Brandon Sanderson: «I want to show in my writing that there is something inherently good inside human beings»

Photography: Jorge Quiñoa

(Versión en castellano aquí)

Before starting the interview, the writer Brandon Sanderson (Nebraska, 1975) has lunch with his collaborators of Team Sanderson Spain and chats about Gaudí, chocolate with churros and the fact that Spain is the country with most fans in continental Europe. His epic fantasy novels include battles, death and some apocalypse or other, but on the whole they are optimistic stories full of honorable characters, from Elantris to the Mistborn saga or the Stormlight Archive series, consisting of ten huge volumes with two already published. He’s also written middle-grade novels (Alcatraz), young adult (The Reckoners, The Rithmatist), comic-books (White Sands), novellas (Legion, The emperor’s soul) and stories complementing videogames (Infinity Blade). It looks like he’s always doing something. We have a long chat (“Will this be a long interview? I love long interviews!) near the Arch of Triumph in Barcelona. After taking some pictures he goes full speed to a six-hour signing marathon in  Gigamesh library.

This is not your first time in Barcelona… In 2006 you came here to pick up the UPC Science Fiction award for Defending Elysium. I liked very much your speech… You opened it saying that you consider yourself more a storyteller and entertainer than a classical writer, so to speak. Do you think that in the literary world the value of entertainment is underrated?   

I do. In fact, the value of emotion is underrated in the literary world, and this was what the speech was about: that not only ideas are important, but also emotion. The power of a great fantasy story is to combine good ideas with something exciting. My wife makes every morning a smoothie for our children, and in the smoothie she puts spinach to make it green, because they love green, but also because spinachs are good for their health. If you read a fantasy book that is exciting, enjoyable, and makes you feel a lot of emotions, plus you insert some interesting ideas that make you think, you can have a bigger effect on the world than if you pile all this ponderous ideas that are difficult to approach into a story.  

Terry Goodkind said once that he didn’t write fantasy, but “histories that have important human themes”. J.K. Rowling also said that it didn’t really occur to her that Harry Potter books were fantasy books, and that she didn’t read fantasy.  Why do important fantasy writers try to disown fantasy literature?