/lit/ - Literature

The Sunlit Man, Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson (2023)

The Nomad's Skip has gone awry and he finds himself stranded on a planet unknown to him. He lacks a sufficient amount of breath-equivalent units of Investiture to Skip again. To escape he'll need to find a power source. In doing so he becomes involved in the rather small planet's problems, namely there's a tyrant trying to subjugate the world to his rule. The sunlight melts and remakes the surface of the world every day. The populace is constantly either running away or hiding from it.

Sanderson said this book was an experiment as to whether he could write epic fantasy at a breakneck pace. The story starts with action and continues on for rest of the time at about the same speed. The climax was a bit more, though it wasn't relatively that much more by comparison to how Sanderson's books have tended to go with an explosive ending. This was a bit frustrating to read because it showed that Sanderson can write without including many hundreds of pages of not doing all that much at a glacial pace. I would prefer there to be far less pages for many of the books. That doesn't seem like it'll happen.

So, how much of the Cosmere does this book reference? A lot. Mostly that's because this novel is probably the furthest in the Cosmere timeline of anything that's been published. That makes this easily the most science fictional book set in the Cosmere yet. Some of the stuff shown is definitely far in advance of our technology. However, fantasy is still very present. This only whets my appetite to see how Sanderson will combine magic and technology in the many years to come. One of the most relevant works are the Stormlight Archive, as the protagonist is a character in those books. Who he is and where he's from is explicitly stated, so it's not something that has to be puzzled out. The other is Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell. That's where the populace is from, which again is explicitly stated early on. Aside from that, having read Warbreaker would be somewhat helpful as background information. There's a bit from the Mistborn series, but it would only be minimally useful to have read them. There's a few others, though it's mostly trivial stuff. It's weird to think that a lot of what's shown here may not be relevant to the main Cosmere series for a decade, or decades for that matter. Also, yes, Hoid makes a brief appearance.

So, yeah, it was just a fun time all around. I appreciated the literal change of pace. I may be overly interested compared to the average reader with seeing how the magical and technological systems of the various Cosmere worlds interact with each other. The future Nalthis of Warbreaker continues to play an outsized role in these books considering it only has a single book currently. I also like having the Cosmere in everything from now on as Sanderson has already said, despite the problems that causes for the casual or singular series reader.

Rating: 4/5