Dragonsteel Prime

4.5 stars out of 5.

This is not just a “Sanderson curiosity”: it's a very good novel that should be read and enjoyed by anyone who likes Brandon Sanderson, and it's fortunately online for free! This is a comprehensive, epic, adventure story that felt in vibe a lot like Anthony Ryan's Blood Song, but with more magic and and a larger cast of characters. Most prominently, an early version of Hoid/Cephandrius appears in this story as a prominent character, and what a wonderful character this early Hoid is.

Dragonsteel Prime is a really nice example of Sanderson's early style, encompassing five available novels: this, White Sand, Aether of Night, Elantris, and Warbreaker. Early Sanderson is emburdened by heavy-handed foreshadowing and a lack of diversity in his conceits, but he shows in all five novels the elements that would later make him famous. In these books, Sanderson usually takes some generic fairy tale or fable and dives deep into the detail and lore. He'll create fantastical environments for this fable to take place, go into the complexities of the religion, and synthesize anything into his characteristic finale. In all these novels, we see adventurous, somewhat complex but unelegant prose, long and steady chapters, many equally distributed points of view, and a fascination for palace scenes and court intrigue. It's easy to see how he stands out from a crowd of less talented writers, and also easy to see how his writing has become more universal over the years.

Our main protagonist is Jerick, a young forester (“lumberman”) in your typical “farm boy sent to palace” storyline. There, he meets Ryalla, a slave girl and attendant to the princess Courteth who sets up the characteristic love triangle. If you've read any of the other early novels, you've seen this setup all before. But we meet the king's jester, Topaz, a wonderful character in his own right who would later evolve into Hoid; Bat'Chor, Hoid's aggressive friend and a member of the obligatory dark-skinned colonized race that usually permeates the early works; and several of the scholars who teach Jerick and, indirectly, Ryalla. These side characters really infuse the book with flavor; it's truly funny in a way that Sanderson has rarely reached since.

Jerick's story eventually includes a subplot that Sanderson would eventually repurpose for The Stormlight Archive, the idea of bridgemen and his company of the Fourth Bridge (several characters of which readers might recognize from Bridge Four). On the Shattered Plains, they fight for Dragonsteel, a valuable element, against the alien Sho Del, who along with the dragons comprise “fain life.” I didn't find that this overlap impacted the reading experience: this arc is far less detailed than the one in Stormlight, and feels like a relatively minor part of Jerick's journey.

The end of this book is possibly the biggest and most out-of-control avalanche that Sanderson has ever written, which is possibly why he considers this book weak and unpublishable. I enjoyed it very much, but it's very different than many other Sanderson endings you might be used to.

I think this book, after Elantris, is the second-best of the early novels, all of which I'm partial to. Of course, if you don't like early Sanderson, you might want to give this one a pass. It is somewhat an acquired taste: if you like the modernity, pace, and large scale of Sanderson's current work, you might be a little alarmed to see him writing very 1990s fantasy with a twist! But it's charming in a way, and really shines a light on what makes Sanderson work as an author when compared to others.

Dragonsteel is probably publishable with some light editing, and honestly better than most of the recent self-published novels I've read. Of course, Brandon will push the narrative that it's not good and it's not canon, but I think it's better than he gives it credit for and a lot of people will probably enjoy this. Read it, it's free!