Shadows of Self | Brandon Sanderson | Talks at Google

Brandon Sanderson visited Google's office in Cambridge, MA to discuss the newest book in his Mistborn series, "Shadows of Self".
Shadows of Self shows Mistborn's society evolving as technology and magic mix, the economy grows, democracy contends with corruption, and religion becomes a growing cultural force, with four faiths competing for converts.
Brandon Sanderson writes science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Words of Radiance, coauthor of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and creator of the internationally bestselling Mistborn Trilogy, among many others.

[@littleripper312]

He's such a good public speaker. That speech at the beginning with connecting the story of the writing system with the modern fantasy/fiction community was really well done.

[@lstmylttrs]

bro i’m so glad i get to experience this in my lifetime. born too late to explore the world, too early to explore the galaxy, born right on time to explore the cosmere with brandon. thanks man you’ve done more for the world than you could ever comprehend ❤

[@JoeMazzolaTheFirstPersonCook]

That reading was excellent, love the Stormlight books and am super hype for number three!

[@prizefighter7607]

+Joe Mazola I've put off reading the last 1/3 of Words of Radiance because I don't want it to end until the third book is out.

[@JoeMazzolaTheFirstPersonCook]

PrizeFighter I wish I had your willpower for things like that, but I just had to keep reading. The book had me absolutely sucked in!

[@prizefighter7607]

Joe Mazzola Have a 5 month old baby. That seems to help.

[@JoeMazzolaTheFirstPersonCook]

PrizeFighter That'd do it, yup

[@michaelxz1305]

I would have to say the last chunk of Words of Radiance is some of the best I've ever read

[@briandoble1652]

I love this guy. Brandon Sanderson seems like such a cool guy. Plus I would love to hang out with a young Dalinar

[@SkyLordPanglot]

By the sound of this hanging out with the young Dalinar woundt be considered healthy. One mood swing and...

[@briandoble1652]

That's fine with me haha

[@scruffydarealog2632]

Brian Doble not even a mood swing he couldve gotten drunk as he did most nights and woke up to 1 new murder

[@briandoble1652]

Sounds fun haha. I remember drinking all night and being good to go allvday the next day

[@merc9nine]

Brian Doble I'm just listening to the Stormlight series again, and I'm so excited for the next book.

[@sylviadailey1465]

Snotty communities criticizing popular fantasy even happened to Tolkien. The other established writers were jealous. One even called his great novels 'JUVENILE TRASH'. And they put other writers on a pedestal - writers who didn't even have that much experience. Tolkien on the other hand was a LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR. He should be admired more than everybody!

[@michaelxz1305]

they might have been talking about the hobbit... it's ok but it's a kid's story

[@hibak8196]

I love this. Accept to connect, criticize but don't shame, take the time to read with the intention of finding what people love about what you don't love.

[@nyodeler6647]

Bout time you guys got Sanderson on. Love his books.

[@vll16b]

These googlers gotta read books. Surprising they don't read books

[@SardonicALLY]

I wish someone had asked Brandon what his favourite female character in all his books is ... for me it's Steris in Mistorn Era 2 (the Wax and Wayne books), she's not the biggest character but I love her so much, the way she develops gives me tingles and I have quite literally fallen in love with her. I love it when a seemingly straight edged character turns out to be something unexpected who in turn changes the life of another character around her.

[@ForeverMasterless]

I have to go with Vin from the original mistborn trilogy. She had to contend with so much. She became a religious icon and a savior that she never asked to be. She faced a slowly encroaching apocalypse knowing that she was the best chance anybody had of preventing it. No pressure. And ultimately she sacrificed herself for the greater good despite being raised to be selfish and mistrustful of other people. The way she's revered and worshiped in era 2 literally made me cry. Nobody deserves to be deified more than she does.

[@willo7734]

Philip Dunne i hear you. Vin was obviously an awesome character and a great heroine but Steris was the character who really surprised me in a good way. Her development as a character has been a real high point in the series so far.

[@surgio98]

@@willo7734 I'm with you on Steris. If you haven't read Stormlight you are in for a treat with Shallan. Most of the female characters in the series are not what you would expect. I love the blend of femininity and strength that his female characters portray.

[@farhanrahman143]

"I'm trying to visit them all. It's a bit like pokemon." Lol

[@NikhilBlr]

Reading starts at 29:38

[@askunz1]

Your plea is granted in my heart, God bless the power of connectivity through fiction! Also, Brandon Sanderson fiction in particular. :)

[@overnightgrowth]

"between 33 and 36 books" only fuckin Sanderson XD

[@SardonicALLY]

+OverNightGaming Yup, you said it! Only Sanderson ... I listen to them on audio format because I spend 2-3 hours a day on public transport getting to and from work and I find listening so enjoyable rather than reading because I get travel sick if I read while moving. Needless to say I am going to listen to them all because I have a soft spot for mystery space opera which is going to be the final era.

[@nathalie6825]

+

[@TheClassicWorld]

That is not too many books (of course, it is much more than a lot of old writers). If you mean that's how many he wrote. But, of course, King wrote 100. Verne wrote 30. Asimov wrote 30. Tolkien wrote 40. Martin wrote 30. Gaiman wrote 40. Pratchett wrote 40. Christie wrote 70. Poe wrote 50. Doyle wrote 35. Lovecraft wrote 30. Dickens wrote 30. Shakespeare wrote 30 plays. Dahl wrote 40. Tolstoy wrote 20. Wilde and Twain and Hugo wrote 25, and many others wrote 25. And that was back then, and think how greater they are than Sanderson's. Now that is amazing.

[@leonardotukiman8253]

@@TheClassicWorld Sanderson's books are typically longer than some of the writers you mentioned. And while I agree that the prose quality is better than Sanderson, I don't mind. Sanderson gives one of the best payoffs in his books for me. And his prose quality has improved significantly in stormlight archive.

[@Luke-nn4pm]

@@TheClassicWorld That's not a number of all of his books. It's the Cosmere series. It's amazing because the only other series with that many books; they are all really short while cosmere books are several hundred thousands of words each time

[@AmyAndThePup]

I'm definitely a gardener. I suck at outlines :( I have a hard time figuring out a plotline, but I love exploring characters' thoughts/personalities/environment.

[@squeakychew]

Brandon Sanderson is an amazing author. Steelheart is my favorite book.

[@woehrle17]

Oh my gosh, the Cosmere is gonna move from fantasy to sci fi? That is freaking cool.

[@carissal.bongalosa4926]

Brandon, you're amazing.

[@airbats801]

Great guy, I love the stormlight series, best part is, the audio book comes out on my birthday. I just finished wot, and im in a low at the moment.

[@SW-wf3gy]

Is it just me? He always reminds me of Chandler Bing. I love watching him speak. Very candid.

[@SuperAwesomeVidya]

+Jessica W He reminds me of Quentin Tarantino

[@cypher_2259]

Hm

[@MemphiStig]

i took a creative writing course in college once, but the teacher only criticized my writing when i didn't use cliches. "the sun doesn't do [whatever i said]. it does [worn-out hack phrasing]." so it turned out not to be much of a creative experience after all. more like color by numbers. which is fine if you're still in grade school. but we had some cool guest speakers who were better, mainly cuz they were actually writers with genuine creative skills, and not just an establishment grammarian with none. not that i'm bitter...

[@jchinckley]

Grammar _is_ important. Clichés are just tropes with all their clothes on. Strip them down and either satirize them or change them and do something that seems new. But bad grammar makes things harder to understand for people outside a clique. That teacher needed to get a clue. He probably wasn't as educated as he should have been. Also, education is not dependent on your schooling, homework, or the classes you've taken. True education takes personal initiative and curiosity.

[@landonwall3329]

Brandon is amazing

[@kitxxxxxxx]

Tough crowd. Google stole all the fun out of them!

[@michaelxz1305]

they just stuffed themselves on all that wonderful free food that's all...

[@joelmacha2104]

Because the people who liked scifi and fantasy were beat down for decades until it became popular and mainstream. Now it's a general culture thing watch superhero movies. You can wear an Iron Man shirt and no longer be considered an outcast. But for the OG nerds, going past the Hollywood versions of things still makes you an outcast. Other people can latch on to the awesome thing we've known about for years, but without the effort or the trials of liking something even when it's not popular. It's actually the same argument for cultural appropriation. Something held close to a small group who struggles to be accepted suddenly becomes mainstream, and that once tightly held piece of culture is now owned by people outside of the original group. The culture is now controlled by people who did not work to create it, but by a larger mass of what was outsiders. Those outsiders then dictate to the originals what is and what isn't part of the culture. The originals respond by fighting to keep what was.

[@jchinckley]

The struggle is unreal.

[@Halinspark]

I love seeing how middle eastern women with hijabs constantly use it to solve minor problems. "No hands free? Stuff the phone in there." "Need a cosplay that works with your outfit? No Face or ninja."

[@strat5520]

Yeah? I know Western women that keep their phone, cash, a knife and sometimes more in their boobs/bra

[@madiantin]

I got chills when he started reading. He read so dang well!

[@XavierSchwindt]

I love how he brings up the UAE! I lived there!

[@bmwilsonify]

These people be like... "What is an Arrakis?"

[@vll16b]

Aren't they supposed to be smart people

[@jchinckley]

They all know by now because of the most recent DUNE movie.

[@hunterbartley7071]

He’s got a really good point

[@Andrew-dh1ws]

I used to live in Sharjah! Awesome

[@SuperAwesomeVidya]

1:05 start of the actual talk

[@rahul-qm9fi]

thanks. saved me a lot of time.

[@ahmeteneren3478]

I think she ummmed her entire lifespan of ummm in less than a minute.

[@starmorpheus]

Thanks. I almost gave up at 40 seconds.

[@jehadmahran]

"IT'S MY PEOPLE, I've come home, I've traveled across the world to a completely different culture, and I found THE SCIENCE FICTION NERDS."

[@greenmistatmywaydotc]

Q & A 18:00

[@Alec-pc2kk]

Was this audience forced to attend this lecture? Pretty deadbeat group of Googlers if you ask me ;)

[@abuabdullah9878]

Were you expecting a rock concert?

[@joshschwarzbauer8155]

He... is way too witty for this audience... or for this world.

[@greensmurf9623]

To be fair the room mics are only unmuted in the mix when someone says something, so it seems like they're quiet.

[@jasontodd5356]

Yo I’m hyped

[@milospollonia1121]

Did you were white the day you were to kill a king? Asking for a friend.

[@dcle944]

How many google campuses are there?

[@qq-sq6qz]

8. Then the elite 4 followed by the champion

[@chaostronaut302]

Damn, he is so educated. It is ridiculous.

[@anachelnance6329]

anyone know if this is a fandom shirt? he usually wears one.

[@ScamwatchDallin]

I believe that’s a shirt from BYU’s magazine, The Leading Edge.

[@praxis22]

Hell I read the turtles in black and white... :) Not that I'm trying to claim supremacy or anything, I'm only watching this as I'm grinding through his lectures at present.

[@DadBodSwagGod]

Woooooooow The badge thing is an inside joke at Google And very nice sidestep by Brandon when he didn’t get it

[@vll16b]

How come the ones who invented Google Maps didn't know where Sharjah was?

[@jchinckley]

This group was in charge of political propaganda and cancel culture efforts, not anything on the actual working side of the company (tongue firmly in cheek), which is why they were so unmoved.

[@17teacmrocks]

@-@ it "sounds" cooler in my head. i think i'll prefer to avoid audiobooks no matter how good the material is.

[@SkyLordPanglot]

Yeah I can agree. Even though I wouldnt say "it sounds". The stream of words become... well I was gonna say movie, but its not movie exactly. Its something different.

[@ruben307]

well if a professional book reader does it it is better. And also if you start from the beginning and all.

[@13eetle13omber]

Try GraphicAudio. They do a FANTASTIC job performing the Mistborn series

[@garnerday7149]

The audio books are better, there is no shrill nasally voice

[@michaelxz1305]

haha some would argue it sounds way cooler on graphic audio... "a MOVIE... IN... YOUR .... MINDDDDDDDDDDD"

[@MrWhangdoodles]

I kind of suck at storytelling. I love building the worlds and then I plop the characters in and they are the cogs of the world which doesn't conduce a good story since usually people continue reading for the characters, the world is simply the hook to lure people in. I just make notes and notes and I write lore and eventually I have 2000 years of history and almost a 100 000 words in notes but not a single complete chapter. By then I'm already bored with the world and I start another one. They make great D&D games but otherwise they suck. I have a few magic systems from Lord of the Rings stuff (magical magic) to hard fantasy stuff up to hard tables like LitRPG. I haven't found a single compelling story that has interested me and isn't horribly Campbellian. The closest I've come to is an Aladin kind of girl who DOES not have a mentor figure ever and has to live with a broken ability in both popular meanings of the term. But I hate writing slice of life since they tend to plod along.

[@CupCakeUnleashed]

I love dalinar

[@Haydenthemaker1000]

What a badass, just reading from a phone

[@Haydenthemaker1000]

My favorite mormon

[@eneskursadyasar5393]

Soulless audience really, but great talk by Brandon.

[@meteorite1157]

Who picked the thumbnail

[@michaelxz1305]

2000 words a day, a slight bit faster than Rothfuss - Rothfuss himself is jealous of Sanderson, he has a post on GoodReads on one of Sanderson's books talking about it - his fans (Rothfuss) just wonder that if he would concentrate on writing rather than playing video games, maybe he'd get some work done. That's just what I read, I really don't know if he is playing on twitch all the time like people say.

[@jchinckley]

He (Rothfuss) should concentrate on writing instead of charity projects that never seem to go more than 5 miles from home. Do the writing first, the "passion projects" come after the hard work, not before.

[@k9hannibal]

No! Not the horse! 😱💔💔

[@NicksAreOverrated]

"J. K Rowling has been very accepted by the community" ... this didnt age well, did it?

[@jchinckley]

Only in the opinion of a minority. Only people that are angry at her for two things no longer accept her. 1- Those upset that she retconned Dumbledore into being flagrantly gay (in a pandering sort of way), and 2- Those that are upset that she stood up for women against the erasure of women by men pretending to be women. Those people are a very loud, very vocal minority.

[@jan_kisan]

10:45 On the point of making scholarship more accessible: deunt wii hav dha seim problem widh tradishanl speling ov Inglish? Wai not meiking _it_ mor aksesibl? Eu, rait, wii'd sii dha seim grymbling from olredi haili literet piipl abaut it biing a weist ov taim and a kooz ov aua sivilaizeishn kalapsing, wii'd hia dha seim styf abaut heuli tradishanz and shit. Byt wud dhat grymbling bi karekt? Not at ool.

[@fdervb]

Problem with that is, what dialect/accent of English do you base the spelling reform on? This idea would be wonderful if English wasn't the single most widely spoken language on Earth, but because there are so many varied ways to validly speak English, any spelling reform would be making English inherently less accessible to a large chunk of the population who don't speak the language in a way that reflects the new spellings.

[@dt4236]

ps: Sanderson is a bad boye.

[@SCEnver]

The first person to translate the Bible into (Old) English was the Venerable Bede, a saint, in the 7th century. He definitely didn't get burned at the stake. Love the talk though.

[@jchinckley]

No, the first to do it was William Tyndale who was actually martyred by the Catholic church. Did you get your info from Catholic school?

[@stanislavstoimenov1729]

10:34 -- "[...] I think the only major alphabet that was designed by scholars rather than arising accidentally." Let's hope that Brandon Sanderson "the biochemist" is more knowledgeable than Brandon Sanderson "the philologue". I often wonder why is it so that Americans in general are such poor linguists... Anyway, Korean is hardly "the only major alphabet that was designed by scholars"🙄. Almost 600 years before king Sejong's project, in IX century AD, Saint Cyril and Methodius -- who were brothers, Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries -- devise the Glagolitic script, THE FIRST ALPHABET USED TO TRANSCRIBE OLD CHIRCH SLAVONIC. Both brothers are venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as saints with the title of "equal-to-apostles". In 1980, Pope John Paul II -- the first Slav pope -- declared them co-patron saints of Europe. The Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire by the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius at the end of the 9th century.

[@dt4236]

The presenters at google seem useless.

[@angryshenlong4502]

I am dumb

[@FelipeKana1]

Well, he never stopped preaching to the choir, but great speech nevertheless

[@legobrickology9167]

That's pretty funny, if the Bible was not put into English, none of them (the speaker and his fellows, that being, Americans) would not believe in it. I mean, of course, the Bible is hopeless anyway, there's simply no way it means what it says it means due to how many times it had been rewritten and re-edited and translated, etc. It's funny just to say 'which set of Ten Commandments do you follow?' since there be more than one, this works every time. Although, I am not overlooking the burning part, I mean, anybody, at all, being burnt is one of the worst things ever. Obscene history is an understatement.

[@SkyLordPanglot]

Its a good fable though. You can take a lot of moral lessons from it, but some parts are... gruesome.

[@michaelxz1305]

I like how they copied the Summerian Flood story of Gilgamesh

[@michaelxz1305]

It's 'cause there were 15 but Moses dropped one tablet - maybe people just got confused as to which tablet was dropped :)

[@jchinckley]

@@michaelxz1305 *_Everybody_* copied that story. There are flood myths on every continent, not just from Sumeria and the Hebrew texts.

[@17teacmrocks]

he turned fat after getting rich

[@callum7081]

Crabs in a bucket

[@DanielDangerous]

Can't help but stan

[@starmorpheus]

When you're writing full time, you don't spend a lot of time walkin around lol