Mistborn got the Elbakin.net award for the best 2010 foreign novel. What does this trilogy represent for you in your career?
It represents several things. It is my attempt to expand the fantasy genre a little bit. I grew up reading fantasy and loving it; I love the great fantasy novels of my youth. Some of my favorite authors were Anne McCaffrey, Robert Jordan and Melanie Rawn, who I think is very underappreciated. I absolutely love their work—Tad Williams, David Eddings—and yet as a reader and a fan of fantasy, it seemed like during the late nineties and early 2000s, we hit kind of a slump in adult fantasy, particularly epic fantasy, which I write. And there were really exciting things happening in young adult fantasy—if you go look at some of the authors like Garth Nix or J.K. Rowling, who were doing really amazing work—but epic fantasy kind of slumped a little bit. I’m sure there were great things being published, it’s just that they didn’t get a lot of mainstream attention. It seemed like a lot of the authors who got mainstream attention were all trying to do the same story that had already been done, a lot. The young boy from an unknown village finds out he has an amazing noble heritage and has to defeat the dark lord…
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that story; that’s a good story, but it’s not the only story. And for a lot of time, fantasy seemed to be having trouble growing out of its youth and growing up. As a reader I was very frustrated with this. I really wanted fantasy to step up and go beyond that. So when I started writing my own works and working on them, I was really looking for places to explore, that could expand upon this lore and take different directions. Mistborn represents several concepts of me, just as a reader and as a writer, trying to explore these new directions to go. I’m certainly not the only one doing it.
The first book is about: what happens if evil has won? And in a lot of ways the second book is part of what started me in the trilogy. One of the big foundations or concepts was: what next? We always hear about the easy part. I always say that overthrowing something, tearing something down, actually seems easier to me than building it up. Then what next, after you’ve caused this great revolution, after you’ve blown up the Death Star and taken down the Empire? I think then you’re going to realize that, whoa, administering something that large is enormously difficult, far more difficult than tearing it down.
So it just represents my attempts and struggles as a writer and as a fan to wonder beyond fantasy’s older lessons and try to figure out what we’re going to be as an adult genre, as we grow up.
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