BINGO: Black, it’s all over this cover
There is a lot of telling instead of showing in this book, for an author who is already sort of well known (and, in some circles, sneered at) for being very tell-y. To be fair, I think it’s because Sanderson is very keen on his world and excited to tell us about it! And to be even more fair, I am a little Cosmere gremlin who will never be satisfied with details and arcana, no matter how arcane. The overlap in venn diagram between “people who thought the LotR appendices should have been longer” and “people who enjoy reading the Cosmere wiki” is probably a full overlapping circle.
However, this is the second time that some truly world-shattering truths have been shared via short-ish novel that isn’t part of any larger series, and I wonder about our ability to forgive Sanderson for doing so (the other example, in my opinion, was Dawnshard, which continues to flabbergast me for the ratio of leveling up of Cosmere powers to book size. Like, the book is literally tiny) (perhaps that’s a metaphor?).
In this case, we are back in one of my favorite Cosmere places, First of the Sun (Drominad for the rest of you), where we last met Sixth of Dusk and his Aviar, parrot-like birds that bestow Invested bonds on their humans that let them survive a truly Jumanji-like wilderness. In our last outing, we learnt that despite their so-called primitive ways, First of the Sun is highly, highly interesting to the warring factions in the Cosmere–we know them as Scandrials (and, in this novel, Rosharians) but to Sixth of the Dusk and his fellow First of the Sunians, they’re the “ones above,” literally beaming in from spaceships. They follow a very Star Trek inspired code of not disturbing worlds that have yet to reach a certain level of technological attainment, but are fully happy to try and push them along via strategic technology drops…sort of a letter of the law vs spirit of the law situation. In our last novella, Sixth of the Dusk figures out this trap and manages to get his planet’s government to realize it as well, saving them (temporarily) from being overtaken and their islands Nahel Bonding Birds to be colonized.
But now, things are different. The Ones Above (and the ones Sharded Up) are impatient, and they’re going to figure out a way into the planet one way or another. Rumors of a Perpendicularity which would drastically cut down on the travel time through the Cosmere abound, as do fantastical and super powerful weapons that could lay waste to much more evolved societies than Dusk’s.
Also, there’s a dragon (!!!!) exiled in human form on a very Firefly-esque ship trying to keep her crew together.
To repeat: DRAGONS HAVE MADE THEIR ENTRANCE.
For once even I could see the ultimate solution to the main conflict—how can First of the Sun maintain any sort of independence in a world with such inequality of military might?—but I didn’t begrudge even a minute spent getting there, given how many morsels of Cosmere goodness we were dropped along the way. And with the latest tidbits of Ghostbloods now available for our perusal, I’m not even that mad about the timeskips that throw the going ons in time bubble Roshar into disarray.