“This is my dream,” Brandon Sanderson says. We’re 30 feet beneath the surface of northern Utah, in a room that feels like a cross between a five-star hotel lobby and a Bond villain’s secret base. My ears popped on the way down. Sanderson points to the grand piano, the shelves filled with ammonite fossils, the high walls covered in wood and damask paneling, and his pièce de résistance: a cylindrical aquarium swirling with saltwater fish.“George R. R. Martin bought an old movie theater. Jim Butcher bought a LARPing castle,” he says. “I built an underground supervillain lair.”This is where Sanderson writes bestselling fantasy and science fiction novels. Many of them take place in an interconnected series of worlds called the Cosmere, his ink-and-paper equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But instead of superheroes defending Earth, Sanderson’s warriors, thieves, scholars, and royals are spread across a richly detailed system of planets, from the ash-covered cities of Scadrial to the shattered plains of Roshar—a landscape directly inspired by the sandstone buttes and slot canyons of southeastern Utah.It all started 25 years ago when Sanderson, a practicing Mormon, was an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University just 15 miles away in Provo. He took a part-time job working night shifts at the front desk of a nearby hotel, where he could write between midnight and 5:00 AM. Over the next five years, while working at the hotel during and after his undergraduate years at BYU, he wrote 12 full-length novels that were all… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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Welcome to Brandon Sanderson’s Fantasy Empire
