Daniel Greene
Almost every other fantasy franchise I can think of that's on the scope of a Cosmere (like Forgotten Realms, Warhammer) has multiple authors contributing. The Cosmere, though, is your child; is there ever gonna be a foreseeable future where you will let someone else's pen enter that space? Or this is the Sanderson sphere?
Brandon Sanderson
I have said that I will let Isaac write in this. And if you don't know who Isaac is: Isaac is my longtime art director, friend, and now creative director at my company. And he has always had a writing bug; he's written six or seven novels. And he's asked if he could write a Mistborn novel; and I said yes. And if that comes out, and it's publishable quality, I've said he can publish it. Either with my name, and I work on it with him; or if he just wanted to publish Mistborn novels just as Isaac Stewart, I told him he would be allowed to do that, too, because he's been a longtime collaborator and helped me a lot with the visual development, and things like that.
I can see a world where I let select individuals come in and kind of do their own thing. It doesn't matter as much that it has my voice if it's their story in the Cosmere, if that makes any sense. Where something more like Steelheart, I'm like, "It's continuing my series; therefore, it should try to do some of the same things that I have been doing in the main series.
Daniel Greene
You said you'd like to die in every adaptation. Is there a particular death from a story you'd love to have? Like, Syl thrown through you at a distance? Or is there a death that stands out from the Cosmere that really should be Sanderson?
Brandon Sanderson
You know, the only really dramatic one that I think of is Vin and Zane's assault on the keep in book two of Mistborn. There's, like, a semi-lobby-sequence-from-Matrix-esque sequence in Mistborn Two. That's one of the ones where I'm like, "I oughtta be on that wall when they come passin' by." But, no, I haven't really otherwise thought "hmm, who should I be." I want to not be distracting. I don't want to be, like, one of the guys who dies in the bridge crews that's all very dramatic, and things. I want real actors for those. Peter Jackson died in a really fun way in the third Lord of the Rings film, right? He's all done up in makeup so you can barely tell it's him, but he does a very good death, and that's inspiration to me. That's my kind; the behind-the-scenes guy who gets to get shot by a bunch of arrows. I want to be there; that's what I aspire to.
Daniel Greene
There's a feeling of passing time within the Cosmere. We're seeing Mistborn jump forward ages; Stormlight Archive is now introducing new tech. And you're also just kind of dabbling into science fiction outside of the Cosmere with things like Skyward. Is there gonna become a time where sci-fantasy is a better description of what's going within the Cosmere as your writing progresses? Or is this, to you, always firmly gonna be a fantasy series.
Brandon Sanderson
No, I think you're probably right. I've told fans for years, what I'm pushing toward is something a little more Star Wars-esque in the larger worldbuilding, where you're going to many different planets, and there's both a science fiction and fantasy mix. One of my favorite movies (despite how it's aging worse and worse) is The Fifth Element. And I like that blend a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I suspect that there will always be places where I'm doing straight-up true fantasy in the Cosmere, that it will give me enough opportunities to go to planets where some of this tech just hasn't reached yet and do fantasy stories. But the main through-line of the Cosmere is pushing toward sci-fantasy.
Daniel Greene
And that kind of leads to a question where: does the complete opposite end of the spectrum attract you within the Cosmere? Writing something that is hard science fiction, maybe something more in the vein of a Star Trek than fantasy at all? Or is it more just gonna be sci-fantasy?
Brandon Sanderson
I could see myself doing something Star Trek, which is... I would call Star Trek hard fantasy, but it's, like, the lightest of hard fantasy. I could see myself doing that. I could see myself doing military science fiction. But true, Arthur C. Clark style hard science fiction, is not something I'm equipped really well to write. I could do it; it would take a lot of work and a lot of help from professionals, so it's not impossible. But writing the Cosmere version of Red Mars is just not something that's really in my wheelhouse. I'll leave that to the Kim Stanley Robinsons of the world and those who are really good at the actual science. There's a reason why I make up half of my science, and it's because that's what interests me and I find fun.
While I won't ever say no to anything that I might write in the future, I think that one's fairly unlikely.
Brandon Sanderson
Years ago, a title popped into my head. And it was called: The Frugal Wizard's Guide to London. And I'm like, "Wow, that's a good title. It feels too Harry Potter-esque; I don't know what I'll do with that." But once in a while, you get one of those titles. And, as a writer, you're like, "I need to find a book for that title." The Way of Kings was another one.
The Frugal Wizard idea was really fun to me. And then, over Covid, one of the things I often do when I am going to bed is I just tell myself a story as I'm going to sleep. This is something I've done since I was a kid; I have insomnia, and this is just a way to pass the time. And one of the things I was telling stories in my head about was people doing time travel disaster tourism. I did a whole podcast with Dan on this. This is just the idea of: what if you were to have a story where someone could travel into the past to a kind of famous event and not have to worry about changing the future? If you could just take that element away and just have fun with doing tourism in the past?
And this matched with that sort of title; I'm like, "The Frugal Wizard, what if that were a reference to the idea that people can travel the dimensions and go to different time periods?" And the Frugal Wizard's a person who wrote guidebooks for if you want to, for instance, go back to the Titanic. And it's like, "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for How to Survive the Titanic," if you want to go have that experience. So Secret Project Two is actually somebody who goes back to medieval England for reasons that are mysterious in the book. I haven't revealed them yet. But it's The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England.
And part of the joke is that the Frugal Wizard's handbook's got an interesting voice. It's Hitchhiker's Gudie-esque, where the main character is getting these entries explaining the world to him, and they are written in a voice that is very distinctive, shall we say.
Daniel Greene
It sounds like it [Secret Project Two] has incredible potential for a series; has that been in your head at all? Or is this a one-shot?
Brandon Sanderson
Oh, yeah. I am not going to turn this into a series, myself. But I brainstormed a lot of the ideas for this with Dan Wells, and so I can absolutely see Dan writing... And the fictional author of the Handbook itself, the in-world book, is a character that Dan and I have both used in our books. This guy, Cecil G. Bagsworth III, interdimensional explorer. He's the author of The Frugal Wizard's Handbook; he's actually a shared character of Dan and mine. If people like this book, I would expect that Dan'll want to take a crack at doing some other Frugal Wizard-adjacent story.
Daniel Greene
And is this [Secret Project Two] targeted towards a more YA audience? General? Or does it not really have an audience?
Brandon Sanderson
General audience. This is general audience. I kind of pitched it to my fans; it's kind of, I'm doing the "when he first arrives in the past and he doesn't remember how he got there," I'm kind of playing with the Jason Bourne style plot. But it's like Jason Bourne mixed with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy mixed with Timeline by Michael Crichton and just a little bit of Harry Dresden.