Somewhere in the middle of a firefight, a battle for a city and the discovery of a lost planet, the book stops and hands a chapter to a slug. The slug is called Bob. Bob is a friendly slug. Bob likes friends. And Bob has many friends, and many of his friends are new friends. Some of his friends have been hurt. Bob does not like it when his friends get hurt. Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson does this five times across four hundred pages, and each time it does, the novel gets quietly better than it was.
Brandon Sanderson’s World, Janci Patterson’s Slug
The taynix at the heart of Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson are the cytonic slugs of the Cytoverse, the creatures who make faster-than-light travel possible and who spent centuries enslaved for the privilege. Previous books in this world have treated them as beloved equipment with a comic streak. This one gives them a point of view.
The prose in those chapters is stripped to the bone: short declarative sentences, no subordinate clauses, a vocabulary of perhaps forty words. It should be unbearable. It is not, because Patterson uses the constraint to do something a normal narrator cannot. A slug does not know what a war is. A slug knows that there are friends and not-friends, that some friends are trapped inside a Cloud, that the Cloud hurts, and that the correct response to any of this is to go and get them out. The reader supplies the geopolitics. The slug supplies the moral clarity, and the gap between the two is where the writing lives.
There is a second reason the device works, and it is a technical one. The taynix cannot lie, cannot dissemble and cannot summarise, which means their chapters can only report what is directly in front of them. That turns each interlude into a small puzzle for the reader: a Cloud is an inhibitor field, the Big Minds are the delvers, popping is a hyperjump, and working that out is genuinely pleasurable. Patterson never once breaks the register to help. She trusts the audience completely, which is not a courtesy young adult science fiction always extends.
It would be a charming trick if it stopped there. It does not. These chapters are load-bearing. The climactic reversal of the entire novel is not won by a pilot or a gladiator or a clever plan. It is won because Bob spends the book patiently talking to frightened strangers through the hulls of enemy ships and asking whether they would like to be friends, and eventually they say yes. The military plot is resolved by an act of unhurried kindness performed by something the length of a forearm.
Where Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson Is Working Hardest
Around those interludes, Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson runs a more conventional novel, and it is a decent one. A diplomatic mission to a forgotten human colony is ambushed on arrival, and half the team is dead within sixty pages. The survivors go to ground on a tidally locked planet where the sun never moves, the city never sleeps because there is no night to sleep in, and much of the continent is covered by a forest in which some of the trees are animals with eyes the size of dinner plates.
Those trees get harvested. Some are cut back until they are docile enough to haul a barge; others are netted, caged and delivered to a coliseum, where fighters score points against them in front of a paying crowd and eventually earn passage to somewhere called Elysium. Nobody comes back from Elysium. The book is unusually good on the economics of this: the gladiator the novel spends most time with does the job because it pays the rent and because a family bonus waits at the other end, not because of glory. Their parents worked a quarry until their bodies gave out.
Patterson is also careful with two things she did not have to be careful with. One is a pilot who lost an arm in the previous war and is now a copilot who cannot dogfight; his prosthetic comes loose twice under g-force, he is never handed a technological cure, and his grief gets a scene on a log that is the most affecting page in the book. The other is a gladiator whose people recognise three genders, handled in four lines of dialogue and then simply true for the rest of the novel.
Where It Strains
Set against all that, Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson carries a handful of faults, and they are structural rather than local.
The first fifty pages are a wall. A reader arriving cold meets roughly a dozen invented nouns and as many named characters before anything is explained. Patterson’s acknowledgments concede that this problem cost her a missed deadline and several attempts at the opening, and while it has clearly improved, it remains the roughest stretch in the book.
The middle is a spy caper performed by people who cannot do espionage. The novel finds this funny and says so repeatedly. It is funny twice.
The dogfights blur. Four extended aerial sequences share the same beats closely enough that the fourth reads as a reprise.
The antagonist is a voice for three hundred pages. When she finally appears, her logic is excellent and there is almost no time left to use her.
Almost nothing concludes. A door locks. An army stays frozen. The revelation everything has been aimed at arrives on the third-to-last page of the action and is then abandoned where it fell.
That last point is the one that will decide whether readers get on with Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson at all. This is an opening move rather than a story, and it is confident enough about that to end on an unresolved catastrophe.
Readers who want more should start with Skyward, which this book assumes throughout and rewards handsomely. Songs of the Dead by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian is a useful comparison for how these co-authored projects distribute the labour, and Tailored Realities offers Sanderson unaccompanied for anyone curious where his voice ends and a collaborator’s begins. On content: named characters die on the page early, sapient creatures are fought as sport and tortured as weapon components, and an act of planetary-scale destruction is discussed in percentages.
Where It Leaves You
Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson will be shelved as military science fiction, and by page count that is what it is. But the passage that stays is not a battle. It is a slug falling out of the sky in someone’s arms, unable to teleport because it has not been given permission, screaming silently inside its own mind because its spines will not make a sound in that much wind, and waiting. Patterson gives that creature the same interiority she gives her pilots and rather more grace. In a novel about an artificial intelligence that saved humanity by destroying a quarter of a planet and cannot understand why nobody thanked her, the counterargument is not delivered in a speech. It is delivered by something that wants to know if you would like a mushroom.