Most of Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy books take place in a single universe known as the Cosmere. Seemingly disparate series are connected by the underlying rules for how magic works along with powerful worldhopping characters like the wandering storyteller Hoid. While this ambitious undertaking was always Sanderson’s plan, the prolific author revealed on his YouTube channel on April 16 that he kept the links between his work quiet at first to make it easier to get published.
“If you write book one and it doesn’t sell to a publisher, it’s very hard to send them book two,” Sanderson said. “But if you have a different standalone, you can send that to them, particularly if they kind of liked book one but were like It just doesn’t mesh with what we do as a publisher.”
While Sanderson is now one of the most successful authors of all time, he explains he wrote 13 novels before Elantris was published in 2005, almost all of which were standalones. But Sanderson grew up reading sprawling series packed with interconnected characters like Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and longed to write something in that vein.
“I started connecting all these books behind the scenes in ways that wouldn’t be obvious so that I could still be submitting them all, but I thought of them as one giant mega-series,” he said.
The full vision of the Cosmere hadn’t quite taken shape when Sanderson published Elantris in 2005, though he had already come up with the character of Hoid. Once Elantris sold, Sanderson began working on his first trilogy, Mistborn, and plotting not just that series but how it and Elantris would fit together in a larger continuity. The lore of the Cosmere is almost entirely absent in the first Mistborn book, but creeps in later in the trilogy when it becomes clear that the problems on the planet of Scadrial are caused by a conflict between the godlike beings Ruin and Preservation.
Sanderson compares his shared world to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some fans feel like they need to read everything set in the Cosmere so they can track the interconnected plots and characters. Others can just follow their favorites and not worry about the Easter eggs they’re missing. He does warn that if you want to dive into his biggest series, The Stormlight Archive, you’ll ideally have also read Mistborn and Warbreaker since those works are all closely connected.
“Any given series in the Cosmere is written so that you don’t have to know any of this,” Sanderson said. “You can just start reading and just fall in love and love the book and the characters. But if you want to dig deeper, there are these connections that are happening behind the scenes. The further you go in the Cosmere, the more these become relevant.”
