Timewaster's Guide Archive

Quote from: fbd on October 23, 2008, 08:40:55 AM

I have one question, and it NEEDS to be answered.  When did they discover the game of cricket?

Page 192 "Plus. you've managed --in our short three years together-- to kill not only my god, but my father, my brother, and my fiancee.  That's kind of like a homicidal hat trick"  (Bolding is mine)

The term hat trick was invented for cricket, and adapted to other sports (notably hockey), first used in the 1880s. That one line took me out-of-world for a good five minutes.

Also, Elend can't count, because hat trick is 3, and she killed 4.

The characters don't speak English, so what we read is a translation into our language. Elend in his native language actually used an in-world equivalent metaphor, possibly one which involved a set of four rather than three.

I do think it's a good idea to pay attention to anachronism when using metaphors and idoms, but that's also something that can be taken too far—for example, trying not to use any words with latinate roots because there was never a former empire of that type in the universe you're writing in. That would probably be impossible because English is what English is, and the book is written in English.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the old "they aren't speaking English so the author is translating" idea, and of course you don't want to take it too far.  Ignoring Latin roots is definitely not a good idea, but it was just such a blatant anachronism (to me, a sports fan) when the books don't mention any type of sport at all.  If they had even in passing mentioned some sort of popular game where people score some sort of goal, I might have been able to go by it, but to me it was just as out of character as referencing a movie or real-world popular song.

Now, this is my largest criticism in the whole book, mind you, so obviously it isn't a major issue.  Just something that distracted and somewhat bothered me.

The Warbreaker story pretty much ends in the first book (everyone's character arc finishes), but it definitely needs a sequel. I'm not sure at what point Brandon decided this.

Not everyone's arc finishes...its been a few months since I read it and completely forget character names, but "the dude with the talking sword" opened up a whole lot of potential follow up material at the end.

About a month and a half ago, one of the annotations mentioned that, if anybody was interested in MB Prime, Brandon would e-mail it to you.  I jumped on this, and also semi-greedily asked for Final Empire Prime as well.  I was a bit busy, but just finished reading both, and wanted to put out some of my thoughts and hear from anyone else who's read one or both of these.  Any of you who plan on acquiring these, there will be some spoilers (though most of the decent twists were cannibalized into MB1&2).

Mistborn Prime
I liked this one just as much as the real book, and if was cleaned up a little (and made clear that it took place in a completely different universe) I think it'd work great as something to be available for easy download.  Kathin is a great character, mainly because I always like being in the head of a completely sane cold blooded killer.  His casual thoughts about murdering the family that took him in were entertaining, as was his complete lack of understanding of why he was developing feelings for them.  I also liked this version of Oresoor better than the published version (although I think the annotations say he was explicitly weakened since he was liked too much by readers), mainly due to his clear adopting of doglike traits.  The inevitable betrayal was ruined by MB2, and really would have worked better if I hadn't known exactly how it'd work out.  MB2 did it better, though, with every few chapters addressing the kandra search, which was sort of ignored here.  The fourth level was a bit  of a deus ex machina, but a similar concept worked better in Warbreaker's ending.  All in all was a lot better than I expected for something that never got published.

Final Empire Prime
MBP was essentially a completed book.  The copy of FEP that I was sent, though, wasn't done (not sure if the project was scrapped and moved into something new or if I was sent an early draft), so some of my issues are just due to the that fact (the chapter epigraphs stopped about halfway in, a class of priests were named * as a placeholder still, and a few characters towards the end were, too).  Still, I enjoyed the read very much.  This Vin I like better than MB's Vin, mainly because he's the type of sneaky character I always love (Mat Cauthon-esque), while MB Vin can get a bit annoying at times (abject lack of trust book 1, too much insecurity with Zane in 2).  I felt like a lot of this book was borrowing concepts from the Belgariad, though.  A lot of these concepts are in other books, too, but the combination of the multiple prophecies, mortal slaying a god, the core of prophecy coming from a choice, the one prophecy rejecting its God/host for the new mortal (more Mallorean, but still), a god who was defeated when he realized that none of his people loved him, a character having 3 fake merchant identities, and a few other things that probably I only see as the same because I started looking for them. 
I felt that the POV shifts in this book were some of the best Sanderson's done.  Vin was clearly the main character and got the vast majority of POVs, so there was no constant rotation like Elantris and Warbreaker, which at times seem a bit forced to keep the pattern.  When it was someone else's section, though, it was almost a pleasant change of pace, and the Conqueror's memories/confusions were a nice touch of history blended in and not dumped. The rotating groups of companions, though, just weakened the characters, since it lead to Nahim basically disappearing halfway in, only to replace him with two largely undeveloped people, then kill them of for Khelsier who had minimal characterization, only to bring Rhone in for the tail end(which also lead to an incredibly anticlimactic Rhone-Vin heart to heart).   The magic system was interesting, and I hope that it gets recycled and better developed in a later book.

So those are my disjointed thoughts...anyone else read these and have comments?