Book #77 of 2024:
Dragonsteel Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson
[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]
A fresh release of an old unpublished novel — one that began all the way back as author Brandon Sanderson’s undergraduate honors thesis, and long existed as only a single physical manuscript that could be checked out from the BYU campus library upon request. Though he’s now seen fit to share the book more broadly, he cautions readers in a new introduction that we probably won’t find it up to his current standard, nor should we take it as wholly canonical to his Cosmere continuity of interconnected stories that followed. Instead, it is best considered as what he calls “half-canon,” offering a glimpse of worldbuilding details and character backgrounds that inform the subsequent works but would be contradictory to take literally. If a revised iteration of Dragonsteel is ever published for real, it will be with widespread changes from this early edition.
(The subplot involving Bridge Four on the Shattered Plains, for instance, was later incorporated into the author’s Stormlight Archive series, where it fits better with a protagonist who’s an adult slave rather than just an impulsive teenage army recruit. So that’s hardly going to appear in the finished version of this one. I’d also imagine that the young mind which named a certain magical force “the hor” and its practitioners “horwatchers” gave no thought to how those particular names would sound in the mouths of future audiobook narrators.)
So, is this ‘Sanderson curiosity’ worth the read? I’d say it is, for the uber-fans willing to tackle 700 pages of non-canon material. In addition to displaying how the writer’s personal style of epic fantasy developed over time, it gives us an interesting look at the quasi-origins of the dragon Frost and the man who will someday be called Hoid, both still on their original homeworld of Yolen well before the mysterious Shattering of Adonalsium in the general saga’s backstory. If you’re caught up with the latest Cosmere happenings, the information on Realmatic Theory won’t be as surprising, but it remains fascinating to see how much of that concept was already planned out so far ahead of its official debut. I’m sure the select group who gained access to this title before such revelations had gone public were even more struck by them.
Nevertheless, the text does have some of the issues that its creator suggests. The various plot pieces don’t quite cohere together, and the story ends without resolving very many of its specific component arcs. The overall effect is more generic than classic Sandersonian, especially concerning the rules-based magic system, and the familiar tropes aren’t tweaked enough to register in a crowded genre. I’m not surprised to learn that multiple publishers rejected this draft, although the raw potential talent is certainly there on the page. But in the end and from a modern perspective, “curiosity” seems an apt label for it.
[Content warning for fatphobia, racism, slavery, rape, and gore.]
★★★☆☆
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