General YouTube 2024

Brandon Sanderson

The 2024 edition of the reading order of my books.

I generally do not recommend publication order. Why is this? That's because I feel like my first book, Elantris, is actually one of my weaker novels. Still, I hope you will someday read it. I do think it holds up moderately well. But it's not up to the caliber of what I write right now.

I would recommend, if you're just coming into this blind:

I would say read the original Mistborn trilogy, Mistborn One, Two, and Three.

Then, I would jump, and I would read Warbreaker.

Then, I would jump, and I would read another of the standalones, probably Tress of the Emerald Sea.

From there, I would jump, and I would start into the Stormlight Archive. And I don't know if I would read straight through the Stormlight Archive; each of those books are enormous. I might take breaks with the Wax and Wayne series, or the other standalones, such as Elantris or Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, and read those.

I do intend for people to read Dawnshard and Edgedancer in the middle of the Stormlight Archive; so Edgedancer, I would read after Book Two; Dawnshard, I would read after Book Three. And The Sunlit Man, I would read after Book Four. That's a standalone novel; it is intended to be read before you read Stormlight Five.

Where would I, then, add the short stories in? The rest, it doesn't matter that much. You can splice in Sixth of the Dusk, Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell, basically wherever you feel like they're appropriate and you want something a little shorter. They're collected in the volume Arcanum Unbounded.

Dan Wells

Now, you're talking about possibly (no promises being made) a revision and an actual release of White Sand. Is that something you would ever consider doing with Dragonsteel Prime or Aether of Night?

Brandon Sanderson

No. Main reasons being that they're too far out of continuity. I haven't been considering them in continuity. Like, Aether of Night, they fight Midnight Essence; shows up in Stormlight, shows up in Tress of the Emerald Sea. And we delve into the first appearances of a Shard of Adonalsium, but that Shard's no longer canon. And the worldbuilding of Aether of Night is totally canon; aethers have been showing up since late 2000s in my books. But Aether of Night, there's nothing about that book, of the actual plot and characters, there's nothing about that that is appealing to me or interesting to me. Hopefully, I will eventually write a book set on the aether planet, where the Aethers come from, which is where Aether of Night was. But that planet's completely different, and the story'll be completely different. Those characters aren't relevant to me.

Dragonsteel, I consider lightly canon to the Cosmere in that the events of Dragonsteel happen, mostly, but the worldbuilding's been refined so much that eventually I will write the book that will be called Dragonsteel (or maybe the series), but it'll now be Hoid's story, rather than Jerick's story. And it'll be a completely different type of story. Though little bits of it will be recognizable.

White Sand's the one that's still canon; I've been considering it canon all along. There's no events in White Sand that disrupt that. The characters are still really interesting to me. Khriss has shown up all over the Cosmere, and she's a main character in it. Baon's shown up in Stormlight twice, now (as of the little reading I did recently), so I wanna get a real good canon prose version of White Sand out there for those who don't want the graphic novel, so that it can be in the line. The big question I have, though, is: will I sit down to write it and be like, "I need to start on page one and just do this over?" Or will I be able to revise it and release it?

Brandon Sanderson

It is, frankly, a bit of a miracle that this [Secret Project Five] manifests in the middle of Stormlight Five. And it only did because I had a little bit of momentum on it from a number of years ago. And you'll find out once that is once we do more of the reveals. But it's something I've been writing on for maybe seven, eight years.

I wrote a bunch of this in Hawaii last year. I took some time and relaxed; I actually had two trips to Hawaii last year, one with the whole family, and then one with just myself and Emily. And that's where the bulk of this was written, was during those two trips.

Dan Wells

Secret Project Five is much shorter and more compact. It's got, I think, really only two POVs.

Brandon Sanderson

Something else I wanted to talk about with this. You mentioned High Cosmere Connectivity; I worked forever trying to figure out how to write that phrase. Because it had to fit in, like, two or three words on the screen. And it had to explain... and I'm not sure if people will understand, even still, what we're getting across. Because what I really wanted to say is: this book isn't intended for first-time Cosmere readers (though if you are a first-time Cosmere reader and you understand that, you'll probably have a good time). The rest of you probably should read a few Cosmere books before you pick this one up, then you will really enjoy it better. That's what I wanted to write; that's not three words.

If they know they're jumping into future era where there's a lot more cosmere connectivity... but, the story reads just fine on its own. There are plenty of people who could read this book, not know anything, and enjoy it quite a bit. It doesn't require you to have read other books to understand. But...

And some people don't like a lot of cosmere connections. And this one does have them. It's got characters from multiple different planets; some you've seen, some you haven't. And it's taking place, kind of dealing with future era sort of stuff. I think most readers will enjoy it, but I do want you to be aware of that, right? There are some people who are just like, "I just want to read Stormlight Archive, and I don't want to worry about the larger mess." And this is probably not something they would like.

Dan Wells

One of the things, as I was reading it (because I was keeping this idea in mind of how accessible is it to new readers), in a lot of ways I think... Imagine Lord of the Rings, except it starts after they've already left the Shire. So you don't actually get to see the homeland of anyone in the Fellowship. But you hear about their homeland, and they brag about their homeland to each other. That still works, right? It's very Guardians of the Galaxy; other than Earth, you don't really see anyone's homeworld. But you can accept, "Okay, these are all the adventurers that have come together to do the thing."

Brandon Sanderson

My number two was a book I don't think you ever read because I wasn't submitting to the writing group. It's called Star's End.

Dan Wells

I've heard of Star's End, and I've read some of Star's End. But you didn't submit it to the writing group, I think that was just Leading Edge read that. 

Brandon Sanderson

My early books I wanted to try a bunch of different genres. So this is - not really a space opera, I don't know what to call it. It's like a Star Trek episode. That's what it's like. It is a guy who gets assigned to a station whose job is to try to harness all the energy of an upcoming supernova. And they're trying to figure out how to make kind of like an expandable Dyson Sphere of energy receptors, that will with the nova go bigger and bigger, and be trapping a lot of this released energy. I don't know why I didn't just go with a Dyson Sphere, but yeah. 

I was new, I hadn't read all that much science fiction. But it plays out much more like a Star Trek episode with technobabble rather than science, so it's not hard science.

And he shows up and it turns out this space station has become a confluence - he's in charge of it but a bunch of alien species are very interested in what's happening here, and they start showing up and jockeying for political position with the energy that's going to come from this station. And there's a mystery, there's a murder and all sorts of things ensue. It's basically murder mystery/ interaction with weird aliens. So like I said,  very Star Trek-y.

Brandon Sanderson

My fourth book, Knight Life (with a 'k') - it wasn't a Pratchett-esque thing, because I didn't know Prachett back then ... it was Bob Asprin. It was very Bob Asprin inspired. Very pun, and very light comedy, not real social commentary, not that kind of extra layer that Prachett or Adams could layer on. And just kind of silly fantasy about the last barbarian who ever lived and his sidekick. 

Brandon Sanderson

Speaking of the convention. I named this convention Dragonsteel years ago. I was the one that came up with that. But we always knew it would need something a little bit more. Our company is named Dragonsteel, right? It gets a little bit confusing. We wanted to take our time, and I'm actually going to announce our rebrand today. We've finally, all of our team, gotten together and have figured out what we want to call it. Because, you see, there's this place in the Cosmere that I have named, and it turns out that part of that name, there are no major conventions named this.

I'm going to announce the name of our convention going forward. And it's going to be: Dragonsteel Nexus. And you will find out what the Nexus means as you read further in the Cosmere, but we really liked the idea of bringing people together, and things like this. And so, we are going to be calling it Dragonsteel Nexus, or Nexus 2024, if you want to call it that.

We spent a lot of time on this, so I hope you guys will enjoy that. It's gonna just work a little bit better.

Brandon Sanderson

My projects for the next six months are: finish revisions on Isles of the Emberdark, which is Secret Project Five. I haven't outlined a finish date for that yet; I'll keep you up to date on that. I've just been taking a few days off, so I haven't even started on that yet.

Do a canon prose version of White Sand from my original draft, which was one of the books I wrote right around when I wrote Elantris. That, I still don't know how much work that's gonna take. I've never done that before. But the core of that book is good, it just needs some updates to the writing and some of these things. So, we will see.

And then, I wanna make sure that we have a collection of my non-Cosmere short fiction all together. There might be... there's a few stories I would like to get into that, that aren't good enough shape yet, that I haven't released.

So, I would like to get all those things done by January 1st. With the goal being on January 1st (oh, and I need to outline Era 3), and January 1st, I start on Era 3 of Mistborn.

Brandon Sanderson

My goal is for this [Cosmere RPG] to, hopefully, be supported as long as I am writing Cosmere books, and beyond. We are in this one for the long haul.

Johnny O'Neal

Where would you like to see us go from here [with the Cosmere RPG]? Not necessarily what's the very next thing that we're going to do after Mistborn, but where would you like to see the system go?

Brandon Sanderson

I am looking forward to when we do Silverlight, and kind of like the hub of knowledge in the cosmere, and how that looks as an RPG. I imagine we'll do, at the same time, a lot of the smaller things. Maybe even some stories I haven't gotten to yet, where we're like, "Here's five pages on a bunch of different planets that we don't have books in." I'm looking forward to something like that.

Brandon Sanderson

We have decided that, instead of supporting Black Friday, we'll just start doing our holiday sales about a month early. We actually picked the name Light Day, which is out of the Stormlight Archive. Fun fact about that: I originally called it Sun Day, it's the day that they see the sun in the middle of the Weeping. Then, I'm like, "Eh..." Sun Day has connotations, and things.

Brandon Sanderson

I will need to do another draft of this [Moment Zero] before December, because we are hoping to release this for Nexus next year.

Questioner

Does the [Stormlight] RPG spoil anything beyond the current books that we should be avoiding if we're worried about that?

Brandon Sanderson

It includes Wind and Truth.

Yes, mild spoilers for beyond Wind and Truth. It does spoil Radiant Oaths, though we have kept the last two Oaths specifically vague for all of the Orders. In the rules, it's like, "It's something like this, but let your player drive." That's a change we actually made a little bit last minute, where we were giving more specifics on four and five, and I'm like, "Let's just pull back on both of those." But there will be Oaths for Orders we haven't talked about. I mean, you already kind of started to get those spoilers in the previous Kickstarters, with the coins and things like that, but that's in there.

I never ended up using Rall Elorim and some other places on the map that I had planned to get to, that I might still go to in the back five. And they are explained in the book, what they are, what's going on there, and some of the stuff that I might eventually get to. It's in here first.

So, yeah, there's some mild spoilers.

And the campaign that you get to play (again, we're trying to keep that pretty secret) is a narrative hole in the books that I someday planned to plug, and never found a spot, and am not planning to plug in any other way. This is the place to get that story.

Brandon Sanderson

Started working on Stormlight Archive 2001; eventually had Way of Kings Prime. And Book Five here has the ending of what I had imagined when I started working on Stormlight Archive. This was the end of the series in the very, very early outlines. Which is why I talk about this being two five-book arcs. As I came back to it later, it was not the actual ending, and as I've plotted the ten books... You'll see why. This is a midpoint.

Questioner

As the cosmere enters the space age, will spaceship travel become the preferred method due to the Cognitive Realm lengthening as knowledge of the cosmos improves?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. The Cognitive Realm will enlarge as understanding improves, but here's the thing. Human beings are really, really, really, really bad at conceptualizing large numbers, spaces, and things like that. So, even as they imagine how big the space between planets is, it's going to actually be a fraction of the actual distance. So, traveling through the Cognitive Realm will remain the preferred method and remain much faster, unless you can get true FTL, which is still very expensive and difficult. I think it's still gonna be the preferred method. But you're right; Shadesmar will lengthen, the distances will lengthen between planets as people's conceptions of them more accurately represent real life.

Questioner

In Firefight, when Mizzy and David were talking, [which] Great Falls did the special Surgeon move from?

Brandon Sanderson

Great falls, Idaho, I believe. Oh, no, it's Great Falls Virginia, because Ryan my friend's from Great Falls Virginia, so most likely it was from Great Falls Virginia.

Emily Sanderson

Will there be a seventh book in the series? *laughs*

Brandon Sanderson

No promises. I have no plans currently to do a seventh book in the series.

Emily Sanderson

But you never know when inspiration will strike.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. You never know but don't hold your breath.

Emily Sanderson

Yeah.