Chances are that the overwhelming majority of readers who have picked up Brandon Sanderson’s first entry in his series The Reckoners, titled Steelheart, knows exactly what they are getting before opening the first page. Sanderson is one of those writers who has a built-in audience for every book he publishes. For those unfamiliar with Sanderson or his previous work or Steelheart, a mere flip of a few pages at random will be enough to quickly clue you into the mystery.
This is one of those novels that includes groups of characters known as Epics or Reckoners. One of the Epics is named Deathpoint. The title character, Steelheart, is an even more powerful version of an Epic. In this dystopian portrait of a near-future, Chicago has come to be known as Newcago. And one of the most eminently useful superpowers at play allows certain characters to merely point their finger in the direction of a person who instantly becomes a skeleton. Even if one has never actually read a novel like this before, one is likely to become very familiar with the world it presents after just a few minutes of flipping through pages and reading skimming some passages.
This analysis of familiarity is not intended to come sounding as critical as it may seem. Is Steelheart or any other of many novels penned by Sanderson breaking new ground in literature? Absolutely not. For the sake of context, here are a few other titles form the long history of the written story that were also not particularly groundbreaking in any genuine way, but rather followed a template already deemed acceptable: The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Troilus and Criseyde. Anyone not living on Mars their entire life has probably heard of some of these works. They are among the more highly regarded examples of a form of literature known as epic poetry. From the standpoint of form and structure and general composition, none of them attained their lofty level within the academic canon because they radically altered the basic layout of the form which had already been popular for around seven or eight thousand years before the arrival of the first mentioned. The Aeneid is duly recognized as a work of genius, but not because it diverges significantly from the Iliad which preceded it by a good five or six millennia.
Is that to say that Steelheart is “The Aeneid” to any of the familiar-sounding books which preceded its arrival on bookshelves? That is up to each reader to decide and it absolutely not the point. Steelheart does not require any scholarly academic analysis to understand or point out its hidden genius. As the almost completely meaningless saying goes: it is what it is. And what is Steelheart? A certain crowd-pleaser to the writer who has actively searched it out and quite possibly an equally enjoyable reading experience to those who are only passingly familiar with its particular genre. To those who consider the works of William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf to stand as the finest examples of a gifted writer can do with the tools afforded by the English language, on the other hand, Steelheart is the key of action-filled story that is out of step with their preferences, but may still have just enough to cover the basic fundamental requirement of any novel: the time spent reading it is still better than time completely wasted.
