BRANDON: Hey! Welcome to the SanderFAQ, where I talk about Sanderson-related things. Today, what is the Cosmere?
I get this question a lot, and I can give you a short answer and a very long answer. The short answer, in case you want to click off this video and you just want it up front, the Cosmere is an interconnected universe that my epic fantasy stories take place in that share some characters. It's like the MCU, though technically I released the first Cosmere book two years before the MCU started, so really the MCU is like me. Think MCU, but for a bunch of epic fantasy worlds, there are crossover characters, but the focus is more on the different cultures mixing and things like this. So Star Wars, but fantasy, you could kind of imagine, except there's not really spaceships and things yet. There are some future books that have it. So anyway, what's the Cosmere? The Cosmere is the name for this universe.
What's the long version? The long version, when I first read the foundation books by Isaac Asimov, like a lot of authors, or readers—at the time I wasn't an author—my mind was blown by how cool the Foundation books were. So I then read the Robot books. Then I read the later Foundation books and saw him integrating these two worlds together. And as a young teen, I thought, “That is really cool. I wonder if he had that planned from the beginning?” There's certain indicators that are like he eventually came up with this idea of integrating these two worlds. And I really thought that was neat.
As I grew older and started writing, I started to have this idea of like, what if I did this from the ground up? I had seen other authors by then do things like this. Stephen King likes to interconnect his books. Michael Moorcock has a cool connection between some of his books. And I saw a lot of these as being cameo-level sort of things. And I thought, could I build this from the get-go? Not kind of ease into it over time, but from day one, book one, there is a connected universe behind the scenes. That was really intriguing to me as a new young writer.
Something else that kind of pushed me toward this was, as a new writer, I was trying to get published. I was trying to write books that would make a career for me. And what happens when you're doing this is if you write book one and it doesn't sell to a publisher, it's very hard to then send them book two. But if you have a standalone, a different standalone, you could send that to them, particularly if they kind of like book one, but they’re like, “It just doesn't mesh with what we do as a publisher.” During that era, I wrote 13 novels. Almost all of these were standalone books.
And yet I grew up reading The Wheel of Time. I grew up reading Anne McCaffrey. I grew up reading giant series with lots of interconnected characters and ideas and themes. And so I started connecting these books behind the scenes in ways that wouldn't be obvious so that I could still be submitting them all, but I thought of them as one giant mega series.
So Elantris was the first of these that I wrote. And Elantris, I did not have the full scope of the Cosmere. I had this idea for this character, Hoid. I'd actually written a short story about him before, and he'd been in some of my very early stories as a teen, as a character who did cameos in other people's books. The first time I imagined Hoid, I was actually, I think, reading an Anne McCaffrey book, and I would imagine this character in the world, in disguise, pretending to be there. My imagination wanted to connect even the books I was reading.
Anyway, I'm writing all these books, and behind the scenes I'm connecting these characters. I eventually sold Elantris. And when I sold Elantris, I said, “Great, let's do this for real.” And so then I plotted Mistborn and I said, I'm going to take Elantris and I'm going to put it into continuity of this big, cool universe I've been designing. I kind of retrofitted Elantris. Mistborn is the first book I wrote really with the Cosmere wholesale.
What is the Cosmere? In the Cosmere, there was an event 10,000 years ago called the Shattering of Adonalsium. And at the Shattering of Adonalsium, a bunch of deific beings were created that have little bits of this greater, more powerful, god-like individual or being or entity. And the 16 Shards, as we call them, became the forces, the deities, that run the Cosmere, but they are ordinary people who ascended to these powers. And so they're full of foibles and problems, and they're trying to figure this out. And there is a suspicion that these people were involved in the Shattering, the death of Adonalsium. And so you run into these fantasy worlds, you have these deific creations, these beings that killed God and are now trying to take his place. And the interactions between them create all the magic on the worlds.
Do you need to know any of that? Not really. But when you go into Mistborn. There's almost no mention of Adonalsium in the first book and brief mentions in the other ones. You don't need to know any of that. Any given series in the Cosmere is written so that you don't have to know any of this. You can just start reading and just fall in love and love the book and the characters. But if you want to dig deeper, there are these connections that are happening behind the scenes. And the further you go in the Cosmere, the more these become relevant.
Some of the series become tied together in inexorable ways. For instance, Warbreaker, Stormlight, and Mistborn are tied together. You don't need to know much about those ties, but they are interconnected. The Cosmere is my way of telling just kind of a larger story behind the scenes that all of these books fit into. This is because this is what that I love. I love being able to really immerse myself in something and find that there are questions and answers to my questions.
So there are fundamental ways that magic works in the Cosmere, and all the different magic systems follow these kind of fundamental themes. There are certain terminologies that we use that you don't have to know, but that mean certain things in the Cosmere. For instance, Identity, capital I Identity, capital I Intent. These are important concepts to the magic. Again, you don't have to know any of that. You can go into any one of the books and you should just be able to have a blast. But if you like these things, that's what the Cosmere is.
Physically, what is the Cosmere? It is what we call a dwarf galaxy. So it's a pretty small galaxy. Normally galaxies have like billions of stars. This is one with hundreds of stars instead. And they are all relatively close together by stellar distances. We're talking, you know, a couple light years rather than hundreds of light years apart. They are reachable using magical means, even though most of the planets don't have space travel or anything like that. There's ways to get between them. There's some trade and things like this. That is the Cosmere, this dwarf galaxy, where the Shards of Adonalsium are doing their thing, and people are trying to live their lives, but magic keeps popping up and making things messy.
That's probably longer than you wanted to know in listening to this, but I thought I'd go into depth so that we have this just as the FAQ. If you are confused and you run across this, hopefully this will make you less confused rather than more, but I can't guarantee it.
