Half the team is dead before page seventy. That is not a spoiler so much as a statement of intent: Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson opens with a routine escort mission to a peaceful, unarmed human colony and then removes the diplomats, the scouts and the transport pilot in a single ambush, leaving four young pilots hiding in a forest with no way to call home. Everything after that is improvisation by people who are not remotely qualified for it, and the book is cheerfully honest about that.
A note on the byline before anything else. This is Janci Patterson’s book. Sanderson built the Cytoverse and signs off on it, and his name is what sells the hardcover, but the prose, the structure and the voice here are Patterson’s, and her acknowledgments are unusually candid about what it took: a deadline missed by four months, an opening rewritten several times, and an editorial letter that finally showed her how to make it work.
Where Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson Sits
Riftwake is a new series, and this is book one of it, but it is a spin-off rather than a fresh start. It follows the four Skyward novels and the Skyward Flight novellas that Patterson co-wrote, and it picks up roughly a month after the war ends.
The cast is inherited. Arturo Mendez, previously a supporting pilot, is now flightleader and one of two narrators. Jorgen Weight, eighteen, is somehow the admiral. Nedd lost an arm in the last weeks of the war and can no longer fly, which he has not accepted. The alien pilots Alanik and Gilaf are permanent flight members. The second narrator, Sadie Chay, is seventeen and the least experienced pilot on the team, which is the entire point of her.
What Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson Add
The planet is the invention Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson bring to the table, and it is a good one. Blightfall is tidally locked to a red dwarf, so one face is in permanent late-afternoon light. There is no night, which means the city of Epiphany simply never closes: everyone works shifts, the pubs never shut, and a visitor who asks what time things close marks herself out as a stranger immediately. It is the sharpest piece of worldbuilding in the book because it is entirely a consequence of the astronomy.
The continent is covered by an invasive forest brought by human prospectors centuries ago, and some of those trees are animals. Scions walk on their branches, have eyes the size of dinner plates, and are captured, pruned into draft animals, or driven into an arena to be fought by gladiators for points. Win enough points and you ascend to Elysium through a gate full of smoke. Nobody has ever come back from Elysium.
What works
What Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson does best is almost always small, specific and off to one side of the plot.
- The interludes. Five short chapters are narrated by the taynix, the cytonic slugs who power hyperdrives. They are written in flat declarative sentences with slug priorities, and they are the best thing in the book by a wide margin. They are also load-bearing: what a slug called Bob accomplishes by patient friendliness is what actually wins the last battle.
- Sadie. She talks too much, and her flightleader nearly leaves her behind for it. The arc that follows is not that she learns to be quiet. It is that talking turns out to be the mission’s most valuable skill and nobody else on the team has it.
- Nedd. His prosthetic shakes loose twice in combat, he cannot dogfight, and the book never hands him a technological fix. What it gives him instead is a conversation on a log about his dead brothers that is the most affecting page here.
- Epiphany. Cobblestones and camera drones, goats in the street and a leaderboard on a jumbotron, three alphabets carved over the gate. Patterson resists the theme-park version of a lost colony.
- The antagonist’s logic. When the reveal lands, it is genuinely good: an intelligence that was asked to save something, calculated the optimal answer, delivered it, and cannot understand why nobody has thanked her. The refrain she keeps returning to is the coldest note in the novel.
Where it gives ground
Five things hold Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson back from the book its best chapters promise.
- The opening is brutal for newcomers. Chapter one deploys taynix, cytonics, hyperjumps, delvers, the nowhere, inhibitors, the Superiority, Detritus and about ten named characters inside fifteen pages. Patterson says in her acknowledgments that this problem cost her four months. It is better than it was. It is still a wall.
- The spy caper sags. The middle third is four people who are bad at espionage being bad at espionage, and the book makes the joke about it five or six times. It is funny twice.
- The romances eat the runway. A running bit about the ethics of dating across species is charming and spread across three chapters, one of which sits immediately before the climax.
- The dogfights repeat. Light-lance pivot, shields down, someone gets shot out of the sky, request a hyperjump, wait for permission. Four times.
- The villain arrives late. She is a voice on a radio for three hundred pages and a character for about thirty.
Do you need the earlier books?
Partly, and more than the marketing implies. The plot of Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Patterson stands alone, and a patient newcomer will follow it. What will not land is the emotional freight: Nedd’s grief for brothers you never met, Arturo’s discomfort at inheriting command from Jorgen, the weight of a species that has just stopped fighting for the first time in a century. Read Skyward at minimum. Read all four plus Skyward Flight and this book becomes considerably better.
Content notes for Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson
Named characters die on the page in the opening act, and their bodies are described. Gladiatorial blood sport against sapient creatures, staged for a cheering crowd, with the ethics raised repeatedly and never resolved. Sapient creatures tortured to be used as weapon components. Cryogenic imprisonment against consent. Limb loss, chronic pain and prosthetic use. Survivor guilt and intrusive auditory flashbacks. Genocide on a planetary scale, discussed in numbers. One kiss, no sexual content.
Read it if / Skip it if
Read it if you have read Skyward and want more of that world at a slightly older, slightly grimmer pitch; if a five-million-strong frozen army is the kind of cliffhanger you enjoy; if you would read an entire book narrated by a slug.
Skip it if you want a self-contained story, because almost nothing here resolves; if you are new to the Cytoverse and unwilling to do homework; if military science fiction with four extended dogfights sounds like three too many.
Read these next
For readers who finish this and want the same weather:
- Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. The prerequisite. Start here, not with this book.
- Songs of the Dead by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian. Another Sanderson collaboration, and a useful measure of how these partnerships work.
- Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson. Short-form Sanderson, for readers who want his own voice rather than a co-author’s.
- The Sixth Faction by Veronica Roth. Young people sorted into combat roles by a system that is lying to them.
- Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. A squad of misfit cadets, an ancient catastrophe, and a similar willingness to be funny in the middle of a firefight.
Worth Your Shelf
Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson is a first act wearing a novel’s clothes. The portal locks, the army stays frozen, the colony is barely liberated, and the discovery the book has been building toward arrives on page 347 and is then left sitting there. Judged as a complete story it is unsatisfying, and readers who want endings should wait for the series to fill out. Judged as what it actually is, an opening move, it does the job with real charm, and it does something more interesting than that too. In a book about armies, gladiators and a planet-sized atrocity, the creature who solves the problem does it by going around asking everyone whether they would like to be friends. Patterson knows exactly what she is doing with that. It is the argument the whole series appears to be making, delivered by something the length of a forearm that cannot pronounce most of the words.
