The Emperor's Soul

[sawyl]

Another loose end from this year's Hugos, in the form of Brandon Sanderson's novella The Emperor's Soul. Not having read Sanderson before but knowing his reputation as a purveyor of big fat fantasy, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect but I found myself pleasantly surprised.

The story opens with a powerful political clique attempting to come up with a way to cling on to power following an assassination attempt that has left the Emperor in a coma. After coming up with a way to give themselves a hundred days of breathing space, the arbiters press-gang condemned criminal Wan ShaiLu to forge a new soul for the indisposed Emperor. Determined to survive the experience, Shai spends the next few months working on her artistic masterpiece whilst also carefully fencing with the arbiters' attempts to keep her under control and to subvert her creation in their own interests.

The story features an intriguing magical system based on the idea that objects can be be manipulated into other forms by someone who possesses an understanding of their past and origins. The more probably a change is, the more likely it is to hold for any length of time. Gradually over the course of her work on the Emperor's new soul, Shai converts her room from a humble storage cupboard into the finest suite of rooms in the palace by constantly tweaking the histories of the items in the room and by increasing the probability of other items being left there.

The characters were also engaging and the Socratic dynamic between Shai and Gaotona, the weakest but most subtly complex arbiter, is particularly well done. Gaotona starts off as a committed advocate of the traditional arts, condemning Shai's forgeries as uninventive hack work, but as she demonstrates her abilities and creates a masterpiece of understanding that seems likely to recreate the personality of Gaotona's estranged pupil, he gradually starts to come round to her point of view. The irony being that the careful and honest Gaotona is changed — corrupted, according to the views of his political fellows — by Shai's honesty.

I very much enjoyed this and, if it didn't deliver on a couple of its promises, that probably more down to my Chekhovian expectations than anything else...