Review: Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
One advantage of knowing you like an author is picking up one of their books with no idea what it’s about and knowing it’s not a waste of your time. For me one author who I’ll read without looking at the back cover is Brandon Sanderson. And that’s what I did with his Novella Perfect State.
And while Perfect State isn’t the best Brandon Sanderson story ever written, it’s also not nine hundred pages long, and it is fun to read his science fiction stories from time to time.
What is Perfect State about?
The basic idea of Perfect State is that there are people who are created as brains in a jar, their worlds created by electrical impulses. Each of these people lives in a world created for them. Some are highly technologically advanced and others are fantasy worlds. And in every one of them is the most important person in the world as the rest of them are machine-born or as we might call them NPC’s though whether they are intelligent and real is up for debate.
Kai is the main character. He’s the god-emperor of his world, able to use powerful magic and wanting for nothing. But the Wode— the people who run the simulation—want him to procreate. For this to happen he has to meet another ‘real’ person and they must agree to have a child together.
He hates the idea. And why wouldn’t he. In his own world he is the most important person with many advantages including virtual immortality, the inability to be killed and admirations. But that’s true of all of them too and he has no experience dealing with his equals.
There is quite a lot of world building in Perfect State, but about Kai’s world, the worlds he is visiting and the actual world with the brain in the jars, though most of what we learn of that is secondhand.
In the end he visits a world with technology roughly similar to our own where he is one of a hundred liveborn in the city and so may do almost anything he wants. And he goes on a date, but while going there a robot created by another liveborn who hates him attacks.
What did I think of Perfect State
I didn’t love this book. It’s not terrible by any means. The world building is fun, the characters are fine. The action is well written, and the premise is one not that different from things that I have written. All that said, I didn’t really love this story and while it could have been expounded on and that may have made it better the story itself just didn’t catch me.
The biggest problem for me is the end. In part because it was both predictable and abrupt and in part because the final idea, That Kai starts interacting with other Liveborn is fine, both undercuts whether the machine born are real and doesn’t feel as important as it could.
I can’t say this is bad, but I can’t give it over three stars either. ***