Tell me a little bit about the new Mistborn book, Alloy of Law [coming out in November 2011]. It seems like the story arc of the original Mistborn trilogy ( The Final Empire , The Well of Ascension , and The Hero of Ages ) was well resolved by the end of the third book. So in what direction does this new one go, if you can say without spoilers?
Well, one of the things that bothers me about a lot of fantasy is that the worlds are strangely static, like we invent all sorts of contrived circumstances to keep them from progressing naturally, because we want stories of a certain type. What we do in fantasy, this kind of idealized time period, in literary terms we call it uchronia. Which in some ways is fun, but it’s not very realistic.
I envisioned a series in which there was real progress. There are books that have done it; the Wheel of Time did it, for example, with the introduction of steam power [into a medieval/Renaissance setting], but I wanted to do a story where I wrote a trilogy which explored a fantasy world, and then do other books years later where that fantasy world has now progressed, and its technology has progressed, so that it’s now almost more of an urban fantasy world. You know, write urban fantasies in a setting where the mythology and history are things you saw take place in the first part of the series.
So you see not just the life of the characters, but the life of their entire world?
This really interested me, because I’d just never seen it done quite the way I wanted to do it. And that’s often where my books come from—I find a place where the genre maybe hasn’t been explored fully, and I get really excited. And so I pitched my editor a series where the first trilogy is an epic fantasy series, and then years later an urban fantasy series, and then years after that a science fiction series, all set in the same world. And the magic exists all through, and it is treated differently in each of these time periods. And that’s what Alloy of Law is: looking at the Mistborn world, hundreds of years later, where society has been rebuilt following the events of the third book.
The analogous time period in our world [for Alloy of Law ‘s setting] would be about 1910, but that’s not really very accurate, because in the Mistborn world there are certain things they’re much better at—metallurgy, for one, obviously—but they’re very poor with communication, because everyone’s very concentrated in one area, so long-distance communication is just not one of the things that’s very important to them. So it’s not a one-to-one correlation. But electricity is starting to be installed in homes, and steam power is used quite extensively.
It sounds to me like it almost might be described as steampunk.
It has one toe dabbling in steampunk, but I don’t call it that because while there is magic and technology, it’s not quite the same. The steampunk genre has a certain Victorian feel to it; there’s an air that makes something steampunk, and this isn’t quite that.
So anyway, it’s the story of a man who lives in the frontier lands, and comes back to the big city because he’s inherited lands and a title. And he has certain things in his past that make him feel it’s time to leave his old life and come to a new one. And the goal here was not epic scope; with The Way of Kings on one side I didn’t want that. This is more a mystery/adventure, and I think it’s really fun.
So the plan is for this to be another trilogy?
I do have another epic trilogy planned for this world in a more modern era, but this is not that. This is actually a sort of side story I decided to start telling. I don’t want to be doing multiple big epics at once, and between The Stormlight Archive and The Wheel of Time, I’ve already got two I’m working on, and that’s enough. With this one I decided to do something a little more action/adventure and a little more self-contained. So Alloy of Law is not the start of a trilogy, though I may do a little more with the characters, but in general the story I wanted to tell is told. So it’s a standalone much the same way Elantris is.
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