Sixteen years ago, sitting in a dim booth at a local steakhouse, I first pitched to my wife an audacious idea I’d been developing: taking an epic fantasy world, and then expanding it through different eras into the future. I’d seen mashups of fantasy and science fiction before, and I’d seen epic fantasy inch toward industrial technology. But I’d never seen an author develop a world in quite this way—giving an expansive view of a planet moving into the future, using the lore of earlier book series as the foundation of religion and myth.
It was a gamble. Readers tend to like their genres well delineated.

Here, I was pitching something that broke apart those genre lines in ways that historically did not sell well. Yet I was convinced that the larger-scale project (the vision of a planet and its magic throughout various eras) was worth the risk. That brings us here, to the final book of Era Two of Mistborn and my grand experiment with genre.

Whether I’ve been successful or not so far is up to you, the reader. But I can say this: I certainly wouldn’t have gotten where I am without the help of a large number of people. I know these acknowledgments are a bit of a blur of names, but I’m so grateful to each and every one of them. These are the people who, when I come up with some new audacious plan, don’t roll their eyes—they instead roll up their sleeves and make it happen.

For this book, Joshua Bilmes did his usual excellent job as my agent. On his team, Susan Velazquez and Christina Zobel were also a great deal of help, managing all the different overseas contracts and subagents.

Speaking of across the pond, I had some extra-special help from Gillian Redfearn on this book—she’s my UK editor, and took the lead on this book performing the line edit work that often is shouldered by the US publisher.