The Emperor’s Soul
Despite the track record of reviews on this site that skew heavily to the murder mystery genre, my first true love for reading came from sci-fi and to a lesser extent fantasy novels. One of the most celebrated modern-day authors of fantasy has to be Brandon Sanderson. I’ve been aware of his works for many years, especially during the pandemic times when he had a massive Kickstarter campaign for a number of books that he seems to crank out with almost magical efficiency, take some lessons, GRR Martin. I’ve mostly steered clear of his stuff though due to my understanding that a lot of it is tied together in a very large interconnected universe and I was worried about the volume of books I might be signing up for if I did enjoy them.
In the last few weeks there has been a confluence of events that have convinced me to finally dip my toe into the Sanderson oeuvre. The first of which was the announcement that he entered into a deal with AppleTV to adapt at least two of his works into a movie and a tv show. My love of Apple notwithstanding, their TV service has an insanely high hit rate of shows, especially when it comes to ones that are in the sci-fi/fantasy genres. And secondly there was a special “Brandon Sanderson starter pack” that was on sale on the TikTok shop directly from the author that featured 3 books he felt represented good entry points into his work.
I decided to read them in size order, so I started with The Emperor’s Soul, which at a concise 192 pages counts as a novella by my reckoning. The amount of lore and worldbuilding that Sanderson is capable of in those short number of pages is pretty astounding though. The story opens with our protagonist Shai being held captive after she was caught swapping a royal artifact called the “Moon Scepter” with a nearly perfect forgery. In this world some people have the ability to “Forge” which involves them being able to perceive the history of an object and to rewrite that history to make the object something much different than it was.
Despite the ruling party considering the practice to be antithetical to their beliefs, the technique is used extensively in the palace and among the influencers of the empire. The ruling circle of the “Heritage Faction” are able to recognize how skilled Shai is in her abilities and they proposition her with a near impossible task. The emperor has just been the victim of an assassination attempt, and while they have healed his body, his mind is gone. They task her with recreating the soul of the old emperor using her techniques before the end of the 100 day mourning period observed following the death of his wife during the same attack. Given that she stands to be executed otherwise, she agrees to attempt it, while also trying to string things along long enough for her to figure out an escape plan.
Even in the short page count, Sanderson is able to convey a lot about the magical system involved with the forgeries and how the magic is used in the world he’s created. We also learn a lot about the motivations of Shai and that of Gaotona, who is effectively the only non terrible person in the emperor’s inner court. The story moves swiftly, given that the plot has the built in timer of the 100 day deadline.
I really enjoyed this first foray into “The Cosmere” (Sanderson’s name for the loosely connected universe that connects most of his novels). I’m looking forward to reading the other two books in the starter pack I received, but so far I agree that this seems to be a great jumping on point if you have any interest in Sanderson’s work.
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Jane and Dan at the End of the World