Many of the lifelong fans of the Wheel of Time, myself included, point to this novel as their favorite of the series.

I think that baffles some readers, the ones to whom the Wheel of Time just doesn’t speak. (That’s perfectly all right, by the way. Not every book is going to appeal to every reader.)

Books one and two, and to an extent three, follow a more traditional fantasy quest narrative. (Book two following it the most exactly, in a lot of ways.) Book four deviates. The climactic moments are staggered very differently from a standard quest story, and here shortcuts in travel start to appear, turning the series away from the quest/travelogue archetype and into a more expansive, political intrigue and character relationships narrative.

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It is a curious experience, to be writing about the third book while actively writing the final book. In book three, Rand comes to accept himself as the Dragon Reborn.

Now, you might think he’s already accepted his place. He found the banner in book one, and though he kicked and stomped in book two, it seemed that he truly accepted his title. And that might be true.

However, accepting a title and accepting what it means — what that title will force you to become — are different things entirely.

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To this day, I feel that The Great Hunt is the best self-contained story in The Wheel of Time. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite (that distinction belongs to book four) but it is remarkable in that of all Wheel of Time books, it feels the most focused and direct.

It’s always hard to pick a favorite section of a book like this, as my moods and interests have changed so many times while reading the series. However, most recently, I think I like the scene of Rand learning the Game of Houses the most. This scene is responsible for the first time in my life that I can remember being directly influenced by a book I was reading to create a magic system.

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I’ve read The Eye of the World so many times now that it’s very difficult to remember what my impressions were the first time. I know where I was when I first saw it, oddly enough. I remember the bookstore, the shelf it was on, and how awesomely big it looked. I don’t remember reading it, though I remember finishing it and being blown away. I was very eager for the second book to come out.

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As we get ready for the release of The Alloy of Law, I find myself wondering what the teenage me would think of what I’m doing in this book. You see, I became a fantasy addict when I was about fourteen, and one of my mantras quickly became, “If it has guns, it’s not good fantasy.” Now here I am, adding guns to my most successful fantasy series. Despite the ways I’ve changed over the years, despite my belief that fantasy should be (and is becoming) something more than the standard “guy living in idealized chivalrous England leaves his farm and saves the world,” a voice inside of me is screaming that nobody will buy this book. Because it has guns.

I don’t believe that voice, but I think it says something interesting about myself and perhaps others like me. Perhaps we fantasy readers sometimes mix up correlation and causation in our fantasy novels. In fact, I’m more and more convinced that taste for a specific genre or medium is often built on shaky ground.

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We are very excited to offer the next excerpt from Brandon Sanderson’s fourth and latest Mistborn novel, The Alloy of Law, out November 8th from Tor Books!

Tor.com will be releasing six excerpts in all from The Alloy of Law as the weeks go on, along with sweepstakes, news, and other fun stuff, so keep checking back!

Read through all of the excerpts in order in the Alloy of Law index.

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I started writing my first novel when I was fifteen years old. I didn’t have a computer; I had an old, electric typewriter. It would remember your file on a disc, but it was really just a printer with an attached bare-bones word processor. (It had a tiny LCD screen at the top that could display three lines at a time. You could scroll through and edit bit by bit, then you hit print and it would type out the document.)

The book was terrible. It was essentially a hybrid of Tad Williams and Dragonlance, though at the time I felt it was totally new and original. It did have a wizard who threw fireballs with smiley faces on the front, though, so that’s kind of cool. At its core were two stories. One vital one was the tale of a wise king who was murdered by assassins, forcing his younger brother to take up the mantle and lead the kingdom while trying to find/protect the king’s son and rightful heir. The other was about a young man named Rick, originally blamed for the murder.

[After the cut, more from this early effort]

I’ve been asked to introduce The Way Of Kings to you. And I have no idea how to start.

This is an odd position for me. Before, I’ve found it easy to explain my novels. Each one was built around one or two central premises. The gang of thieves who want to rob an immortal emperor. A man cast down by a terrible, magical disease and forced to rebuild a society among those similarly afflicted. A boy who finds that librarians secretly rule the world.

Kings has stymied me each time I’ve tried to describe it. I often end up talking about its creation. (How I started work on it over fifteen years ago. How I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words worth of worldbuilding for it. How much the project has come to mean to me over the decades.) But such things describe the book but don’t actually tell you anything. And so this time, I’m going to try to talk about what The Way Of Kings is.

It’s a book about characters I love. I’ve begun to build a reputation as the “magic system” guy. The author who creates interesting types of magic for every book he writes. On one hand, this delights me, as I do put a lot of effort into the magic in my books. But a great book for me isn’t about a magic, it’s about the people that the magic affects.

The book started its life many years ago being about a young man who made a good decision. I wrote the entire book that way before realizing I’d done it wrong. So I started over from scratch and had him take the other fork, the more difficult fork. The fork that cast him into some of the worst imaginable circumstances, ground him against the stones of a world where there is no soil or sand on the ground.

My goal: to prove to myself, and to him, that the ‘good’ decision was not actually the best one. The Way Of Kings is his story, though he shares the space with several others. They’ll get their own books later in the series.

I want to tell you more, but I don’t have the space here. I want to talk about the art in the book (it’s ambitious, unlike anything I’ve seen tried in an epic fantasy novel before.) I want to talk about the scope of the series, the distinctive world which is so much larger and more real than anything I’ve worked on before. I want to explain the book.

But, for now, I think it’s best to just show you instead.

Enjoy.

To keep up with all our Brandon Sanderson and The Stormlight Archive posts, see our Way of Kings Index page.

I remember when found my first Moorcock sighting.  It was at the library, and I was fifteen.  Even at a distance, that copy of Elric stood out from the books around it.  It was the version with the white and red cover, put out by Ace, I believe.

I looked through it, and I remember thinking to myself “This isn’t like the others.  It’s different.”  I had no idea.  After just a few years reading fantasy, I already had in my head what a fantasy novel ‘should’ be.  Elric was to teach me that I still had a lot to learn.

One of the oddities of getting into the genre as I did—by way of pure accident, without friends or coaches to guide me toward the best books—was that I got to ‘discover’ many authors for myself that were already famous in the field.  I suspect this isn’t uncommon among those of my generation, who didn’t have Amazon suggesting similar books to us or internet forums extolling the best books of the year.  (Life got a lot easier for me when I discovered there was a sf/fantasy independent bookstore in town.)

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They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. I’ve always wondered who “They” are, and if—by chance—they’ve never heard of Michael Whelan. Because my experience in life has been very different.

It’s been almost twenty years now since I first discovered Michael’s work. I was fourteen when it happened, and I was not a reader. I’d been handed a succession of novels about young boys living in the wilderness and taking care of their pet dogs. (Which would die by the end of the book.) I disliked reading with a passion. So, when my eighth-grade teacher assigned me to do a book report, I did everything I could to get out of it.

[That failed]