The Alloy of Law ebook at $2.99!
Tor announced this week that the ebook for The Alloy of Law, the first book in the second Mistborn sequence, is on sale at $2.99 for the rest of the year. (At least in the US; other countries may see slightly different prices. I’ve heard people say it’s $4.99 on Kindle in some countries, and €2.99 on Google Play in others.)
I know there are many of you who love the first Mistborn trilogy who haven’t yet tried out the sequels. This sale is a great opportunity to check them out, if you’ve been waffling.
The Alloy of Law jumps forward more than 300 years after the events of the original trilogy. An industrial revolution is in full force, and knowledge of gunpowder is no longer suppressed. That means guns. Lots of guns. And magic too.
With Mistborn, from the start I’ve wanted a fantasy world that changed, that grew updated and modernized. I pitched Mistorn as a series of trilogies, which many of you probably already know. Each series was to cover a different era in the world (Scadrial), and each was to be about different characters—starting with an epic fantasy trilogy, expanding eventually into a space opera science fiction series. The magic would be the common thread here, rather than specific characters.
I hadn’t originally planned to do a Mistborn sequence set in the equivalent of the early 1900s, but as I was working on Stormlight, I realized that it was going to be a long time (perhaps ten years) between The Hero of Ages and my ability to get back to the Mistborn world to do the first of the next epic arc.
That’s when I took a step back and asked myself how I really wanted to approach all of this. What I decided upon was that I wanted a new Mistborn series that acted as a counterpoint to Stormlight. Something for Mistborn fans that pulled out some of the core concepts of the series (Allomantic action, heist stories) and mashed them with another genre—as opposed to epic fantasy—to produce something that would be faster-paced than Stormlight, and also tighter in focus.
The result of this conundrum was The Alloy of Law, a shorter story arc in the Mistborn world. I believe it gives you everything you love about Mistborn in a more self-contained package. I started out thinking of these books more as a “fun adventure” rather than a deep epic. I hope you’ll approach it with that mindset. In a way, I’m hoping books like these will balance the Stormlight Archive. Sometimes, you want a 1000-page book with hundreds of different characters. Sometimes, however, you want a quick, fun book with compelling lead characters, good action, and fun banter. That’s what this book is.
Though the story does gain more depth and and breadth in the sequels. The first one, Shadows of Self, was just released last month and The Bands of Mourning, the third book in the second era, comes out in January. So if you check out The Alloy of Law and like what you see, you don’t have to wait to get more of the story!
A few years ago, some fans put together a trailer for The Alloy of Law, which although not strictly accurate is still pretty awesome. (By the way, only the prologues of the first two Wax & Wayne books take place in an Old West-type setting; the main plots take place in the big city.)