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Stormlight archive art5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() He has also “hacked” the publishing industry. He has sold 20 million novels across his career: Rhythm of War, the fourth volume of the Stormlight Archive, topped bestseller lists around the world when published late in 2020. It left me needing a sit down afterwards – and I was seated to begin with. Early in the first book, there is a fantastic set-piece in which an assassin uses magic to switch gravity: he’s running along the side of a wall with a sword drawn, fighting guards at a 45-degree angle. Stormlight is essentially Tolkien if Tolkien had grown up on Marvel. Take, for instance, his ongoing saga the Stormlight Archive: his action-packed version of the Lord of the Rings or George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (from which Game of Thrones is adapted). They are huge and ever-expanding but always immensely bingeable. He is the world’s most popular writer of escapist fiction and a widely acknowledged heir to Tolkien and George RR Martin. That so many would rally to Sanderson is no surprise. I’m not sure this is the guy to be judging another writer,” agreed fantasy author Justin Lee Anderson. ![]() “ is repetitive, over-long, structurally messy and tonally all over the place. “He’s a wonderful bloke who has really earned the right to be a bit more respectfully written about,” tweeted Grimdark Magazine. Even readers lukewarm about his sprawling books have rallied to him following the pole-axing to which he was subjected by Wired. In the case of Sanderson, the effect has been the opposite – at least judging by social media. Similarly, there was much hooting at Succession’s Jeremy Strong after he was tackled from behind by the New Yorker in December 2021. If you dislike someone so much – as the US edition of Wired does – then why write about them at all? It can cause lasting damage too – the reputation of singer MIA never recovered from a vicious 2010 New York Times magazine profile in which she was upbraided for talking about social justice while scoffing truffle fries. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for?” Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Another early part of the piece reads: “He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. Such unabashed vitriol will land oddly to non-American readers. We discover his readers are all nerds too when the magazine visits a Sanderson fan convention and laughs at attendees’ replica swords and the fact that they name their children after Sanderson’s characters. The subtext – actually it’s just the text – is that Sanderson is a dreadful author and, worse yet, a nerd. “Maybe nobody writes about you…because you don’t write very well,” goes an early quote in the piece. Make that 4,000 in the case of a new Wired magazine “profile” of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, in which the best-selling writer is subjected to a thorough biffing-up. This involves a journalist pretending to be friends with a famous person and then demolishing them over 2,000 words or so. One of the weirdest is the glossy magazine “hit piece”. From tipping the barman to pre-teen beauty pageants, America is no stranger to bizarre rituals. ![]()
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