Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#2Apple has proven with numerous shows over the past few years that they can be trusted with this task. Foundation, Silo, etc. Exciting stuff.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#3I do love reading Sanderson, even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey. Can't fault the magic system building or the action.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#4It was pretty much guaranteed to happen at some point. This is the author whose kickstarter for four ebooks that made $40 million.
Plus the universe just begs for an arbitrarily large number of seasons and spin-offs. There's something for everybody. You almost certainly start with multiple series of Mistborn. From there, you can go in dozens of directions. And there's a built in huge audience. It practically begs for high budget TV adaptation.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#5I do love reading Sanderson, even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey. Can't fault the magic system building or the action.
Yeah, the books are formulaic, but it's a good formula. "Act 1: Okay, here's a neat magic system with well defined rules. Act 4: surprise, there was an extra rule you didn't know about! Act 5: we killed God with the surprise, extra rule."
It's hard for me to fault Mistborn. It has the tightest ending to a fantasy trilogy I've ever seen. And then, as an afterthought, Sanderson somehow managed to end the Wheel of Time, which frankly I don't think Robert Jordan could have managed to do.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#6I do love reading Sanderson, even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey. Can't fault the magic system building or the action.
> even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey
This is what made early Sanderson so great for me though. I’m constantly inundated by media through which the author demands a soapbox. This can be anything from politics to just the author’s personal preferences.
Mistborn 1-3 was a fairly simple and satisfying plot with likeable (if somewhat predictable) characters and fun world building. Perfect set of books to just pick up and enjoy. Not Shakespeare, but it didn’t have to be.
By the time I got through all the Stormlight books I felt like I had been locked in a room and forced to listen to Sanderson drone on and on in a self-serving tone about his personal power fantasies. The story was more complex, but it also had 100+ pages of fluff nobody except Sanderson cared about. I truly believe that once he got really famous his editors stopped saying “no” to anything, no matter how small.
His short stories are the same way. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is good because it’s short and sweet. It sticks to a classic formula and focuses on imaginative settings, which is what Sanderson is good at. Tress was boring because it tried to be smart and kind of flopped.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#7Risky business, creating TV shows out of incomplete book series and Cosmere has several. Granted, technically each of those series are standalone and some like Mistborn are timejumped in such a way that each trilogy can be seen as it's own entity so unlike GOT Sanderson and Apple has more wiggle room.
Also, Sanderson is pretty much the exact opposite of GRRM in terms of quantity of writing so odds are good even Stormlight is finished by the time Apple even gets to the first book.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#8I do love reading Sanderson, even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey. Can't fault the magic system building or the action.
> even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey This is what made early Sanderson so great for me though. I’m constantly inundated by media through which the author demands a soapbox. This can be anything from politics to just the author’s personal preferences. Mistborn 1-3 was a fairly simple and satisfying plot with likeable (if somewhat predictable) characters and fun world building. Perfect set of…
Talk about an unpopular opinion. Nightmare Painter is well liked, but Tress is far and away the fan favorite.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#9Risky business, creating TV shows out of incomplete book series and Cosmere has several. Granted, technically each of those series are standalone and some like Mistborn are timejumped in such a way that each trilogy can be seen as it's own entity so unlike GOT Sanderson and Apple has more wiggle room. Also, Sanderson is pretty much the exact opposite of GRRM in terms of quantity of writing so odds are good even Storm…
Cosmere isn't an incomplete book series. It's a "universe" created by Sanderson where all of his novels live. Many of which are already completed series or stand-alone novels. It's like saying Stephen King hasn't finished his "series" since shit keeps happening in Derry Maine.
Re: Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV
#10I do love reading Sanderson, even though his characters are quite robotic and video-gamey. Can't fault the magic system building or the action.
This is my concern about Sanderson having full creative control. I know that show runners have developed a reputation for ruining all sorts of adaptions. But I also know that screen writing is different than writing a novel. And prose and characters and dialog have never been a strong suit of Sanderson. He's an amazing world builder. I love the exploration of how magic systems impact society. I can geek out on that all day just like I can geek out on Weir's protagonist's "problem solving" scenarios despite thinking the characters and settings and world building are particularly weak.