I never rule out the possibility of doing more books in a setting or world, but I DO prefer to have endings to my series and stories. I conceived Mistborn as a trilogy, and this really is the end, at least for these characters and this story.
I think there’s too much of a temptation for authors to keep a series going for too long, and so I try to make sure I plan out how many books a series is going to be before I write it.
The world continues with Alloy of Law
I did return to the Mistborn world and wrote a novel called ALLOY OF LAW. It is set several hundred years after Hero of Ages, but you will recognize references to the original series. I hope you will enjoy it and the other Wax and Wayne books.
A Trilogy of Trilogies
Mistborn was pitched to my editor as a trilogy of trilogies. I told him I wanted to do a trilogy of epic fantasy books, then take the same world hundreds or thousands of years later and tell an epic story in a modern setting. It’s going to be Allomancers with 21st century-equivalent technology. It’ll be an urban fantasy series. Think guns, cars, skyscrapers, and Allomancers.
Then I wanted to do a Science Fiction series in the same world, using the Epic Fantasy series as kind of a mythology to this new world. The magic system will become the means of Space Travel.
Since I just started coming out with the Stormlight Archive, I want to commit myself to that and don’t want to dig into the second Mistborn trilogy for quite a while. Yet I want to prep people for the idea that Mistborn is going to be around for a while, and they are going to be seeing more books. I didn’t want it to just come out of nowhere at them in ten years or whenever I get to it. So I decided to do some interim stories and that’s where THE ALLOY OF LAW came from.
My current plan is to hold out on the second trilogy until I’ve reached a breaking point in the Stormlight Archive. (So after book five.) My reasoning is that the second trilogy is very involved, and I’m not certain if I want two thick-booked series going at once. There is a good chance I’ll return and do another shorter book, like this one, in the world before then. Either about Wax, or perhaps a quick glimpse of the southern continent.
One of the things I’d been playing with was the idea of what happened between the epic fantasy and the urban fantasy trilogies. We have some very interesting things happening in the world. You’ve got a cradle of mankind created (by design) to be very lush, very easy to live in, so a great big city could grow up there relatively quickly; civilization could build itself back up over the course of just a couple of generations. Yet there would be very little motivation to leave that area at first, which I felt would mean that you’d end up with this really great frontier boundary. The dichotomy between the two—the frontier and the quite advanced (all things considered) city in the cradle of humanity—was very interesting to me. So I started playing around with where things would lead.
To worldbuild the urban fantasy trilogy coming up, I need to know everything that happened in the intervening centuries. Some stories popped up in there that I knew would happen, that would be referenced in the second trilogy. So I thought, why don’t I tell some of these stories, to cement them in my mind and to keep the series going.
I started writing The Alloy of Law not really knowing how long it would be—knowing the history and everything that happened, but not knowing how much of it I wanted to do in prose form. Things just clicked as they sometimes do, and I ended up turning it into a novel.