The Alloy of Law

Brandon Sanderson has recently decided to embrace a direction that makes his books rather unappealing to me. I don't want to be constantly reminded of the raging culture war while reading a fantasy novel. Dawnshard may have been a watershed moment. However, I have yet to read many of his works published before 2020, like most of the second set of the Mistborn series.

This was the first time I have read a Sanderson book in Finnish and it was initially quite a weird experience, especially in the acknowledgements and foreword where the author is directly speaking to the reader. Having listened to him talking so much, I could hear his voice in my head yet the text was in Finnish. The weirdness did go away once the novel properly started, though.

The series is not a great one to try force into Finnish. Even 'mistborn' already translates clunkily: 'usvasyntyinen'. Then there are all the metal alloys whose names in Finnish can sound silly. I would say, though, that alloys and metals in general are not a great basis for a clean and symmetrical magic system. Most metals are so similar, gray or silvery substances, and an alloy's properties can vary wildly based on merely the ratio of elements that are mixed in it. If I were to device a magic system based on elements, I would probably stick to pure ones to retain some level of reasonable limits.

The Alloy of Law -- the Finnish translation by Mika Renvall titled as Lain pyörteissä (lit. "in the swirls of law") -- is not a direct sequel to the first trilogy, instead taking place in a technologically more advanced setting that has familiar-looking location names here and there. The prologue is almost weird west in its genre: the protagonist Waxillium "Wax" Ladrian laying down the law as a some sort of borderlands sheriff. His current case doesn't go all that well and he ends up returning to Elendel, which is equivalent to a late 19th century metropolis, to take over the Ladrian estate and its businesses.

The novel introduces a new metalborn type: twinborn. They are able to utilize one allomancy and one feruchemical power. Wax is a Crasher (a title he doesn't like), which means can burn consumed steel to push metals away like a Coinshot and store/retrieve weight in/from an iron object he's in contact with like a Skimmer. His power combination is synergic: by making himself lighter, pushing metals allows him to fly around easily (he even has a mistcloak like Vin in the first trilogy), and by making himself heavier, he can push stuff away from him with a lot more strength than a mere Coinshot could.

Wax has a sidekick called Wayne who is similarly a twinborn. Wayne can burn bendalloy like a Slider to hasten time in short a radius around him and store/retrieve health in/from gold like a Bloodmaker. (Bendalloy doesn't have as simple a name in Finnish, as far as I know. I think it's a commercial name, too. The word Renvall used for it was vismutti-something after the mixture's parts.) The combination is not as synergic as Wax's but Wayne does make good use of his powers in a fight. Bendalloy is also rare; Wayne has to see effort to acquire more of it.

The novel's antagonist is likewise a twinborn. Their power combination is a pretty interesting one too because both are from the same metal. But I shall not get into that any further in this post.

The Alloy of Law is a typical Sanderson novel, its plot and characters from the same old molds. It's entertaining enough; easy to read. And I do like the magic system. When Wax increases his weight and then pushes to every direction in the middle of a banquet hall to initiate a fight -- it's just a cool scene to picture.

I could see the antagonist turn out to not be the ultimate villain early on and the sequel hook twist for the following novel, Shadows of Self, did not surprise me.