My SFF Reading Journey

Science-fiction and fantasy have been obsessions of mine for as long as I can remember, and these genres have massively impacted my own original artistic output. You can probably tell from the sounds, themes and aesthetic of my band ORBIT, that I’m into this stuff. When I start releasing my own science-fiction and fantasy books, you’ll see a whole new layer of this inspiration coming through. Stay tuned for more info on that. For now though, I wanted to write about how these fantastical ideas took such a firm hold of my mind, and also give some thoughts on Brandon Sanderson’s massive new book, Wind and Truth, and The Stormlight Archive series as a whole.

            I think it’s very interesting how science-fiction in particular has stayed such a popular genre of fiction. The way it presents itself changes periodically, but it’s always there. Thinking about the sci-fi movies of the 1950s and 1960s, there is a real distinct vibe that gets conjured up. My mind tends to drift towards things like The Blob or Plan 9 From Outer Space; the theremin-soaked B movie (although we of course have 2001: A Space Odyssey on the flipside of that). This is a far cry to things like Robo Cop or 1984’s Dune, which would be released 20 years later, but it’s still sci-fi. There’s always some element of this genre floating around in popular culture.

            Fantasy is a bit of a different beast, and as we know it, it really has to be attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien. Now of course, this is a blanket statement and an over-simplification, but Tolkien’s influence is so massive you just can’t discount it. So that is a distinguishing factor from sci-fi, where there isn’t any one person with the influence of Tolkien. There have also been times over the years where the idea of wizards and magic swords were considered silly to society as a whole, even while spaceships and time machines were popular. So to me, it feels like fantasy has had a bit of a harder road to travel when it comes to mass appeal. It’s safe to say at this point however, that Lord of the Rings style epic fantasy has been cemented in pop-culture. That being said, the border between fantasy and sci-fi is porous at best. They are different flavours of the same meal, so I don’t mind them being lumped together, despite their differences.

            My journey into these worlds really started where it did for most people my age, with The Hobbit and Star Wars. And they’re awesome. They’re narratively simple enough, and their execution is just utter perfection, so it makes perfect sense that so many people started there. The Lord of the Rings came next, along with the rest of the first Star Wars trilogy, and being a child of the 90’s, things like Star Trek the Next Generation and The X-Files were big favourites as well. You might notice that most of the examples I’m giving are TV shows and movies, not books. I really didn’t start my SFF reading journey until I was in my 20s. I was always a reader, but I’d say I read mostly general fiction, along with some mystery/spy stuff, and some non-fiction too. I never paid much attention to genre fiction as a whole.

            Then I picked up Dune. It took me a couple of starts and stops to actually fully get into it, since I wasn’t in the habit of reading something with such detailed worldbuilding. And it doesn’t hold your hand. Names, ideas, planets, drugs… these all get thrown at you without any explanation and the only way to understand what’s happening is to just stick with it until it makes sense. And it does eventually make sense of course. You could say that Lord of the Rings was a kind of primer for reading this type of book. There is, however, always the gentle, fairy-tale quality that exists in Tolkien’s work. They’re not kids’ books (except probably The Hobbit), but there is that element to them. In comparison, Dune felt positively adult. I fell in utter love with this series, and went on to read all six of the original novels by Frank Herbert. They get weirder and more abstract as they go, and I could not get enough.

            Around the time I finished the Dune series, Game of Thrones was just starting its second season. I’d heard people talking about it, and how it was based on a book series, so I looked it up and decided it sounded like exactly the kind of thing I could become hopelessly addicted to. And I absolutely did. I read all five of the books before I watched any of the show, and I’m so glad I did that. The early years of the show nail a lot of the big moments, but I feel that it relied too much on sex and shock value right from the beginning. Those elements are absolutely there in the books, but the show focuses on them so much more. Overall, I enjoyed the show, but I do hold some resentment for how it diluted and sometimes completely omitted a lot of what I love about the books. The more bizarre, psychedelic and colourful elements were what really inspired my own writing. Well, that and all the onomatopoeia. I love that shit.

            A Song of Ice and Fire is still possibly my favourite book series of all time. It’s worth noting that I started the series back when the fifth book had just been released and the show had just started, so optimism and energy for this series was at an all-time high. I know it’s different now, although I maintain that the books stand as an amazing achievement as they are, even though they are unfinished. For about five years, I was obsessed with ASOIAF, and I spent a lot of time re-reading the books, as well as reading the supplemental stuff like the Dunk and Egg novellas, Fire and Blood, and The World of Ice and Fire. It’s all fantastic, but a part of me was thinking it might be time to check out some other stuff.

            I’d been watching a lot of youtube channels about books and was hearing a lot about this author, Brandon Sanderson, who was writing several separate fantasy series simultaneously, and they were all part of the same universe. There was a pandemic, so it definitely seemed like the right time to dive into something like that. I started by picking up The Way of Kings, the first book in the Stormlight Archive. I loved it. Starting a new epic fantasy series is an exciting feeling. The very things that made Dune difficult to get into, have become the things I look forward to in books. In contrast to ASOIAF, The Way of Kings was less constantly violent and showed less human-to-human cruelty, with the occasional very disturbing thing thrown in, which really hit me hard a few times. I was intrigued and couldn’t put the series down, and in the past five years I’ve also read the first Mistborn trilogy, the standalone novel Warbreaker, and the rest of the Stormlight Archive.

            Sanderson is an interesting and frustrating author. He’s mind bogglingly creative, and is very meticulous in ensuring all his books fit together. It’s very addictive, and on top of that, his books are easy reads, despite how long some of them are, and there are just so many. His ideas are quite original, and the fact that he never relies on using classic fantasy creatures like elves or even dragons (for the most part), really impressed me. On the other hand, his prose can be very simplistic, and there is always a moral simplicity that saturates his work, which has at times lead to character decisions that just do not feel real to me. This is a pretty consistent criticism I have to all his works that I’ve read.

            I’ve just finished reading the fifth book of the Stormlight Archive, Wind and Truth. This is the end of the first arc of the series, and there will be a second arc, books 6-10, coming in seven years or so. A lot of people have been hating on this book online, and a lot of the complaints seem to be related to the criticisms I mentioned above. Rather than rising above those weaknesses as he gets older, Sanderson seems to be leaning into them more than ever. That’s not to say I didn’t like the book. It’s a big swing, and it hits in many ways, making me very excited for the back half. Overall, I love this series, and each of the five books really is its own unique thing, including this fifth one. I’ve just come to expect the same issues from Sanderson, and in accepting those, I have really come to love what he does right.

            Now that I’ve burned through Wind and Truth, I’m going to be taking an extended break from Sanderson. I’ll read some more of his work before the next Stormlight book comes out (probably some of Mistborn Era 2), but for now I’m really excited to read some new stuff. Aside from Wind and Truth, in 2025 I’ve read Son of the Hounds, an historical fiction about the war of 1812 by my grandfather, Robert Sutherland; To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers, which is a great sci-if novella that follows the lives of astronauts exploring new exo-planets in the next century (expect a detailed review of that in the near future); Bloodsucking Fiends, a contemporary vampire comedy by the great author, Christopher Moore; and I am currently just over three hundred pages into The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I know opinions on that book, series, and author can be intense, but I have to say I’m loving it, and it is totally giving me that wonderful feeling of discovering a new fantasy world for the first time.

            So in closing, if I had to pry any kind of thesis out of this black hole of my personal reading history (that sounds like the most boring topic ever), it would be that reading is cool. Do it. Do it lots.