What can you tell us about this new Mistborn book?
When I originally pitched Mistborn I did it as more than one series. One of the things that fantasy does that I don’t necessarily like is that an author will skip, like, 4000 years and come back and you’re still in the same world, nothing has really changed. In The Wheel of Time, I like that steam technology is starting to appear; there’s progress. I wanted to do a fantasy series where I told a story that had a classic, medieval feel, and then I wanted to jump forward several hundred years and tell an urban fantasy in a world with guns and skyscrapers and the same magic, and the story of the first series had become the mythology of the second. Then I wanted to tell a story in the future of that, a science fiction story where the magic had become a means of inter-stellar propulsion. So this book is along that continuum; it’s not quite up to the second series.
It’s a story that I wasn’t supposed to be writing but I just loved. It’s the era of industry in the Mistborn world. Now we have characters living post-gunpowder. Motor cars are beginning to appear, skyscrapers are just being built. I based some of it on 1910 New York. The protagonist is an old lawman from the equivalent of the Old West who moves back to the big city after 20 years outside. It’s a whodunit-ish sort of thing. Imagine Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world, if Clint Eastwood played the role. It’s a little bit steampunk, but not true steampunk because I’m not going interesting places with the steam technology.
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