Posts Tagged: Shadows of Self

THE ALLOY OF LAW by Brandon Sanderson

“Tor Books is eye-wideningly excited to announce that TWO new Mistborn novels by Brandon Sanderson will be released in late 2015!” announced Tor.com today. Sanderson fans were already aware that the first of these novels, Shadows of Self, was due for a 2015 release, but the announcement of a 2015 release for Bands on Mourning (which is, like, the most post-ironic black metal band collaborative name ever) is a pleasant surprise.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned in ten years of working with Brandon, it’s that he almost always delivers more than we’ve asked for and that he loves to surprise us,” said Sanderson’s agent, Moshe Feder.

Tor Books’s proclamation that Sanderson’s releasing two novels next year is a tad misleading. Shadows of Self will hit shelves in October 2015, but Bands of Mourning won’t arrive until January 2016.

Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning are the concluding volumes in Sanderson’s Mistborn pedantically-named spinoff series, the Wax and Wayne Mistborn tetralogy. Given my enjoyment of the first volume, The Alloy of Law, I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of fun Sanderson has with Wax and Wayne on their next outing(s).

UPDATE – 12-19-2014: Sanderson has revealed that there’s actually a third Mistborn novel, tentatively titled The Lost Metal, coming. This will bump the full Wax and Wayne Mistborn series to four books at its conclusion. The final three volumes announced here will be feature a more traditional trilogy structure, with The Alloy of Law acting as a prequel/set-up narrative. The trilogy will include: Shadows of Self, Bands of Mourning, and The Lost Metal. Sanderson then plans to work on the next Mistborn trilogy, tentatively set in a world that mirrors the 1980s (or, he hints, there’s a possibility that he’ll write something set in an amalgam of the ’40s.)

Gollancz has announced that Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning will be released in the UK in October 2015 and January 2016 respectively.

mistborn

Tor Books announced today that they have acquired two more Mistborn novels from Brandon Sanderson. These two novels will be set in the same timeframe as The Alloy of Law, the standalone sequel to Sanderson’s popular trilogy, and will likely be of similar length. The first of these novels is titled Shadows of Self. According to Tor, the series is about “a team of cowboy detectives who investigate crimes that arise in a Scadrial that is rapidly approaching modernity.”

Sanderson on the upcoming Mistborn novels:

[O]ne thing I’ve wanted from the beginning of the Mistborn series was to show the interactions of magic with technology and society through different eras of that world’s development. There is much more to explore with Waxillium Ladrian, his comrade Wayne, and their time period, so we’re going to stay with them for a couple more books. I think you’re going to like what’s coming.

Moshe Feder, Sanderson’s agent, describes the deal as ‘the biggest’ they’ve done with Sanderson, and reconfirmed that these books are not part of the ‘trilogy of trilogies’ that Sanderson has described on several occasions. Instead, they are ‘bonus books.’

Feder describes the ‘trilogy of trilogies’:

The Mistborn series was conceived as a trilogy of trilogies. The first was set in what will eventually be thought of as Scadrial’s mythological past. The second will be set in Scadrial’s equivalent of Earth’s 20th century. The third will be in its high-tech future, roughly the Mistborn equivalent of Star Trek’s world. Obviously, the second and third trilogies are going to offer exciting opportunities for science and magic to combine and clash. I can’t wait to see what Brandon will do with that!

The Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self take place about 75 years before the second trilogy in the planned ‘trilogy of trilogies.’ There is no release date for the second trilogy.

Shadows of Self is tentatively scheduled for release in Fall, 2014. The third novel will follow in 2015.