Sampling Sanderson

For a very long time, author Brandon Sanderson has been on my reading list. I read a lot of fantasy, many of my friends have enjoyed his books, and it just seemed like something I'd naturally get around to at some point. When I finally did, it went differently than I'd imagined in a few significant ways.

First, I listened to one of his novels on audiobook. My steady diet of too-many-podcasts means I don't really listen to many audiobooks. But when my husband and I are driving somewhere together, an audiobook is a great choice. Of course, there aren't many long car rides in Pandemic Times, so not only does it take a while to get through an audiobook, writers like Brandon Sanderson are arguably a terrible choice: any writer of "doorstop fiction" -- most any fantasy writer -- can take quite a long time to get through indeed.

Although... second (and unexpectedly) I found myself listening to a Brandon Sanderson book that is not fantasy. I listened to Skyward, a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel that's first in a series currently forecast for four books. This didn't make the "read" any faster; Skyward is not a short book. But I always figured that when I finally wound up sampling Sanderson, it would be one of his many well-regarded fantasy series.

Skyward is set on a distant planet where the human descendants of a small fleet of crashed ships are struggling to survive against a mysterious alien race known as the Krell. Regular fighter attacks keep the humans stranded on the planet, but are always limited enough to allow a society to exist. Pilots fend off the Krell attacks in ships built mostly with scavenged technology... and 17-year-old Spensa Nightshade is desperate to join their ranks. The problem? Her father is the most notorious coward ever to be a pilot, and the stain of his legacy hounds Spensa decades later.

I found Skyward to be a very engaging tale. While there are certainly trope-ish bricks used in its construction, the structure itself feels satisfyingly different on the whole. Sanderson is also careful to make sure the book works on multiple levels -- the lead character is compelling enough to stick with for a lengthy first-person narrative, the single book itself has meaningful plot developments and reveals, and there are interesting threads set up for future books in the series.

There's a fairly large cast of characters in Skyward, but Sanderson takes the time to develop most of them beyond their utility to the plot. In this aspect, he gets a big boost in audiobook format from performer Suzy Jackson, who has a lot of weapons in her vocal arsenal. She takes on multiple accents, shifts deftly to different pitches, using everything from a slow and warm drawl to a cool and clipped monotone. There might be as many as 20 distinct and important characters in Skyward, and Suzy Jackson adopts a specific performance for each of them that always keeps you anchored.

If Skyward is any indication of what Brandon Sanderson's fantasy writing is like, I'll definitely be reading some in the future. For now, though, I'm fully engaged in this tale and looking forward to what happens next. I give it an A-. Book two is already available and in my queue, and I'm watching out for the release of book three later in the year.