred and world-weary people who are stuck in their current situations. Kaladin is stuck in the shattered plains as a slave. Shallan is stuck seeking the chance to save her family from their debts as a thief. Dalinar is stuck in the War of Reckoning as one of the Alethi leaders expected to pursue it more fervently than anyone else. characters descend into low points, deep low points. Most canonized literature is also depressing, because as a writer once said: it’s the struggle of the human heart in conflict with itself, or something like that, that is the only thing worth writing about. But most depressing canonized literature stays depressing. In Stormlight, like most popular fiction, the characters tear themselves out of their low points and make progress. But as another writer once wrote: you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. Depression doesn’t just go away, trauma doesn’t just go away, mistakes don’t just go away. The main characters of Stormlight, no matter how much progress they make, carry with themselves on page 5000 the same baggage they did from page 1, only now there’s more baggage to carry with it. In the latest book in the series, Rhythm of War, one of the main characters relapses into depression. That is their main arc throughout this entire 460,000 word long book. Yeah. Not exactly popcorn material, but by no means an exercise in defeatist negativity. These characters may not be able to magically think away their hangups, but they do work to change the way they perceive them, taking two steps forward and stumbling one step back, but always taking that next step onwards. Always the next one. Even more than the fascinating setting, the persistent emotional vulnerability of Stormlight’s characters is what has invested me the most in this series.

The Stormlight Archive isn’t just a fantasy novel series. It’s an epic fantasy novel series. You may be wondering: How can an adjective as overused and drained of meaning as “epic” make any difference? Well, for one, calling a story epic makes you expect a longer affair told on a large scale, which is exactly the case for Stormlight. The first two books in the series, The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, are each around 400,000 words long, while the third and fourth books, Oathbringer and Rhythm of War, are each around 450,000 words long, making the series currently about 1.8 million words if you include the two novella side stories. If the pattern of each subsequent book in the series being longer than the last holds for the fifth book currently being written, the total word count for the first half of the series will be more than twice as long as all of Harry Potter. You read that right. The first half. There are a total of ten books planned for the series. Needless to say, even just starting The Stormlight Archive is a big commitment, but it’s one that only seems intimidating from the outside looking in. Once you start reading, you realize that almost every chapter is well-paced, progresses the plot, and reveals information about the characters in a tantalizing drip feed of both backstory and forward momentum in their character arcs. Unlike a fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings where the characters often take a back seat to worldbuilding exposition dumps via the third-person omniscient narrator, the chapters of Stormlight are all told in a third-person limited voice that closely focalizes one character at a time. The narrator never gives pure exposition not directly connected to the character’s actions, observations, and thoughts for more than a few sentences in a row. It may be an epic fantasy series, but individual chapters intimately focus on the POV of individual characters and clearly demarcate when a chapter occasionally switches perspective midway through. The narrator never breaks from the perspective of the focalized character to dump exposition that said character wouldn’t know about or to philosophize about the duality of man and the duplicity of nations and the long history of that grove of trees that the fellowship just walked by and yada yada yada.

The sub-genre of epic fantasy is also pretty much synonymous with high fantasy, as both denote stories that take place in a world entirely apart from ours, as opposed to low fantasy stories like Harry Potter which do not. Beyond technical differences, though, an epic fantasy takes place on a, you guessed it, epic scale. Think of journeys across vast lands and diverse cultures, wars being waged on a continental scale, characters who find themselves with the choice of wielding great power in return for shouldering even greater responsibility, humanity-ending and or world-ending stakes. These are all the conventions most people associate with The Lord of the Rings, but unlike what many critics claim, J.R.R. Tolkien’s work isn’t the peak of the genre let alone the only epic fantasy with literary merit. Speaking as someone who once thought that by reading TLotR I could safely skip all the other fantasy novels overshadowed by its influence, let me tell you, if one views TLotR as a piece of fiction and not an classic immune to criticism, it falls apart as a wellpaced story. Don’t get me wrong. If you’re in the mood for four paragraphs of exposition for every one of character action, TLotR is a masterpiece. I’d argue that the appeal of TLotR, specifically the books, is that they’re novel histories, which to say that they’re mostly concerned with telling the reader about an intricately thought-out world than they are with telling an engaging story, and that’s fine. But what if you could have both? An intricately thought-out world that mainly acts a stage for, not an impediment to, an engaging story? Enter The Stormlight Archive. If you thought that fantasy novels were expository and verbose affairs, then this series will change your mind. Stormlight even inspired me to branch out and read other fantasy series like The Wheel of Time and The Kingkiller Chronicle, but good as they are, Stormlight remains my favorite fantasy novel series thus far. Sanderson is a writer who loves creating rich fictional worlds, but he doesn’t lose sight of the characters and the plot needed to make those worlds come alive, needed to make the reader care.