The Alloy of Law is newly out and returns to Scadrial, the world of your Mistborn trilogy, but rather than the medieval milieu of high fantasy, instead comprises a late 19th century world of steam trains and industry. This sounds like steampunk, but The Alloy of Law is also very much a “western” in feel, with a former gun-toting Roughs (Wild West) lawman, Wax, returning to the urban metropolis—yet still ending up fighting the bad guys with his wise-cracking buddy, Wayne. So was that fun to do, blending the genres? And what led you to explore that path with your Mistborn world?
I’ve said that what I love about fantasy is that it can do anything any other genre can do, plus have that added sense of wonder. So I’ve wanted to explore different types of what fantasy can achieve. The steampunk movement is awesome for doing this. I don’t actually consider this book to be steampunk, because the Victorian feel and steam technology aren’t there, but it certainly is a cousin to what is happening in steampunk.
At its core, really what I’ve done is write a detective novel. A buddy detective novel set in an early 1900s industrial age equivalent, in a fantasy world where the epic fantasy that I wrote as a trilogy (Mistborn) has become the mythology for this new world. That concept excited me. What made me do it? The idea that I could, and that I hadn’t really seen it done before. That’s what fantasy is all about.
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