When I say books, I actually mean audiobooks, as I have had very little time to read lately. I actually can’t remember the last time I read a book in its entirety without at least partially listening to it. I like audiobooks for two reasons, you can read them when you’re driving to work or at the gym and the readers often add a bit more drama to the actually novel if they are any good. Of course, if the reader is terrible, it can absolutely ruin a book. The worse reader I ever heard was for Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule. He read every sentence like he was movie trailer announcer. Of course, considering the poor choices Terry Goodkind has made regarding how others treat his work (see Legend of the Seeker), I should not have been surprised. But it really is too bad because I probably won’t ever have time to re-read it and can’t stand to listen to it.
Now that I have had my aside about audiobooks, here are the books I am excited about this fall:
The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind (already released)
Speaking of Terry Goodkind, apparently he has a new Richard and Kahlen novel out. This is not a continuation of the Sword of Truth series, but its own stand alone novel. The last few books in the Sword of Truth series read as stand alone novels (The Pillars of Creation hardly had Richard in it at all), and I think Goodkind is better suited as a stand alone fantasy novelist. His books never ran together and wrought with inconsistencies. Goodkind also failed as a main stream novelist with The Law of Nines, and came crawling back to Tor. That is why I am really interested in reading this book, I am hopeful that Goodkind will be a bit more humble, listen to his editors and play to his strengths. Of course, he could just continue to be an arrogant ass. I am excited to find out one way or another.
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (Nov. 8, 2011)
This is a stand alone novel set hundreds of years in the future in Sanderson’s Mistborn series. The first six chapters are available here. I thoroughly enjoyed the Mistborn trilogy. Sanderson created a great magic system, and has incredibly vivid action scenes. One of Sanderson’s strengths is the way he portrays action in a novel. I often find that action sequences really drag in books, and very rarely work for me. But that is not the case with Sanderson. He really takes you into a scene, and I have been blown away by him on more than one occasion. I think other writers are better at characterization and plot (and Mistborn does fall apart a bit in the third book), but Sanderson has some of my favorites action sequences, and at least two are in this trilogy. That is why I am really interested where he takes his magic system in a post-Victorian world. Whereas Goodkind fail to bring his story to a more modern setting, I am hopeful that Sanderson will be able to pull it off.
Inheritance by Christopher Paolini (Nov. 8, 2011)
I think Paolini gets a bit too much criticism for bringing in common fantasy elements into his work. I have thoroughly enjoyed Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, and I think that he has made those common fantasy elements his own. That is why I am interested in where he takes the finale. This was originally planned as a trilogy, and you can really tell that he was dragging things out in the third book (it seemed like he was trying to give screen time to every single character). Hopefully he picks up the pace and brings the series to rousing conclusion.
I approve of Sanderson’s willingness to advance the timeline of his Mistborn world — it’s something he’s been quoted as not liking about other fantasy series. There are many writers out there who write stories separated by centuries, during which period of time no appreciable technological or cultural progress has been made in the secondary world. Seems a bit unrealistic, no? Just think of how different our world is now than it was three hundred years ago.
Tad Williams used to talk about returning to his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn world at a point hundreds of years in its future, during its equivalent of the Industrial Revolution. This always fascinated me and I’m still disappointed to this day that it hasn’t happened. On the other hand, that trilogy is one of my favorite fantasy series of all time, so I wouldn’t want him going back to it unless he had a story he absolutely needed to tell.