Mistborn

So I finished Mistborn as part of another entry in the ifMUD book club. Capsule summary: The author wanted to write a heist novel but isn't very good at it, so all the good bits are after the heist's come off. Also, suffers from a serious awesomeness deficit.

Stop me if you've heard this one, but there's this rebel group fighting to overthrow an evil empire led by a near-immortal emperor with godlike powers. Some members of the rebel group actually have the powers themselves, which let them do things like influence people's minds, control objects telekinetically, react more quickly than is humanly possible, and leap around dramatically. There are two leading characters -- one is an old guy who bears the scars of past encounters with the emperor, and then his scrappy young protege who's just learning to control her powers. Oh, and did I mention the protege's dad is one of the emperor's right-hand men?

You can play this game with most any book, of course -- there are only three possible stories and hardly anyone wants to write "Man against Goat" these days. The issue isn't that the story isn't 100% original -- it's that if you've written a good story, the reader won't be thinking about what it reminds them of because they'll be interested in reading it.

Ok, so what do I think is wrong with the book? First off, I think the pacing sucks. The breakdown is roughly 350 pages of the characters organizing this attempt to start a rebellion and take down the emperor, wherein nothing of interest happens because their plans all fizzle out, and then 180 pages of cool stuff happening once the rebellion's actually started. This ratio is all wrong. There are some important things happening in the 350 pages -- you have to introduce the magic system, bring in the characters, establish who the bad guy is and what they're fighting for, and put in some hooks to bring up again later, but you know how much time you should spend on that? 50 pages max. Not 350.

Spending 350 pages isn't just bad because it wastes the reader's time, it's bad because it turns the awesome into the mundane. Like, the emperor has these arch-servitor dudes whose shtick is that they have steel spikes driven into their eyes (this is the next new thing in badass piercings). They are introduced on page 47, and the first cool scene with them is on page 470. In the meantime, they have totally stopped being cool because they haven't done anything except stomp around. The Conan books, of course, get this right -- you wait until the last possible minute to introduce a thing, you tell why they're cool, and then you have them actually have a big badass fight with somebody to prove it. If you have to introduce the Steel Inquisitors right from the beginning, you don't give away their shtick. Instead, you, I dunno, put bags on their heads. Or cover them with helmets that have no space to see out. Then all the characters keep saying "man, I have no idea how they can see out from within that bag" or some of them say "I bet they have little eyeholes". Then when the final confrontation comes, there's a dramatic scene where the hero rips the bag off and AIEE THEY HAVE SPIKES IN THEIR EYES. And then the real ass-kicking starts. See? We take it to the next level to rev things up in the concept, and then we have them do something cool to take advantage of the badassery of the idea.

The other thing the author does that turns awesomeness into mundanity is he picked a setting where the premise is everything's boring. Like, the idea is we're post some kind of magical near-holocaust, and there's ash falling on everything all the time now, and all the animals seem to be dead (although there are carriages, so maybe not), and all the plants turned brown and the flowers died, and the sky is some boring-ass color, and the evil emperor projects emotion rays that make the serfs passively dull, and the empire has been going on for a thousand years with not much changing and wtf. Seriously. This is like making a show about beach volleyball and setting it in Seattle in November. He tries to spice things up by having all these feuding noble houses, but I couldn't make myself buy it -- first of all, it's not clear what there is for them to fight over, and secondly, we hardly see any of the fighting. Instead what we get are nobles at parties gossiping about rumors about the fighting. Nobody enjoys second-hand fun. The author also has a diary of the emperor's early life running through the chapters. This could be interesting, but in practice the emperor comes off as whiny and tedious. There's a twist related to this, but, in fact, having it just look like the emperor is whiny and tedious is not actually a win either.

The final big thing I ought to talk about is the magic system. This one is definitely a matter of personal taste, but personally, I don't dig carefully-worked-out magic systems. This one in particular has eight kinds of powers, and there are four mental and four physical, and four internal and four external, and four "push" and four "pull", and you can tell the author has worked out a whole diagram of which corresponds to which and what metal corresponds to each and what nickname society gives each one and yawn. Like, there's actually a point in the book where a character says "Pewter, for instance, is generally accepted as an alloy of tin mixed with lead, with perhaps some copper or silver, depending on the use and the circumstances. Allomancer's pewter, however, is an alloy of ninety-one percent tin, nine percent lead. If you want maximum strength from your metal you have to use those percentages." Right. 91%. Good to know.

It's weird I have this reaction for two reasons. One, because I also get fussy if a story introduces magic like this, makes it relatively common, and then doesn't work out all the effects on society. And two, because I said the magic was a total ripoff of Star Wars, which it mostly is, and I don't have the same reaction to Star Wars at all. So what's different? I think the problem isn't just that the magic in Mistborn is formulaic, it's that it's explained formulaically. The characters are obsessed with explaining how it all works down to the tiniest details, and they do it in lecture mode, not just when it becomes necessary in the story. If this was an RPG it'd be awesome to have this kind of thing in a sidebar, but it's not an RPG and I don't, as a reader, need to know the exact range of the powers -- the author ought to bring them up only as and when they're relevant.

Ok, a few more small gripes and then lemme finish up with stuff I actually liked. One gripe: too many thieves. Ever since Lankhmar people have been thinking you can support as many thieves as you want in as small a city as you need. No. This is something Lies of Locke Lamora handled pretty well -- they said, ok, there are a lot of thieves, but there are also a lot of rich people in town and there are a lot of travellers. So there are a huge number of victims to feed on, which means you don't have to hit the same people all the time. Mistborn actually makes this worse by implying that most of the thief gangs are con artists, which is totally nonsensical in this world because IT HAS NO MIDDLE CLASS. You got the nobles and you got the serfs and you got a few rich serfs and that's about it -- who on earth are the con artists scamming? Are they really preying on the rich over and over again? Aren't there going to be few enough nobles that this would become a serious problem? Another gripe: technology handled badly. Probably the worst example of this is the guy with a pocket watch. This is, you recall, basically a medieval or industrial-revolution economy -- there are unidentified factories, but, again, there is no middle class, there are hardly any skilled craftsmen (the one we see is a carpenter), virtually all labor is done by hand because of the lack of animals -- how could they have the technology to make pocket watches? And who would need them if so? Not the nobles, they've got arbitrary amounts of free time. Watches are for eople who are well off, but aren't rich enough to not have jobs. Finally: the magic system makes carrying iron untenable, so the magicians carry glass daggers around to fight with. Is this really a valid plan? I know that, contrary to how the movies go, if you hit someone with a bottle the bottle isn't going to break. But surely something like a dagger that relies on a sharp edge or point can't be made out of glass and expected to last for any length of time.

So, right, the goodness. Despite everything I've said, there are some bits of awesome left in the novel. One in particular is a fight between the scrappy heroine, disguised as a noble, and another noble. The other noble's been acting nasty to the heroine for pages and pages, so it is totally great that when the heroine breaks up an assassination, one of the assassins turns out to be this nasty noble. And she's a mage too! So then we have this badass fight between mages. It's great because we actually care about this fight, since we know the history the two characters have, and because the heroine uses a couple tricks in the fight that reference things we had earlier in the novel. And, in fact, this fight kicks off the good bit of the novel. Once the author gives up on the elaborate heist plans and just starts making stuff happen, the novel gets interesting. Some people die, and some other people make surprise reappearances. Some mysteries get explained, and others get introduced. By doubling or tripling the amount of plot per page, the book develops real momentum -- there's no time for it to be dull because there is a plot twist on the next page. This is in contrast to the first 350 pages, where there is no time to be exciting because there is a discussion of pewter alloys or college-freshman philosophy on the next page.

Oh, and one last bit of goodness which is hardly likely to be intentional, but I don't care. So two of the guys in the heist gang are named Ham and Breeze. Ham is this burly strongman guy, and Breeze is this irritating dandy guy, and they are always arguing. In the Doc Savage stories, the good doctor has an assistant named Ham, and another named Monk. One is a burly strongman guy, and one is an irritating dandy guy, and they are always arguing. Unfortunately, in the Doc Savage stories Ham is the dandy, not the burly guy, so it seems pretty unlikely that this is a purposeful comparison, but I can hope.

In fact, several of the side characters are pretty good in this book. Unlike the scrappy-street-orphan-who-discovers-her-true-powers protagonist, or her I-hate-all-the-nobles-and-want-revenge mentor, or her gawky-and-reads-books-but-is-nice-unlike-the-other-nobles boyfriend, the dandy sidekick Breeze is deliciously and unashamedly irritating. He is wildly self-centered and feels free to manipulate people to get what he wants. Ham is also pretty good -- he's a "I'm just here to do this job" kind of guy that nicely sets off the idealism of the other characters (unfortunately he's also a mouthpiece for a lot of the author's juvenile philosophy -- "hey, if the emperor is god, doesn't that make everything he does good by definition?" is a perfectly valid question to write a novel about, but the way to get it into the story is not to have the characters say their positions, it's to have them act on them).

So, yeah, there you go. Mistborn is the first book of a trilogy. You could read it as a standalone, but there are definitely some unanswered questions at the end. The second book might be better -- now that the author's gotten so much of the world-building out of the way, hopefully he can get right to the action.

Next up is The Little Country, a book Allen recommended. You can tell it's recommended by Allen because the back-cover blurb is "blah blah folk music blah blah cornwall blah blah magic fiddle".