Review: The Emperor's Soul

The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most people, when they're taking a month's break, do something that isn't related to their job.

Brandon Sanderson, apparently, writes a Hugo-winning novella.

At novella length, the worldbuilding and the magic system are a bit thinner than his usual, not very far beyond the initial inspiration of looking at some East Asian seals in a museum and thinking (in the way Sanderson does), "What if that was a magic system?" The main character uses such seals to "Forge" - that is, to alter the essence of something in a way that is plausible if it had a different history. She's been caught stealing from the Imperial Palace, fortunately at the exact same time as the emperor has been brain-damaged in an assassination attempt and can be expected to spend 90 days out of the public eye in mourning for his assassinated wife, and the faction that backs and largely controls the emperor want her to do the impossible - Forge his missing soul, so that he can continue ruling and they won't be displaced from power.

The idea that she achieves this (and so much else) in 90 days when it should take years is made somewhat more plausible by the knowledge that the author wrote this book in a month (though he did have plenty of time to revise and improve it). As a novella, it's inevitably somewhat linear, though it does have some clever structural features which are fully visible only when you reach the end. The protagonist is clever and skilled, and I do enjoy watching a clever, skilled person do what they do so well (and here I mean the author as well as the protagonist).

The antagonist still feels like a threat, even though we know, at a meta level, that the protagonist will win out; the way in which she wins out is clever and, in its way, amusing, though this isn't as humourous a book as many of Sanderson's. The East Asian feel is present, though not as in depth as a novel would make it.

Given the length Sanderson usually writes at, a novella is his equivalent of a short story from a more normal writer, and it should probably be judged as such rather than compared to his novels directly. Considered as a short story, it has everything it needs to succeed.

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