Isles of the Emberdark (No Spoilers)
New Cosmere. What more do you need to know?
Brandon Sanderson’s latest Cosmere novel is fascinating. Here is my no-spoilers review!
This book is no simple sequel to Sixth of the Dusk! It's a massive escalation of events in the "space cosmere" time-frame. The economic cold war alluded to in The Sunlit Man is on FULL display here, front and center in the story. Much of this story actually plays out like it's straight out of Star Trek (and in multiple ways at that).
And yet it is still very much a Cosmere story! A strong follow-up to Wind and Truth, starting to address a lot of the questions raised by the end of that story.
You don't need to re-read Sixth of the Dusk before reading Isles of the Emberdark. It's actually woven right into the even-numbered chapters of the first third or so of this novel. It’s really creative the way he did it, and he explains his reasoning in an author's forward.
This book connects with elements of the Mistborn series (Scadrial), the Stormlight Archive (Roshar), multiple standalone novels, and at least one (I would argue two) standalone novellas. Each planet in the Cosmere has a unique magic system, but in this novel it's all intersecting on a new planet.
As with The Sunlit Man, I can only assume that the reason this audiobook wasn’t read by Reading and Kramer is to preserve the identity of a specific character seen early in the story, in Chapter 7. That moment is a bit of a jaw-dropper for Stormlight fans!
Get this book. It’s a good one.
