Tell me about Mistborn
The Mistborn trilogy was the series I released following Elantris. I knew I wanted to follow up with something a little bit longer. Elantris was a standalone, and I wanted to try my hand at a series. I had made a name for myself, with Elantris, for being someone who does something different with fantasy: doesn’t do the same sort of things. Still, I want my books to feel like fantasy, I want them to give you that same feeling of epic wonder that you get in a good fantasy series. I just don’t want to do the same stories that have been done a lot.
And so with this, the inspiration really came from two places. I love the fantasy genre, I read a lot of fantasy books, I love the classics—Tolkien—I love the Harry Potter and the Robert Jordan books. These books all kind of share one similar plot element, which is kind of about the young hero, who goes on a quest to defeat the Dark Lord, which a lot of my classic favorites in fantasy deal with. I thought “Is there something different I can add to this?” I was actually watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies, watching Frodo go on his quest to fight Sauron and defeat the Dark Lord, and I thought about Harry Potter with Voldemort and all of these and I thought “You know, these Dark Lords always get taken down by these peasant kids. What happens if the Dark Lord wins? What happens if the peasant hero loses?”
That idea kicked around in my head for a long time, and I began to think of this story where there had been this young hero, who’d gathered an unlikely band of followers, and they’d gone traipsing off on a quest to defeat the great evil, and they lost: the Dark Lord took over the world, and began to rule. That’s kind of a depressing story: I didn’t to start, I didn’t want that to be the whole story, but that was a beginning.
The other seed for this story was my love for the Heist genre. I love the old Mission Impossible TV show, where you’ve got a gang of specialists who can each do something really unique, and they get together and try and pull off something impossible. I have often wondered: why don’t I see more of this in fantasy? It would be a great way to apply the genre—each person in our team could have a different magical power.
These two ideas rammed together, and I began to conceive this story of a world where the hero had lost, and now, a thousand years later, we’ve got this gang of thieves who say “okay the Peasant Hero, he didn’t save us. the Prophecies, they were all bunk. We’re now ruled by this terrible dark emperor—let’s do this our way. Let’s rob the guy silly, bribe his armies away from him, and overthrow the empire. “And so it’s kind of a different take on the same story, and that’s what I did, and it turned out to be kind of a mix between Lord of the Rings and Ocean’s Eleven and a kung-fu epic and a little bit of My Fair Lady thrown in there for good measure. It’s kind of its own unique thing.
Well Mistborn, the series is a trilogy, and the progression from Book 1 to Book 2 is interesting in that, when I was originally conceiving this trilogy, this series, one of the things I wanted to do is tell the story of what happens once the heroes have already won. I wanted to start where the story usually ends because one of the things I like to do is try and turn the genre on its head, do new things with the genre. When I was planning the series, I decided that the story of the heroes winning is a great story, and that’s one that I wanted to tell. So I actually backed up by a book and started with Book 1, telling the story of the fight against the evil empire by a gang of thieves, trying to rip off the Dark Lord himself. But Book 2 then starts where my original concept had been. What now? I won’t tell you how Book 1 ends, but we’ve got the heroes having done something pretty spectacular, it’s where most books usually end, most series usually end. Book 2 takes up there and says “What now? What do you do now that you’ve pulled off this great accomplishment?” It leads me to some really interesting places, I think, in the series, because I get to tackle things that most people haven’t covered. Most series are done by now. It lets me forge some new ground in the fantasy genre.
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