Mormon fantasy narratives

When I am not involved in matters religious or scholarly, one of my favorite escapes is science fiction and fantasy literature or media. My favorite series is The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. The series focuses on the actions of four friends, pushed by circumstances from their little village into the larger world. They discover along the way that they are meant to play central roles in the coming Last Battle of the Ages. A lot of aspects of the series drew me in. When I started reading, I was a similar age to the main characters and had just left home to go to college. Another reason was the vividness of the characters and the world they inhabited. Jordan breathed life into these people and places.

In 2007 while working on what was meant to be the last novel in the series, Jordan died from cardiac amyloidosis. His publisher and his wife—who was also his editor—searched for someone to finish the series. They selected Brandon Sanderson, another prolific fantasy author. Having learned of this, I picked up Sanderson's Mistborn series. I immediately became a fan of Sanderson as well.

With 14 books in The Wheel of Time series—each more than several hundred pages long—there is so much that could be said. I also want to be careful to not spoil anything. So, I want to focus on two specific elements external to the series: the power of narrative to do religious work and the mainstreaming of Mormonism.