Bestselling author Brandon Sanderson steps away from his sprawling Cosmere fantasy universe for his latest book, Tailored Realities. The collection of short stories and novellas includes entries tied to his Reckoners and Cytoverse young-adult series, but it mostly collects standalone works ranging from a story he wrote in 2001 (four years before Elantris became his first published novel) to a new piece he put together for this collection. The closest he comes to the epic fantasy stories that he’s currently working on adapting for Apple TV is Perfect State, a Hugo-nominated 2015 novella that mocks the sort of elaborate magical worlds Sanderson is known for. It’s a clever story perfect for video game fans — and for anyone interested in knowing how Sanderson thinks about himself.
Perfect State includes a lot of Sanderson’s favorite tropes. It follows Kairominas, aka Kai, the immortal god-emperor of the world of Alornia. The character is reminiscent of the godlike king Raoden from Elantris, or the divinely empowered king Dalinar Kholin of the Stormlight Archive. Kai is a master of his world’s unique form of magic, Lancing, which allows him to connect to the celestial energy of the Grand Aurora, a shimmering light that surrounds Alornia. He uses those powers to fly and transport his army and followers on floating platforms powered by special stones that can hold a charge of Lancing energy. All of it feels extremely reminiscent of how the Knights Radiant channel Stormlight in the Stormlight Archive, the series Sanderson launched in 2010.
But Alornia isn’t one of the planets of the Cosmere. It’s one of many worlds created as part of a network of simulations maintained by the Wode, the people who act as caretakers for the rest of humanity. Their goal is “to create the greatest amount of happiness among the greatest number of people while using the least amount of resources.” They’ve determined that the best way to do that is by extracting fetuses’ brains and placing them in virtual realities based on their emerging personalities, so everyone is the most important person in their own self-contained world. Like so many fantasy heroes, Kai was destined for greatness because he’s the only person in his world who isn’t a computer program.
Kai knows the truth about his reality — the Wode tells all its organic wards (“Liveborn”) the truth once they turn 50 — but he understandably doesn’t like thinking about it. He’s mostly content to live in his sandbox, study magic, bask in his people’s adoration, and go on adventures with the AI creations (“Machineborn”) the Wode has invented to be his friends. But the Wode pushes him to get out of his comfort zone and go on a date. Even though humanity is just a collection of brains in jars and reproduction is done through extracting their DNA, the Wode’s rules stipulate that new generations have to be created through the consent of two Liveborn. Choosing a mate is, after all, one of the only things people can do in this world that has real consequences.
Kai reluctantly decides to leave Alornia to head to a neutral meeting zone, a 1920s noir-themed city cloaked in eternal night. His homeworld magic doesn’t work there, and Kai doesn’t know anything about cars, trains, or guns. Everyone he encounters there makes fun of him relentlessly for coming from a fantasy world, calling him primitive and asking if he rode in on a unicorn. It feels like Sanderson himself being insecure for writing about godlike beings wielding magical light-imbued crystals, rather than writing historical fiction or political thrillers, inventing the more grounded kinds of worlds Kai’s new acquaintances hail from. Even a woman whose realm is based on ancient Rome views Kai with contempt. No one he meets cares how awesome Alornia’s magic system is.
A lesser author would have turned Perfect State into a defense of fantasy, with Kai proving his worth by solving some sort of problem using the grand imagination that shaped the creation of Alornia. But Perfect State is twistier and more philosophical, exploring the nature of heroism and rebellion. Kai’s date, Sophie, was given an oppressive world to reform. She became the first female president of her world, but her contrarian nature was so great she then armed a rebel faction to start a global war, because she’d rather spite the Wode than live in the paradise she’d made.
Meanwhile, Kai finds the opportunity to be a true hero by fighting a battle where he could actually die, because he’s acting outside the safety net of the Wode’s programming. Kai and Sophie question what their achievements actually mean when they’re effectively following paths laid out for them by someone else. It feels like a peek behind the curtain at how Sanderson views his own creations, and the process of building stakes for the conflicts in his stories.
Perfect State is also a clever video game story, imagining reality as a live service game. People literally die of boredom in this world — they can live forever in the Wode’s artificial realities, but they tend to eventually run out of things they want to accomplish, and die of old age. The Wode is constantly introducing new content to keep people interested, from lost continents to PvP zones where neighboring Liveborn can compete for resources and the affection of Machineborn factions. Not all of the Wode’s programmed challenges hook Kai’s attention: Sanderson clearly empathizes with both Kai and the Wode, as someone who loves epic fantasy adventures and builds so many worlds for different types of people to play in, then feels the need to keep them constantly evolving with sequels.
Sanderson wrote a few paragraphs of postscript for each of the stories in Tailored Realities, and in his notes following Perfect State, he says it’s his favorite entry in the collection, and also the most personal. He writes that when he considers his good fortune as one of the world’s highest-selling fantasy and science fiction authors, he sometimes thinks, “This can’t be legit, right? I have to be in a simulation.” But the story he penned about his impostor syndrome is funny, philosophical, and richly detailed, demonstrating why he’s actually had the immense success he sometimes can’t quite believe in.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
