I get the feeling he doesn’t want to wind up like a certain someone in New Mexico who’s already 74. “But I do have to finish all this by the time I’m 70,” he says. Now 47 years old, Sanderson has already published 21 Cosmere books, and he plans on publishing at least 19 more. The fourth and most recent Stormlight book, Rhythm of War, was published in November 2020, with a fifth entry scheduled for November 2024. And finally, we’ve arrived at Sanderson’s magnum-opus-in-progress, the dense and wondrous Stormlight Archive, a sprawling ten-volume war epic that reads like The Iliad from another solar system. Then, in 2009, the wife of fantasy legend Robert Jordan picked Sanderson to finish writing the Wheel of Time series after her husband's death from a rare blood disease. Next was the Mistborn franchise, where magic-wielding thieves take down a dystopian empire. But one day in 2003, Moshe Feder, an editor at the Tor Books subsidiary of the publishing house Macmillan, discovered one of his manuscripts in the slush pile-and the fate of the Cosmere was sealed.įirst came Elantris, Sanderson's 2005 debut about a dead city of immortals once worshiped as gods. Over the next five years, while working at the hotel during and after his undergraduate years at BYU, he wrote 12 full-length novels that were all rejected by publishers. He took a part-time job working night shifts at the front desk of a nearby hotel, where he could write between midnight and 5:00 AM. It all started 25 years ago when Sanderson, a practicing Mormon, was an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University just 15 miles away in Provo. But instead of superheroes defending Earth, Sanderson’s warriors, thieves, scholars, and royals are spread across a richly detailed system of planets, from the ash-covered cities of Scadrial to the shattered plains of Roshar-a landscape directly inspired by the sandstone buttes and slot canyons of southeastern Utah. Many of them take place in an interconnected series of worlds called the Cosmere, his ink-and-paper equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is where Sanderson writes bestselling fantasy and science fiction novels.
“I built an underground supervillain lair.” Jim Butcher bought a LARPing castle,” he says. Sanderson points to the grand piano, the shelves filled with ammonite fossils, the high walls covered in wood and damask paneling, and his pièce de résistance: a cylindrical aquarium swirling with saltwater fish.
We’re 30 feet beneath the surface of northern Utah, in a room that feels like a cross between a five-star hotel lobby and a Bond villain’s secret base. “This is my dream,” Brandon Sanderson says.
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