I’ve been thinking a lot about Brandon Sanderson lately, and his recent turn toward including more woke content in his books, especially Wind and Truth. I haven’t read it (I’ve only read the first book in the Stormlight Archive), but I have read excerpts from it, and heard from other people that it includes a great deal of woke content, including a gay romance that is central to the story. Most notably, Brandon himself wrote a blog post addressing this, in which he very politely said that his conservative readers are wrong, and that anyone who objects to the gay romance on the basis of Biblical morality is not living up to Christ’s teachings about showing love and compassion. Which is, of course, one hell of a way to gaslight a large chunk of your readership. You can read more of my thoughts on that here.
I really hope Brandon pulls back from the position he’s now staked out for himself, but sadly, I don’t think that he will. From what I can tell, as a local Utah author with several direct (through his class) and indirect (through members of his writing group who are close family friend) connections to Brandon, the roots of this transformation run very deep, possibly before his debut novel, Elantris, was picked up by Tor. After all, Brandon has always surrounded himself with people who are on the extreme left side of the political spectrum, from his early days as an unpublished author working the convention circuit to get picked up by a New York publisher, all through the descent of his Writing Excuses podcast into woke madness, and most recently, to Wind and Truth itself. For a very long time, he has surrounded himself with these people. Clearly, their association has had a deep and lasting impact on him.
So what comes next? Here are some of my thoughts and predictions.
Prediction 1: Brandon will not teach English 318R at BYU after the current academic year.
For the last two decades, Brandon has taught a creative writing class at BYU as a visiting professor. Both my wife and I have taken this class. Ever since the pandemic, he has posted his lectures online on YouTube, and they have become quite popular. His class has become something of an institution at this point.
However, Brigham Young University is a religious institution, and the new president, President Reese, is rumored to have a mandate from the church leadership to clean house. From my vantage point here in Provo, there is a great deal of truth in these rumors. My wife is currently applying to be a professor at BYU, and we were asked some pointed questions about our belief in the teachings of the Family Proclamation in our General Authority interview.
What I suspect will happen is that the university leadership will talk with Brandon privately and inform him that he will not be teaching this class in the future. Brandon, being classy, will not make a big stink out of this, but he will announce at the end of the semester that the time has come for him to “move on,” or something like that, without making a big fuss. It might take another year before he gets the axe, but I will be very surprised if he continues to teach his class at BYU after the ’25-’26 academic year.
Prediction 2: Over the next few years, Brandon will lose a significant portion of his readership.
From what I’ve heard, Brandon Sanderson has somewhere between 800,000 to 900,000 true fans who buy just about every book he puts out. I don’t know what portion of those fans are conservative enough to be bothered by his turn toward the woke, but a large number of his fans do live here in Utah, judging from the massive turnout he gets at local signings and launch parties. In mingling with more conservative readers, I’ve also come to see that he has a large following in things like homeschool circles, where his turn toward wokeness is sure to be viewed with alarm.
Over the next few years, I think that most of these conservative fans are going to quietly stop buying or reading his books. They probably aren’t going to make a lot of noise as they do so—conservatives are very used to keeping their opinions to themselves. But I do think that many of these readers will see Brandon’s embrace of woke ideas and woke stories as a betrayal, and will lose confidence in him generally.
This is not a thing that we can measure very well from the outside, but from the inside, I suspect that Brandon’s publishers will be able to measure a drop in his sales. It may not be more than a dip, and he’ll still sell better than 99.99% of other authors for quite some time, but I suspect that his sales have already hit their high water mark, and we’ve already seen “peak Brandon.” People will deny it, but a large portion of this decline will be from conservative readers quietly deciding not to buy his books.
Prediction 3: Brandon’s fanbase will become increasingly toxic.
I’ve already experienced a degree of this on my other posts, but I expect it will become even more pronounced as time goes on. Brandon already has a rabid online fanbase that can descend like hyenas on anyone who posts something critical of him, especially on places like BookTube. But as more conservative readers start to pull away from his fanbase, the ones who remain will likely become even more toxic, as the remaining fans feel an obligation to defend him.
This is not to say that Brandon will encourage any of this. Brandon himself has always been remarkably classy toward his critics, and I don’t think that will change at all. He may, in fact, find it necessary to reign in his fanbase and ask them not to be so toxic. Whether or not they will listen, however, is something else entirely.
Prediction 4: Large multi-volume epic fantasy will die out with the ending of the Stormlight Archive.
By “large multi-volume epic fantasy,” I mean the kind of fantasy series where each book is upwards of 400k words, and there are at least three volumes—but usually, more like a dozen. Stuff like Wheel of Time, Sword of Shannara, Song of Ice and Fire, etc. I think we’ve already seen the high water mark for these kinds of books, and that they will no longer be considered commercially viable after the Stormlight Archive has finished.
The big trouble is that of the three major authors who are currently known for large multi-volume epic fantasy, two of them (George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss) have failed to finish their series, and probably never will. The third is Brandon Sanderson, and he became famous for finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time after the author died… again, leaving the series unfinished.
Many readers feel betrayed by this failure of the author to deliver, and as a result, many readers won’t pick up a new series until it is already complete. But this creates a chicken and egg problem, where new epic fantasy authors find it very difficult to break into the genre, since it takes a lot of time and effort to write even one +400k word epic, let alone a whole series of them.
Because of this, there really aren’t a lot of midlist or up-and-coming authors waiting in the wings to take the baton from Brandon, Martin, or Rothfuss. Also, if you calculated the Gini coefficient for fantasy book sales right now, it would probably be very high, indicating that Brandon has the lion’s share. That’s not a good sign of health for a genre—think of the western, where Louis L’Amour is just about the only author who still sells worth a damn. I love L’Amour and westerns, but it’s not what I’d call a thriving genre.
Brandon will probably never become to fantasy what Louis L’Amour has to westerns, but that’s only because people still read Tolkien, the grandfather of epic fantasy to whom every fantasy author owes an incalculable debt. Also, I’d like to point out that Tolkien didn’t write a multi-volume epic: my copy of Lord of the Rings is in a single volume, as the author originally intended.
There will probably always be a small subset of readers who prefer the sprawling +400k word multi-volume epic fantasy series to everything else, as well as a small subset of independently wealthy authors who can afford to sink their whole lives into writing this sort of thing. But I strongly suspect that the format will morph into something more serialized, along the lines of The Wandering Inn, with shorter individual works (that might not even be “books,” necessarily) released much more frequently. I don’t think this subgenre will be commercially viable after the end of Stormlight Archive—at least, not in the traditional book format.
I suspect that you are probably right on all counts. I have enjoyed Sanderson’s work through the years, mostly because he has a tendency to ask good questions through it and not insist on a particular answer to said question. If his works start preaching at me, I’m out. I HATE it when authors push their views on me, and I strongly suspect I’m not alone.
I will probably buy a few more of his books that I have particularly enjoyed, because (for example) I liked the Alcatraz books but couldn’t afford to buy them all as they came out.
I have noticed the tendency of any large fanbase to become increasingly toxic over time, not allowing any criticism of ‘their’ content or author. I don’t think this is a problem with the creators themselves; I think it’s a problem with the kind of people who become fixated on a certain genre or particular work of art. Sanderson, as you mentioned, has never encouraged and indeed has actively tried to DIScourage toxic behavior in his fans.
One of the reasons this saddens me, though, is that the Stormlight books are somewhat their own art form, with beautiful covers, interior art, and interludes all set up to further the story for those who spent some time with them. The idea that that may die out is a crying shame, because although ebooks have become more prevalent, I prefer physical copies where possible, and no one can deny that in recent years Sanderson’s books are beautiful objects in and of themselves.
I’m all for a cheap mass market paperback – I have many in my collection because they were all I could afford – but sometimes I want to pick up a really beautiful edition of a book and pause to peruse. Sanderson has advocated for books as an art form in a way that no other author could, because he had the influence to do it. And honestly, some of the indie books I’ve most enjoyed were the ones who followed suit, with snippets of interior art and fancy chapter headings that thoughtfully further the vision of the author.
Our culture is obsessed with ‘cheap’ and ‘ugly’, and I believe it’s bad for the soul, which has affected stories and art in depressing ways.
Thanks E.C. To be fair, that last point is the one that I’m least sure about. From talking with everyone else in the writing scene here, they all seem pretty confident that long-form multi-volume epic fantasy will continue to have a dedicated readership. Perhaps even if it falls out of favor as the dominant form of fantasy literature, it will continue to attract enough fans to support the subgenre. But I do think Martin and Rothfuss have done a lot of damage by failing to deliver, and while there are lots of eager indie authors itching to take up the mantle, where indie really seems to be exploding is in LitRPG and web serials, not traditional epic fantasy.
Oh, absolutely there’s been damage to the genre as big names failed to finish their series. Larry Correia has ranted at length about it – and recently finished his own epic fantasy series while thumbing his nose at Martin and Rothfuss in his dedication. 😀
To be fair, I never really got into the super long-form stories, mostly because I don’t like exponentially expanding casts/viewpoint characters, and most epic fantasy suffers from tesseract levels of plot meander. I prefer slightly smaller, tighter novels from different POVs if an author feels the need to expand their cast. But I liked the Stormlight Archives and I have read several other longer series. I do like webnovels, but they often suffer from the same kinds of plot meander as epic fantasy.
I didn’t think that the Shannara books were that long? I seem to remember them being more… normal-ish?
I haven’t read them personally, but from what I can tell they were long for the time. Before Tolkien became really popular in the 70s, most of the popular fantasy was derivative of Conan the Barbarian, and tended toward short stories and short novels. Shannara was the first series that pulled more from Tolkien than from Howard, setting the stage for the rise of epic fantasy.
Very good thoughts. Thanks for sharing–and for linking to Brandon’s original statement. I read that, too, and I agree that whatever happens next, he’ll be classy about it. I think that’s one of his great strengths. He doesn’t shame people for disagreeing with him. I actual like that of the many famous LDS Christian authors out there, there is huge variety–from vampires (Stephanie Meyer) to the Book of Mormon in space (Orson Scott Card) to dystopian (James Dashner) to high fantasy (Brandon Sanderson). I feel like this is a good time for religious writers to be in because they aren’t pigeon holed into “this is what they ought to write” (whatever that is).
Thanks Hunter-Kay.
I’m pretty disappointed about the whole deal honestly. I just got into Brandon’s books, I’ve read 3 of them. I was excited to have an author with a bunch of content i could sink my teeth into that was highly praised. This honestly kills it for me. I was ready to buy his entire collection of works and make my way through it, but I don’t think i will now. With all the liberal media and all this woke junk being crammed down our throats for the past 4-5 years I just cant take it anymore. I read, play video games, watch movies to escape the real world. I don’t want the real world creeping into my pleasures. When i found out what was in store for the newest book in the storm light archive i was devastated. I was just about to hit purchase on the way of kings and had prepared myself for the long journey but now I’m completely not interested in investing that much time just to wind up where that recent book takes us. So you’re spot on that this will alienate his conservative readers. It has 100% turned me off of him and anything he has. Even if his old stuff doesn’t include those things I refuse to support someone with his ideologies. I want the world to be less like him and if I spend money on him than i am just a hypocrite at the end of the day. So no thanks.
Thanks Chritty.
Nail on the head.
I finished Wheel of Time and decided to dip into Brandon Sanderson. Winds and Truth is awful, though.
It’s the first book I have dropped in a long time because it’s so poorly written, and the woke agenda is crammed into every other chapter. It’s giving me serious whiplash to be lectured on mental health, gay relationships, and gender “fluidity” every other chapter.
I do hope you are wrong about epic fantasy declining. I really enjoy diving into an expansive world with persistent characters and settings.
It’a too bad Brandon has decided to use his fantastic novel (the Cosmere) empire to push disgusting moral degradation.
Thanks Kyle. I hope I’m wrong about epic fantasy too.
I felt like there were characters in Starsight (the “they” alien species) that were subtle enough for conservative Christians to feel comfortable and members of the LGBTQ+ community to feel represented. I have no problem with that. As a Christian, I recognize that there are beliefs separate from my own. I am completely happy to peacefully befriend and coexist with people who live lives outside of what I believe to be “moral”. I love these people and Christ does too. I loved that in Starsight, Brandon Sanderson seemed to be making an effort to peacefully and subtly open the conversation of cultures other than our own having more gender fluidity. I felt like it was a really good step toward building relationships with people very different from us. I even felt like it was a powerful way to acknowledge that someone’s reality is not our own. They were a different species. Nobody could say they were being immoral. They just were created that way. That is something that transgender and other people who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community want those of us who see it as a moral issue to understand. Or honestly helped me better understand things family members of mine were feeling.
This recent move of Brandon Sanderson’s has done the opposite, sadly. Paired with his criticism of the church, a message of representation and acceptance quickly turned into almost a rebuke for moral beliefs. This strong stance is actually more divisive and accomplishes less for the cause of being more accepting and tolerant. It is an attack on LDS faith (and Christian faith as a whole) rather than a friendly invitation to challenging our beliefs about how people different than us should be treated.
More Christians are pulling away from public spaces and entertainment. I think a lot of us are ducking our heads because on the one side, Christianity is being weaponized by a man who is so bereft of morals it’s appalling even to his (reluctant) supporters. That is not who the majority of us are. And when good, kind Christians abandon the less-popular fight for peaceful acceptance of differences, it gives those of us who still want to exist in that safe space no room to believe there is a peaceful middle ground.
In a nutshell, I’m very sad to lose access to high-quality fantasy that doesn’t make me choose a side. I am one of the fans that has jumped ship.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, MPM.
Your article is right on target. I used to be a big fan of Brandon and supported him even from the very early days of his book signings at the Provo mall in Waldenbooks. I am supposing his friends/family/business connections, etc. etc. have gotten him to feature more and more of trendy LGBTQ stuff. I don’t think Brandon understands that including that stuff cheapens his writing and art and corrupts what he (seemed to be) originally trying to accomplish.
I have no problem showing empathy or love to people who have different beliefs than me. My problem is choosing to deliberately feature and/or promote storylines that validate things that are wrong. He promotes the fallacy that “truth” is subjective and based on what makes a person happy or comfortable, and such lies will not stand the test of time. How can a practice that directly prevents procreation be heralded as something “good”? If everyone on our planet practiced such a thing, we’d quickly be extinct. Isn’t that all we need to know? Having a character do “what makes them happy” is a slippery slope. An abusive, murderous, and destructive character is probably doing “what makes them happy” much of the time, yet anyone with morals and common sense can see why it is wrong.
I figure this boils down to 1 of 2 things: 1. he truly (personally) believes the nonsense he wrote into there books, or 2. he has been pressured to including this by his family, friends, reading group, business influences, etc. etc. and figures it will boost his sales since there is plenty of cheap money out there willing to award this kind of behavior.
Was a strong focus on woke gibberish really part of his original vision for the Stormlight Archive series all those years ago? And it just “happened” to align with society’s fascination with these ideas? I doubt it.
Thanks DRV.
Completely agree with all of this, though I go a little further in my frustrations.
I was a hardcore fan. I have every Sanderson book in hardbound right up to SL5. I did the secret novel KS. I even have some signed copies. I got SL5 at the Dragonsteel Nexus convention with my son. I was so excited about it. I went home and read the first several chapters and decided not to complete it. I felt betrayed. It’s personal to me. I can’t even open a Sanderson book on my “Sandershelf.” I’m done with him until I get an apology. He’s got films coming out and I literally have zero excitement about it. Before SL5 I would have been raving in excitement online. Now I can’t even get myself to turn on his YouTube channel. I’m disgusted with him.
That all sounds harsh to left wingers, but come on. I’m an Eagle Scout. I love my country and Jesus. To me, homosexuality is evil. The trans agenda is child abuse. Sanderson sold his soul as far as I’m concerned.
I’m waiting for an apology.
Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, I think your chances of getting that apology are pretty much zero. Whether he cynically added the gay love story in order to appease the DEI folks at Apple and get his TV deal, or whether he’s following what he actually believes, if he apologizes to his conservative fans, he’ll get trashed by the left so hard he won’t know what hit him. There are a lot of lefties who would relish the chance to bring him down, simply because he’s a straight white male.