Just Finished Reading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire

Seeing that I am five books through a fourteen-part fantasy series by Robert Jordan and having already read through an eleven-volume fantasy series by Terry Goodkind, I thought it would be refreshing to embark on a series that was a tad shorter...say, a simple trilogy.  So I decided to read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, beginning with Mistborn: The Final Empire.  As it turned out, that original idea of a simple trilogy with this series was wrong: Mistborn is an ongoing project of Sanderson's, as he plans to make a "trilogy of trilogies" out of it, with nine total projected books.  He's working on the second trilogy, and I will probably eventually catch up to him as I did with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series...and then await the next installment.  But in the meantime, I just finished reading book number one.

Mistborn: The Final Empire takes place in that mythical Final Empire, whose capital city is Luthadel.  For centuries the people have been oppressed by a seemingly immortal tyrant, the Lord Ruler.  There must be a lot of volcanic activity in this world, for everywhere in the daytime ashes permeate the air.  In the night, though, strange mists come in to settle the ashes and blot out the sky.  The common people fear the mist...but not all.  Within this society are people, born of nobles (in support of the Lord Ruler), who possess special powers, called allomancy, which derive from the burning of certain metals they ingest and which have their own specific superhuman effects.  On the fringes of this nobility, which enjoys the Lord Ruler's support, are people descended from at least one noble but who are considered common and who also have the ability to practice allomancy.  Among these are the rebel leader Kelsier and a young teenage girl named Vin, whose special skill at burning all of the allomantic metals earns them the designation of "mistborn".  Along with other more specialized allomancers like Ham, Breeze, Spook, and Clubs, they plot how to overthrow the Lord Ruler and liberate their society.

Sanderson, in this book, succeeded in creating a fantasy world vividly different from those about which I have read before.  Also, the very nature of the Lord Ruler, including exactly how he had saved the world from the "Deepness" in the distant past and apparently continues to do so is a mystery that the book reveals at the beginning of each chapter in the form of old journal entries of his as he struggles with his burdensome role and newly-found powers. Much of that mystery continues to the end of this first book and beyond: I'm looking forward to seeing how Sanderson reveals what really happened long before and what dire threats this interesting fictional world now faces...