The Emperor's Soul (Elantris Book 2)

By now its pretty obvious I'm a Sanderson fangirl. He ranks in my top 5 favorite authors and is an insta-I'll even pay full cover price for the hardcover buy. This isn't to say I think everything he writes is perfect (I had some issues with The Alloy of Law for instance), but by golly his writing makes me excited to read every time. This is his second stand alone novella of the year (after the contemporary mystery/urban fantasy Legion, which I have yet to review) and I think this one fared better then Legion. Not just because its longer (edited to add: You can see in the comments, EMPEROR is much longer than Legion), but because it played more on his strengths. The magic system here was as intricate as they come--in about 140pages he conveys a system just as detailed as anything in Warbreaker or The Way of Kings. Unfortunately unlike his longer epics the information is more or less explained to us instead of organically weaving itself into the plot. That's okay though, this is a much shorter work so I expected that. This is loosely tied in with Elantris (as in, set in the same world, but not the same characters, setting, magic system or tone at all) and for his eager fans that bloody trickster that runs throughout all his books (tied in with the Cosmere at least) gets his due here as well. Sanderson approaches this magic system from a more philosophical bent. Forging is, in essence, re-writing something (or in this case someone's) history. Shai uses it for theft and amusement, but she's highly skilled at the little details other people seem to miss. She's a perfectionist. She doesn't just Forge a broken table into a sturdier model, she Forges it into something it can be proud of, something that speaks to its 'soul' and sense of being. By contrast Gaotona, and the whole Empire Shai is being blackmailed into saving (kind of), view Forging the same way people view reproductions of artwork or sculptures. Its there to please the eye, nothing more. The debates the two get into are intriguing. Shai's people believe everything has a soul and its important to respect that. Gaotona's internal debates on whether or not what they're asking her to do--that is save Ashravan by Forging his soul--is ethical is what makes up the meat of this book. I won't say what the end result is. Its unexpected in many ways and yet suits the story. Though many of the other characters are thinly written, and the world isn't as well fleshed out as his previous works, this is still a solid reading experience. This may in fact be a good book to hand to a Sanderson newbie--its short enough that they won't feel intimidated, but gives a good accounting of his writing style to lure them into his longer works.

I had heard a lot of good things about Brandon Sanderson’s works and have been trending more into the fantasy and science fiction realm in recent years, so picking up The Emperor’s Soul to read seemed like a no-brainer. I had started The Wheel of Time series, reading the first two books in the series and thoroughly have enjoyed them and saw that Sanderson had collaborated with Jordan on finishing the series. The Emperor’s Soul, as readers say, is a shorter novella and a good entry point into Sanderson’s style of writing. “To forge something, you have to know its past, its nature.” The basis for the novella concerns Shai, a master Forger who had been caught stealing and is awaiting execution. She is given an opportunity to win her freedom, however, when presented with the opportunity of forging the soul of the Emperor, who is in a catatonic state after an assassination attempt. Those who offer her the deal want this to be a covert undertaking, as they hope to avoid a civil war and save their own skin, but tell her that they want this to be finished within one hundred days. While Shai is an expert at the craft of forging, this is an entirely new type of unprecedented forgery that pushes the envelope and that she has never performed, so she must work diligently and expertly to accomplish this, all the while with a timeline over her head. “No matter how good you were, someone was better. Live by that knowledge, and you would never grow so confident that you became sloppy.” This is one of those reads that took me a while to get into, but I really was very invested as the book progressed. By novel’s end, it was a very enjoyable and satisfying read. I think it takes the reader a little bit of time to wrap their brains around the entire concept of the forgery magic system, but once the story gets going, things fall into place nicely. I liked the intriguing aspects of how Shai has to walk a delicate line between completing her task, and also thinking about her freedom, understanding what those who are forcing her to do this are capable of. She has to navigate carefully. It was also interesting to see how she had to do her research and reading and learning with such precision, digging into and exploring the Emperor’s life to create the proper seal. Shai has to get inside the Emperor’s mind, so to speak, to try to recreate his stamp, his soul. At any rate, this short work offers a lot of food for thought about important themes like identity, originality, ownership, and the art and value of taking something to create. In our day and age of artificial intelligence and the issues with it, this novella works nicely as a discussion piece into such subjects and topics about the ethics of such modern technological advances. A very engaging and interesting read, and I now have Mistborn: The Final Empire on my to-read radar.

Though known for his epic fantasy, Brandon Sanderson has now released The Emperor's Soul, the second of two novellas scheduled for late 2012. While the first, Legion, was fun, it was too short - at 88 pages - to let Sanderson really develop the story as well as he usually does. In The Emperor's Soul, Sanderson takes a more robust but still quick 176 pages to tell a fantastic story that really gets you into the protagonist's head, while also giving fans of his previous works some fun ties to his first novel, Elantris. Sanderson seems to have found his novella "sweet spot" with The Emperor's Soul, and it's well worth reading. Our protagonist is Shai, a master Forger who is caught by the palace guards during a heist. Fortunately for her, instead of being executed outright, the Emperor was recently seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, leaving him alive but a vegetable. The Emperor's closest advisers, despite their repugnance at her skills, are desperate enough to ask Shai to Forge the Emperor a new soul. Shai takes the job because it's better than a short drop an a sudden stop, hoping to find a way to escape while working on the impossible task before her. Instead, the challenge consumes Shai, and we learn a lot about who she is, why she does what she does, and how her talents work as she works away at the problem. No simple thief or charlatan, Shai considers herself an artist, and we see just how accurate that appraisal can be as she approaches the Forging of the Emperor's soul. Shai is the focus of the book, but the secondary characters are well-rounded, especially considering the space Sanderson has to work. We learn as Shai does just who the Emperor really was, and we get a lot of interesting interaction between Shai and Gaotona, on of the Emperor's advisor's, and Gaotona himself is very compelling, given his personality and role. The other characters are less of a focus, but Sanderson still develops them well, giving the reader a good view of everything from the politics of the Empire to why the guard captain especially doesn't like Shai. As I mentioned, there are ties to Sanderson's first novel, Elantris. If you haven't read Elantris, don't worry, that won't slow you down at all. If you have, you'll appreciate the little touches that show the Empire is part of the same world, even if far away, and you'll have fun puzzling out how Shai's Forging ties into the magic system seen in the parts of the world depicted in Elantris. Sanderson always delivers great magic systems in his fantasy books, and the magic here is different enough from Elantris to be interesting while still be consistent with the logic of the other book. Sanderson has done an amazing job with The Emperor's Soul. It retains the brevity and speed of a good novella, while also delivering deep characters, an interesting plot, and great world-building. Sanderson manages to get a lot more of his usual talents to come through in this novella than his first attempt at the shorter format in Legion. Maybe it's a matter of size, with this book being twice as long, or that it's fantasy, which Sanderson does more of than the science fiction / thriller genre of Legion. In any case, Sanderson knocks another one out of the park with The Emperor's Soul, and I'm much more excited about the idea of novellas from Sanderson now than I was after Legion, which was fun but just felt too short and not quite as deep as I'm used to from Sanderson. If you're a Sanderson fan, you'll enjoy The Emperor's Soul, and if you're not, it's a good way to give him a try without committing to one of his longer epic novels or trilogies. Either way, I highly recommend The Emperor's Soul.

Brandon Sanderson, popular author of various epic fantasy works can certainly be called “prolific”. He has, in just a few short years, written numerous books. Some short novellas, but most lengthy novels – between about 600 to 1,000 pages long – each of which usually take a couple of years a piece for most writers. What's more, the quality doesn't suffer at all. His work is really good. I have not heard this from his mouth personally, but I wager that he genuinely loves writing, and that that is why he can put out so much material. He has done it again in his novella *The Emperor's Soul*. The story takes place on the same world in the “Cosmere” - the universe where all of Sanderson's works (not including his novels completing Robert Jordan's *The Wheel of Time* books, which takes place on a future/past earth) take place – as the novel *Elantris*. In an empire in a different location of that world, a “Forger” named Shai has been arrested in an attempt to steal the Emperor's scepter. Forging is essentially a system of magic whereby one can create various “stamps” that, when applied to an object or an animal, will rewrite the history of what is stamped, in order to make it something else. This can work on people as well, but this is *much* more difficult and prone to error. The only caveat is that the new “history” must be something believable about that which it affects, or it will not take. As a side note, Sanderson has stated that he got this idea from the seals that he saw stamped onto some ancient artifacts when he visited a museum on a trip to Taiwan one time. The penalty for such an attack (such as Shai's attempted theft) on the person or attire of the emperor is execution. But Shai is offered a chance to survive. It is revealed to her by the Imperial advisers (called Grands) that assassins from a rival political faction have murdered the Empress and rendered the Emperor vegetative. If she can rewrite his past to forge him a new soul during the 100 days in which he is officially “in mourning”, so that his state of health is not discovered, then she can go free. If not, she is to be executed. Shai sets to work, but she doesn't believe the Grands for a minute. She knows that they will kill her anyway. Whether this be when she is finished, or beforehand when she is far enough along to have another forger complete her task, she isn't sure. But she is already planning her escape. Then the unexpected happens in that she begins to care about the welfare of the Emperor she is tasked with restoring to life, and about the one honest Grand who assists her in her work. Can Shai finish her task and escape before she is quietly executed? This book is not so much action as it is a work of philosophical and psychological suspense. I say philosophical in a specific way. Sanderson does not engage in the level of commentary that he does in the *Mistborn* novels (not even that of *The Alloy of Law* the similarly short *Mistborn* novella). His commentary applicable to our society is brief. This isn't a preachy book at all. What I mean is that the story of Shai and how she uses her magical “art” to set about restoring the Emperor and escaping is tied up in philosophical and psychological aspects of that specific plot. It really is interesting. It's like some films that have a person mostly in one room undergoing days, weeks, or months of adversity, but the difference is that this story has a happy ending. I hope that's not too much of a spoiler to say that. ;) The characters, other than Shai, the one kinder Grand, and the Emperor, were not exactly well-developed, and these three were not given a ton of development either. Of course, given the brevity of this story, that is not surprising, and it is certainly not the negative it would be for a longer work. They received sufficient attention for the needs of the story. Once again, Sanderson designs a rather ingenious system of magic. While Sanderson does have his faults in that he can be a tad too wordy (just like the late Robert Jordan could be), and he sometimes doesn't give the proper “breathing room” of some positive aspect amidst the darkness of some more depressing stories (see the first of his *Stormlight Archive* novels, though his *Mistborn* books don't fall into this trap), but he is ingenious at developing characters just enough for what the story needs, and at creating unique and interesting systems of magic. I would actually compare Sanderson's impact on modern epic fantasy in terms of how he handles magic to Isaac Asimov's impact on science-fiction in how he handled robots. I'll be the first to say that the man has faults, and to roll my eyes at some of the more extreme Sanderson fanboys that apparently think he is some sort of god of fantasy literature, but he does deserve his due as a prolific, talented, and creative author. *The Emperor's Soul* makes this abundantly clear. Highly Recommended.

Wan ShaiLu is a Forger. By carefully crafting and using soulstamps, she can in some sense alter the history of an object: fixing a timeworn table by rewriting its history so that it was properly maintained, for example. But the Rose Empire considers Forgery a great evil, and she sits in prison awaiting her fate for having been caught in a theft involving forgery. Fortunately for her, the emperor Ashravan has been desperately injured in an attempted assassination. And the only way he can be healed is for Shai to Forge not an object, but an emperor's soul, well enough to fool an entire nation -- before the emperor's enemies discover the extent of his injuries. "I think it's my best piece of short fiction to date, and stands as one of the best complete works I've done of any length. It reads more like a short novel than it does a long short story, and does a lot of what I do in my longer fiction--it has a great magic system and cool characters." -Brandon Sanderson At least based on his works that I've read, Sanderson's right: this is definitely his best short fiction yet. Infinity Blade: Awakening suffered somewhat from issues of pacing (not to mention that the underlying story wasn't fully Sanderson's to tell). Legion significantly improved upon this, but it told more story in less time than it should have; it felt a little like a long story abbreviated in a short story format. This book truly gets it right: neither is it rushed nor is it slow, and neither is it cramped nor is it drawn-out. It has exactly the right feel for a novella: not too much, not too little. And yet, as Sanderson says, it still does what his stories do best: tell a story based around a systematic form of magic, given through interesting characters. The book takes place in Sel, the world of Sanderson's debut novel Elantris , and there are parallels between portions of this story and that one. (And -- mini-spoiler -- most of Sanderson's works take place in sibling worlds within a universe known as the Cosmere, although this is not relevant to this particular story.) But it's not necessary to read either book before the other: if memory serves, the allusions between them are little more than some similarity of concepts and the nations mentioned in both. Sanderson's novels are where he works best, but he's getting increasingly good at shorter forms as well. If you've only read his novels, this is a good place to start reading his shorter works.

I really enjoy Sanderson's books and this was no exception. Once you have read a few of his books the plots become a little predictable, but that really does not take away from the enjoyment of the book. His characters are complex, well developed and enjoyable. His female characters are powerful and are given good roles, my only complaint would be the fixation on their hair, clothing and that they ultimately are always subservient to the men, helping develop their characters and are often rescued by them, still they are better than in many other similar books so I am not complaining too much. Very good mixture of lower and upper class characters, more so than in most other books of this kind but once again, although subtly the edge goes to the upper class, the main characters even if they start out lower class are usually absorbed into the upper class even if they are at some point sucked down into the lower class they inevitably rise up and often 'become' the upper class (I am generalizing over books here). However those would be my only complaints about the book, it is face paced, the plot complex and enjoyable, the characters well developed and varied very hard to stop listening to or to read.

This is just a gem of a story, and to think I almost didn’t buy it. Why, because it just doesn’t portray much band for the buck. I mean why spend almost $15 dollars for a ultra slim, by today’s standards, volume of only 176 pages. Then there is my private beef with publishers the last year or two who seem obsessed with producing off size editions. Maybe for a person that doesn’t have 4000 books on custom shelves that doesn’t matter but I like my paperbacks to fit on my paperback shelves somewhat evenly and this is both slightly taller and slightly wider that normal. Luckily for me Amazon had it on sale when I was ordering some other books so I took the plunge and boy am I glad I did. This is really a novella since there is a pretty high perchance of dialogue to description and it makes this about a 3 hour read which is pretty rare among modern books. The author crafts a society and a magic system in only a few short sentences and then lets the story run itself. Shai is being held in jail awaiting judgment. Her crime, she is a forger who using some rather tenuously explained magic system where through study and research she crafts a soul stamp that when applied to an item rewrites its history. While this power is favored by the Empire as a way of recalling past artworks it is done more by rote by the accredited practitioners and anyone doing it on their own is an enemy of the State. An example of this is when she uses her power to change a drab wall into one covered by a magnificent mural. She has learned that years ago a renowned artist was sick for several months in another room in the palace and working from the assumption that he could have just as easily have been ensconced in this room rather than another and that it would have been equally possible for him to dab away at the walls while he waited to recover his strength. She is enlisted to perform a task of great import to the Empire, something secret that has to be accomplished in a short time which is completely beyond the ability of the government controlled magic workers. What I enjoy the most about this story is that there is a “WOW” factor in the magic. It is a highly visible thing that astounds the reader along with the people who are keeping her captive. Too often books take their magic for granted and dwell at most on the amount of power rather than the wonder of their magic. Because of the skill of the author I found myself revisiting several paragraphs almost as soon as I finished my initial reading.

The ever prolific Brandon Sanderson is back again, this time with a novella from his Cosmere titled The Emperor's Soul. After a few adept attempts at writing short fiction, The Emperor's Soul is in my opinion the first piece of short fiction that Sanderson has gotten just right. With a fascinating study of clashing beliefs, another inventive magic system, and highly entertaining action sequence, The Emperor's Soul is the book I would recommend to anyone who wants to find out for the first time what Sanderson is all about. The story follows a young girl named Shai, a Forger who is imprisoned after an attempt to steal a famous sceptre on display in the emperor's palace. Shai has the ability to alter any object by creating a stamp that forges a new history for the object it is applied to. For example, a plain old wooden table can be transformed into a masterpiece by altering the history of the plain old wooden table to say it was created by a master carpenter. When an assassination attempt leaves the emperor in a vegetative state, Shai is offered her freedom in exchange for a stamp that will alter the history of the emperor so that he is able to recover from his vegetative state. But crafting such a stamp is highly complex and controversial process, and Shai knows she is a loose end that the emperor's council will be desperate to get rid of. I really enjoyed this story, not only for the plot points from beginning to end, but also for all the themes that the story generates along the way. The idea of forging a person's soul generates a theological debate about the nature of a soul which Sanderson embraces whole heartedly. Sanderson also generates debate about the nature of art, whether forgery can be considered art or not, and why a skilled forger would not create their own art. There are many arguments generated, and Sanderson presents both sides in a surprisingly balanced fashion, never giving preference to one side over the other and giving the reader all the information they need to form their own opinion. I felt connected with both main characters used to explore these debates, and Sanderson delivers an ending that gives a great pay off for both characters. Speaking of the two main characters, Shai and Gaotona are a fantastic pair of polar opposites who are connected by their passion for knowledge and understanding. These fierce enemies at the start build a unique relationship, and watching both of them grow throughout the story is rewarding in itself. Sanderson tries to introduce more characters and tries to give them importance in the story, but these characters end up feeling a bit tacked on and they take away from the main character conflict between Shai and Gaotona. The Emperor's Soul is a fantastic addition to Sanderson's already bulging bibliography. At 175 pages, it is on the short side, but unlike his previous attempts you really feel like you get a full story in these 175 pages. For those big Sanderson fans, there are a number of neat little Cosmere Easter eggs scattered throughout this story, but you don't need any knowledge of prior Sanderson works to fully appreciate this novel. This is an easy recommendation to every fantasy reader out there.

Great short novel that keeps you hooked until the end. I was left wanting more!

Typical Brandon Sanderson. Great storytelling, a nice little plot with well defined characters that really draw you in. Even those who hardly feature are three dimensional. Brilliant.

Aqui já vemos como Brandon Sanderson evoluiu na escrita desde Elantris. O livro é envolvente e de leitura rápida, apesar de não ter tantos acontecimentos como brigas e conflitos. 5/5 estrelas!

For a Sanderson, I was stunned at how short this book was (~200 pages). I was bracing myself for another behemoth. The story is just fabulous and really engaging. How he thinks of some of the concepts in his books is beyond me. The majority of the story takes place in just 1 location (room in fact) so the character interaction becomes pivotal and it is spot on.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I highly recommend it for both Brandon Sanderson fans and for new readers. I actually found myself wishing this book was longer.