Hi, this is Scott Sigler, the author of Infected , Contagious and Ancestor , and you are listening to the SupaNova podcast series!
Everyone welcome Brandon Sanderson. [applause] Thanks guys. I—hey, I see a Doctor Horrible out there. Nice!—I usually like to, when I do something like this, do a reading of something you can’t hear somewhere else, and so—something published. Unfortunately I can’t read to you from A Memory of Light . Now you go “Awwwwww.” I know. Harriet is doing a reading from that at JordanCon, and I can’t read anything from it before we do the reading at JordanCon—it just didn’t seem appropriate—and so, instead, I’m just going to read to you shortly from a novella I’ve been working on called Legion , and I’ll do that for maybe ten minutes, and then after that I’ll just do a Q&A. So are we all capable of hearing? Am I holding the mic in the right way? We’re all good? Okay, great. Hey, Anika, can I get a water? I didn’t bring one. I left one on my table? That might be….that’s my handler. I’m going to run out of….ahem ahem…my throat is going to need that. So I’m quickly going to, if you don’t mind, sit down and read to you from this. Oh! They’re right there. Wow, that was fast.
This is a fun story. This story came from me sitting around….uh, it’s got a great history. I have a friend named Dan Wells who writes stories about people with deep psychological problems, and I was sitting and talking to him about deep psychological problems, and I started saying, “Hey, I got this great idea; you should write this story! Yada yada yada, yada yada yada yada yada…” and I kept telling about this great story he should write, and he said, “Go write it Brandon!” Um…it’s not something I had ever done before. It is a modern setting. It does have a science fiction twist, but it’s way cool. So I went ahead and gave it a try, had this concept for it, and it actually kinda turned out. I liked it. So I went ahead and I am releasing it with a small press, ‘cause it’s just a novella, this summer. You can get it from them at Subterranean Press, if you’re interested—they’re doing preorders—but we’ll also do it as an ebook release at the same time, so if you want the nice collector’s hardcover that they’re selling, Subterranean has those; if instead you just want to read the story and get it cheap, then you can get it on Amazon or any of those places; we’ll probably even put it up on our website.
So, I will just start this; it’s kind of a—like I said—shorter reading, and then we’ll do the Q&A.
[cut reading]
And I’m going to stop there. [applause] So, the story is about this guy who is a complete genius, but the way his mind works is, he will research a topic, learn everything about it very quickly, but the way his genius manifests is a new hallucination appears who is an expert in that thing, and he has to lean on and rely on all these hallucinations to get the jobs done that he wants to do, and they all have very distinctive, strange and odd personalities. In the book, for instance, in the story, he needs to learn a language, and so he spends a couple of hours just looking through a dictionary, and memorizes the language, but then an interpreter who is a hallucination appears for him to use, and he has to go through her in order to actually understand the language; it’s how he fragments his mind. And the story is about a camera that can take pictures of the past that someone has invented, and he is actually hired to recover it after it after it’s stolen.
So that’s what Legion is. It’s a very fun story about someone who is really, really kooky which, you know, is a lot of fun to write. So like I said, you can go to Subterranean Press, or wait for that to come out online. So we’re gonna do a Question and Answer, and (to moderator) I can run that myself, if you want. You want to do it? Okay. Alright, so she’s gonna run the microphone out to those that…to ask me questions, so, what do you guys want to know? You can ask me pretty much anything, right here.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.