Brandon Sanderson's Wonderful Marble Machine

Why Mistborn is modern art

“Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like the sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is a recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis of the plot.”

Ursula le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”

Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn is a fascinating piece of art. And I do think it is art. It is art in the same way that Yves Klein paintings are art:

Or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain:

Not all modern art is about “deconstructing” art, at least not purposefully. Duchamp was trolling—and to be clear, I adore The Fountain—but Yves Klein, while by all accounts a provocateur, seemed to genuinely really fucking love that shade of blue.

Jackson Pollock, too, was less interested in deconstructing art with his splatter paintings than he was interested in the quality of depth and space. I am not the first to note that a Pollock painting in real life is a mesmerizing experience, and is clearly, distinctively better at what it is trying to do than a generic replacement.

Rothko, too, was truly in his heart obsessed with fields of color and what they could express. He did what he was doing with such attention and focus that it was clearly art, even with all the traditional elements of a painted scene removed. An artist pushing themselves to the very limits of their deranged, specific interest can take you along for the ride, even if you didn’t think you’d want to come.

Brandon Sanderson is such an artist. With Mistborn, he achieves a remarkable feat: a book with flat characters, bald cliches, an utter absence of emotional subtlety, and, crucially, no style whatsoever—

—that, nevertheless, is good.

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What makes Tolkien better than his imitators? He was fixated on something. He had his preoccupations and he was going to make them your problem. He’d been through the Great War and he was so obsessed with language—with his invented languages—that he created a whole world to put them in.

I recently reread The Fellowship of the Ring. By many traditional markers of storycraft, it is not what you would call “good.” You can see the ugly seams in it, the places where a mediocre rhyming encore to The Hobbit meets a much grander, darker story. My recollection of The Two Towers and The Return of the King is that they are better books by these conventional measures, but have much of the same discordant ugliness to them.

Nevertheless Tolkien’s work is great art, in large part because it reflects the passions of his soul. Tolkien’s imitators, meanwhile, can only produce banal and vapid nonsense with elves and dwarves and orcs. They have fallen into cargo cult. They are laying out the landing strip of elves and dwarves and orcs and breathlessly awaiting the airplane.

For all my disdain for Sanderson’s craft, I cannot help but respect his art. Like Tolkien, he is no imitator. Mistborn is the single-origin product of his own soul’s obsessions, and as a result, we see a piece of art pushed to the limits of the form.

Because Sanderson is utterly uninterested in almost every aspect of book writing in the conventional sense. What he wants to make is one of these:

Listen here

Mistborn is a marble machine, a beautiful whirring Rube-Goldberg contraption of interlocking parts, utterly devoid of human beings (besides the one who operates it). And at being this specific thing—it succeeds tremendously. Not only does it succeed at being what it is, it produces beautiful music. Perhaps not the most beautiful music—but pleasant to the ear without a doubt.

Of course what’s notable about the music is not that it is enjoyable to listen to—but that it could possibly be produced by that bizarre contraption.

Mistborn is not a bad reading experience. As I said, I believe it to be good. I enjoyed it tremendously from start to finish. I was rarely bored. I enjoyed each character. I felt genuinely gripped by the events of the story.

All this accomplished by characters that can at absolute best be described as “two dimensional”, with prose so limp and blank that I listened to all three books on audio at x3 speed, as close to the limit of speech comprehension as I could go.

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One mistake that many beginning fantasy writers make is treating characters like people—or worse, stat blocks. It comes of a common way to come to fantasy writing—novelizing your D&D campaign, or forum roleplay, or RPG character’s adventures. These are all forms of game that incline you to think of a fictional character as an entity unto itself, having some platonic form out there in the ether independent of their function in a story. (This mistake is discussed at length in one of my favorite podcasts, Homestuck Made This World.)

I sometimes think it is a bit rich that Sanderson, an author so overwhelmingly workmanlike on every aspect of the craft besides the specific one he is obsessed with, teaches a course on creative writing, but perhaps I shouldn’t be. He certainly understands that characters aren’t people.

And they’re not. They’re more like, say, chairs. They are in the room to serve a purpose.

Sometimes, indeed, that purpose is to simulate a psychologically realistic human being—George R. R. Martin does a fantastic job with characters that have this purpose, for example.

Other times, that purpose can be very different. Almost no characters in The Lord of the Rings have true psychological depth—essentially, only the hobbits. Aragorn, Theoden, Faramir, Eowyn, these are not people we are meant to understand primarily as human beings. It is not a flaw that we essentially never see Aragorn show relatable vulnerability, or that Eowyn ultimately throws down her arms and turns to a life of domesticity with Faramir in the space of approximately one sentence. They are not real people whose interiority we are seeing with a flawed lens—they are serving a function.

Sanderson does not even attempt to give more than token depth to the characters in Mistborn. They are simplistic caricatures—cartoons.

This is not criticism! Cartoons have the advantage of being pleasant to look at, and easy to read. They are doing exactly what they need to do. If the marbles in the marble machine were not round and smooth, they would not clatter through the music machine nearly so pleasantly.¹ If the machine were not made of plain, unpainted wood, it would detract from the beauty of its form.

Sanderson’s other books never quite reach the purity of Mistborn on this axis. The Way of Kings is also quite good, but in a rather more prosaic sense, and leaves you without any satisfying sequels. Warbreaker is in a similar boat, without the disappointing sequels, while Elantris is just outright terrible.

All these books have fascinating magic systems and satisfying, clicky plots, but they just aren’t the whirring, buzzing, self-contained snowglobes of pure mechanism that Mistborn manages to be.

I do, of course, highly recommend it.

1. This is, in my opinion, a major reason as to why the later Stormlight Archive books lose focus and fall off.