Brandon Sanderson, "The Final Empire"

Who is the highest rated fantasy writer on Goodreads? Brandon Sanderson.

So, in my ongoing quest to remain up-to-date on the world of fantasy writing, I got a recorded version of his first book, The Final Empire, to listen to with my youngest son on a recent trip. After half an hour my son was so bored we turned it off.

So there's my first gripe, that after being told by all the agents that my book was too long and slow-moving, I discover that Brandon Sanderson got published despite his book being much longer than mine and having a dreary beginning.

But I forged on. It does get better, at least in one limited sense: there is a lot of entertaining action. Think John Wick or The Matrix, not LOTR. The magic system makes its practitioners into a combination of Spider Man and Wolverine, and they spend a lot of time flying around cities and dispatching evil minions by tricks like using telekinetic powers to turn coins into bullets. It's kind of fun, even exciting at times, but it is not the least bit magical, at least as I understand the word.

So that's my second gripe: The Final Empire does not do, at all, the thing that makes me love fantasy, taking me away to a world of mystery and wonder. Instead it takes us into a comic book.

And third: I have an ever-growing list of Things that Tick Me Off in Fantasy Writing, and Brandon Sanderson checks every single box.

To begin with, the bad guys are pointlessly, self-destructively bad. The Dark Lord – he is called the Lord Ruler, but we might as well just call him by his proper title – is really, really bad. He is so bad that under his reign, all the plants are brown. But making plants that survive without chlorophyll is not the limit of his prowess as a plant geneticist! He has also, somehow, eliminated flowers, even though the main thing the nobles of this world seem to eat is fruit. Fruit without flowers! Truly this man is an evil genius to be reckoned with.

Then there are the nobles, who are both puzzlingly irrelevent and just as pointlessly bad as the head bad guy. Most of them seem to live on plantations where the serfs are so oppressed they would make your heart ache if it weren't so ridiculous. First, they are always starving, which is a lousy way to treat your workers if you want anything done. Second, the attractive women among them are always being taken away by their lords for sexual purposes, but that isn't evil enough, no, because, see, the Dark Lord has a stringent rule against the creation of half-breeds, which means that all the women so used have to be killed. The nobles don't care that they routinely murder the healthiest females of their working population because the serfs somehow have a very high birth rate – up to twelve per woman, we hear – despite surviving on a calorically inadequate, nutritionally pathetic diet. Third, these people are so oppressed that they seem to have no culture at all; no music, no stories about clever rabbits outwitting wolves and lions, no local recipes for cheese, nothing at all except misery. Nobody suffers like they suffer.

The Final Empire has, we are told, a very impressive canal system along which most goods move, but I don't believe it because all the canal boats are pulled by teams of men. I mean, mules can do the same work at about a tenth of the cost, but that wouldn't be evil and oppressive enough.

But besides oppressing their poor serfs, the nobles don't do very much. The running of the empire seems to be mostly carried out by a caste of religious bureaucrats. The nobles spend their time trying to get rich off half-baked business schemes and inviting each other to balls. Business seems to be mainly transacted via deals between noble houses who are always worried that the other party is cheating them.

So I'm reading this and thinking, if I were a minor noble in this world I wouldn't have any trouble making my house the richest in the empire within a few years. First, I'm going to pull my canal boats with mules, which will allow me to massively undercut the prices of all my competitors. Using some of the profit from that radical scheme I'm going to set up an actual market where things can be traded and prices can find their natural level. I would think a one percent commission on this genius innovation would make my house the richest around in no time, and surely the other houses would pay this to escape from the constant fear of being cheated. I could even regulate the grain trade using, say, the provisions in the Code of Hammurabi, since the Mesopotamians somehow managed to invent regulated public markets at a technological level 4,000 years behind that of the Final Empire.

What is the technological level of the Final Empire? Glad you asked! Warfare is medieval, mostly done with swords and spears, and books are all hand-copied. But everything else seems taken from a random grab bag of European centuries. Besides the aforementioned canal system we have seventeenth-century political writing, eighteenth-century clothes, nineteenth-century ballroom dancing, limelight (invented in 1820), anarchist noblemen like certain Russians of the 1860s, and, of course, hidden somewhere offstage, the genetic labs where the Dark Lord develops marvelous innovations like flowerless fruit. The poor live in Timelessly Miserable Huts but the rich have private rooms with doors and other modern arrangements of space, so anyway after 1650. I know it is pedantic of me but this sort of guess-the-century historical miscellany plays havoc with my suspension of disbelief.

And who are our heroes? A gang of about a dozen thieves. Yes, in Brandon Sanderson's imagination, the people to overthrow this whole gigantic system of oppression (it takes months to travel across even the central districts of this empire) are a "crew" of swindlers who call their rebellion a "job."

They have a Plan, or Scheme, which is completely ridiculous under whatever name you want to give it. Imagine sending the Dirty Dozen to overthrow the Soviet Union. True, two of the dozen are Spider Man and Wolverine, but the Final Empire has dozens of supervillains who are their match, and the Dark Lord is at least rumored to be the greatest supervillain of them all.

And yet, protected by unbreachable plot armor, our band of heroes trundles on toward a Great Confrontation with the Dark Lord.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the Plan depends on some of these low-class thieves being able to impersonate nobles, this in a society where the distinction between the classes is at least as profound as any on earth, and they can learn to do this in two weeks. And during the two weeks when our cute irrepressible heroine is learning to act like a noble she is also learning to read. Within a month she is pounding her way through thick, thousand-year-old tomes of history.

Sigh.

So here, it seems, is the new formula for popular fantasy: lots of action, a couple of superheroes who fly around dispatching bad guys in neato ways, some sort of psychic powers to which one might apply the word "magic," and a bad, bad, bad Dark Lord. Very bad. Oh so bad. He must be opposed by a Band of Unlikely Heroes, each with his or her own traumatic backstory. The Dark Lord must be incredibly, astonishingly, superhumanly, superabundantly, way over the top powerful, but he must also have some bizarre weakness that nobody else has figured out in a thousand years but which the cute, perky heroine can divine in the midst of a twenty-page battle scene. Wrap it up with some vague stuff about ancient myths and prophecies, and, well, here we are.