Spring 2022 (March);
~ The Sanderson Sisyphean Challenge

I did not read anything about this one, but turned it on and let the new world just steal me away with itself as it unfurled line by line. This one was a little harder than most of Sanderson's for me to slide into -- but that's on purpose. Our main character is deeply antisocial and steeped in isolation, to the point even his thoughts are girded toward his task and away from anything that either distracts from his training that is keeping him alive or threatens the island he's sworn to protect.

I fell in love with this one in bits and pieces. In the staunch, unwavering dedication (and dare I say love?) to a place that with your every step and its every shift of so little as even a breeze has five to twelve ways to kill you. To the birds, with their magical gifts and their quiet, personal, attachments to their characters. To the encroaching shadow of colonialism as it comes for this quiet, dangerous rural island, willing to mow everything down for the secrets it hides. ( )

I love it when Sanderson creates a world with its own ecology and species. It's impressive how he could draft a new one compressed only in 50 pages!
On the other hand, this novella is too short for a decent characterization and I could not connect to the characters and the story as much as I wanted. I hope we can get more of it in a fully structured novel. ( )

Absolutely amazing. I love Sanderson's writing. A brief novella set on a totally new world in the Cosmere that asks many more questions than it answers. I hope he gets around to fleshing out this new world with a longer story some day. ( )

I've previously listened about this story on the Writing Excuses podcast and read it in the Shadows Beneath anthology, but it's just as weird/good now as it was then.

Worldbuildingwise, the idea of an ocean culture that travels between terrifying islands (with just as terrifying beasties in the water) is fascinating. Sentient birds (/ worms) that people can tame and carry with them to grant them special powers? Yes please.

Storywise, it's an interesting exploration of a fading native trapping culture and the advances of civilization. It has just enough feel of magic to it to hint at an adventure story set in the Age of Exploration, which I really enjoy, especially given that it's not set from the point of view of the explorers.

Technically, Sixth of the Dusk fits into Sander's shared Cosmere universe. One interesting point, as noted in the Arcanum Unbounded surrounding text, is that this story takes place the furthest in the future of any of Sanderson's Cosmere stories. So those people above that are trying to trade with the people of First of the Sun? They very well could be Mistborn. Or Shardbearers. Or Worldhoppers.

Very cool. ( )

4.25 stars

First expedition into Sanderson land.

The magic thingamabobs were all interesting, and the way it explained how the Aviar get their abilities at the end was very neat. The references to various bits of backstory ( most of which I won't get since this is the first Sanderson story I've read) were also cool; there's a suprising amount of worldbuilding packed into this.

The concept for Sak was especially interesting. I'm not sure whether using a corpse in the visions was just a literal extrapolation of the "Future Vision"ish idea, but it's definitely a very vivid and effective way to do it. It also raised the sense of danger very very quickly, and the best part is that Sanderson got to show off the corpse=death/danger thing a lot at the start to explain and normalize the mechanic, and he still got a lot of impact out of it in the corpse scene (perhaps partly BECAUSE he'd established and normalized the mechanic early on).

Downsides

THE PROSE. I've seen this point made about Sanderson a few times, and regardless of whether it applies to his other writing, it certainly applies here. There were multiple places where some sentence just sounded very clunky. I noticed most of these early in the story; later, when the plot sped up, I was too immersed to notice, but there were a suprising number of them ( especially for such a short piece of writing).

To be clear, I don't expect "lyrical/sparkling prose"; I expect only unobtrusive prose that doesn't make me stop and notice that the phrasing is awkward. As you may infer from the previous paragraphs, I noticed a fair bit of odd phrasing here. ( )