62 pages • 2 hours read
Brandon SandersonTress of the Emerald Sea
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere and “Secret Projects”
The Cosmere is a creation of Brandon Sanderson, a universe that connects nearly all his oeuvre. The Cosmere encompasses all the worlds of his novels, including the Stormlight Archive series, the Mistborn series, Elantris, Tress of the Emerald Sea, and more. A few characters do travel between the worlds of this universe, including Hoid, Ulaam, and the Sorceress, but the populations of these worlds are otherwise unconnected. Each world has its own magic system, manifesting in a variety of ways.
Cosmere has a highly complex structure, which involves three different realms: the physical realm—a planetary system, the cognitive realm—the world of thought and imagination, and the spiritual realm—the world of concepts or ideas in which everything exists as essence. Despite the complexity of Cosmere, Sanderson emphasizes that a reader need not have a great deal of understanding of the logistics in order to follow any of his novels. Rather, the connections that readers may find to the cosmology of the universe across novels offer subtle rewards for the specialist reader.
In 2022, Sanderson started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publishing of a series of books that he wrote during the Covid-19 pandemic. The campaign has set the record for the most money raised on Kickstarter ($41 million). Tress of the Emerald Sea is the first of four novels that were revealed on Sanderson’s YouTube channel in March of 2023. Donations to the Kickstarter were rewarded with exclusive editions of the novels and have helped fuel Sanderson’s large Cosmere fanbase as the process of exclusivity, including the use of Sanderson’s own publishing house Dragonsteel Entertainment, secrecy, and unveiling creates a highly enthusiastic reader community.
Sanderson has hinted, both through the novels and through communications with his fan base, that his novels are building up to even more connections throughout the Cosmere, as well as some conflict that is bigger and more dangerous than the conflicts of the novels thus far. For now, each of the series Sanderson has written stand independently from the rest.
Genre Context: Fantasy Literature
Fantasy literature is a branch of speculative fiction that creates worlds out of magic that is physically impossible. Closely related to fantasy is science fiction, another genre of speculative fiction that speculates on the possibilities of science and technology that may be possible someday. Sanderson’s novels qualify as fantasy in that they rely on a world of magic, yet Sanderson creates concrete systems and frameworks of rules that dictate the functioning of magic in his fictional worlds, similar to the laws and theories of science that science fiction plays with.
Sanderson himself distinguishes between two different types of magic found in fantasy literature—soft and hard. “Soft” magic is that which creates an element of wonder in the reader and magic seems to be more of an inherent quality of a character or location. An example of this can be seen in Gandalf and his ability to move things with thought in the Lord of the Rings series. “Hard” magic, found in Sanderson’s Cosmere universe, is a system of magic governed by rules of the universe in a vein similar to scientific principles in the real world. These hard magic systems are often explained at length in hard magic fantasy novels. Magic, like science, becomes a skill that a character builds and the world follows these rules of magic, regardless of the narrative circumstances. For example, in the Mistborn series, those born with particular powers can ingest metals and “burn” them to use certain powers. Here, the rule is that metals must be ingested first before powers can be used.
For Sanderson, magic must follow rules that he has outlined as follows: “An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic” (Sanderson, Brandon. “What are Sanderson’s Laws of Magic?” 2018). In this way, Sanderson has joined some of the expectations for science fiction—logic and human imperfection—with the awe expected of fantasy. Magic in Sanderson’s worlds must be thoroughly explained and allow the audience to guess at its uses and extents. In this way, magic in Sanderson’s novels becomes another literary tool for foreshadowing, tension, by way of the predictability of a rationalized magic system.
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