Hello everyone!
I'm a n00b, don't harass me too much or I might harass back.
Just kidding. ::tiptoes around the oldies::
I just finished Elantris, so I went looking for the official webpages and the like, and found myself here.
Oddly enough, a friend of mine the other day had a post in his blog about how many author websites were so...bad. Espeically considering SF&F writers are supposed to be the thinkers, the ones interested in the cutting edge--and yet so many of the official sites were static, boring, and never utalizing the potential of the internet to let an author reach his or her readers. He thought that was a very sad thing.
I'm happy that's not the case here. Kudos to you, Mr. Sanderson, for having a nice website, and a nice forum.
Oh, and a good book.
I just finished my first read-through of Elantris, and I can see why Tor snapped it up.
It's nice to see fantasy that's not in the same-old same-old setting...and I think I agree with EUOLogy #17, about Tolkien. ::nods:: Even if one isn't a fan of Tolkien, such as myself, so many are, and so many base their fantasy books ever-so-slightly on him, and even if you never read Tolkien you are exposed (tainted?) as a writer by the echos of his work in other authors' works. It's very very difficult to find and root out of your own work, because normally if you write SFF, you've read a whole lot of it too, and one influences the other.
Ack...went on an aside there.
I like Elantris. I'm not...I'm not CRAZY about it, but that is because of personal likes and dislikes, and not because of the book itself. It's a very....a very solid fantasy book. It has a lot of good things, but not the little bit that makes me, personally, totally fascinated/obsessed by it as a reader.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if future books do make me a crazy and obsessed fan.
It's always fun obsessing about things.
Elantris reminds me a lot of Robert Silverburg's Majipor (sp?) books. I haven't read those in 5 or 6 years, but Raoden's character reminded me of the what's-his-name-cheerful-lost-prince-dude. Valentine. It's probably superficial as I recall very little of those books...I think it's more the "feel" of Elantris that reminds me of them.
When reading Elantris, I noticed how while it was fantasy, it obviously did not follow in the footsteps of most high fantasy exactly. I could feel the amount thought that went into descriptions of things.
And because most ordinary fantasy has made me a bit of a sheep, I underestimated Mr. Sanderson's intelligence several times when reading despite that. The first time when the slime in Elantris was mentioned--I was wondering how an entire city becomes covered in slime, and dismissed it at first as a way to make the city scary and dark (how many books make everything evil scary-looking and twisted?). I was very glad when that wasn't (entirely) the case and that there was a reason behind it!
Rotting slime mold is a good reason, at least to me. The second time was when the political system was described--how could a man smart enough to make money set up a system where people were serfs...and yet the lords were merchents? You'd eventually end up with lords buying from and selling to lords, wouldn't you, as serfs don't really get paid and therefore can't really buy? I smelled a plot hole--but the King's will at the end proved me wrong there too. Yay!
There were a few other moments when I thought I had spotted a plot hole or cliche, but most if not all (I don't recall) were resolved, so I'm a content reader.
One problem I had, and this is probably what makes me respect the book a lot but not be fanatical about it as I am with other books, is that while the characters weren't stupid, and were described quite well so I got grand mental images of them, and had nice banter with one another, everyone got along quite well with one another...there was no subtext beneath or between characters, or at least not that I could feel. Character interactions were very...honest. If they disliked each other, they disliked each other--no inbetweens. When there was some falseness going on, it was in a "good cause", and the reader was clued in to what was up fairly quickly.
Of course, I'm a huge fan of Robin Hobb and she's known to torture, kill multiple times, and do all sorts of horribly emotionally-wrecking things to her characters, and I tend to like a streak of darkness and angst like that in my books. So this is the opinion of one reader.
Another thing I noticed--and I haven't decided if it's a flaw or a positive, so take it as you will--is that the story was very...well-pruned. It had a start, a middle, and an end, and each tendril arced from start to finish and was very tidy at the end. The overall structure of the novel was very defined. Like an Aon perhaps? I can't decide if it was over-pruned, or if it is what it is, or if it was intentionally supposed to be like Elantris--almost too perfect to be real.
Anyway, my thoughts on the book/story itself.
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