Legion

July 9, 2012
Reality and illusion, sanity and insanity, are but subjective labels in this thought-provoking foray into a world where visions abound like the biblical demons the title evokes. Narrator Stephen Leeds, also known as “Master Legion,” alternately describes himself as schizophrenic and asserts his own sanity, even though his “hallucinations... are all quite mad.” Sanderson (the Mistborn series) sends them all to Jerusalem on a mission to retrieve a camera that may be able to photograph past events. Its inventor, Balubal Razon, has stolen it to photograph the resurrected Jesus. The engaging if madcap events of this outré narrative unobtrusively prompt the reader to reflect on the nature of reality. Complications pile on to expand the divergence from normality (“Your hallucination has hallucinations”) even as mainstream philosophical issues are addressed in an Alice’s Tea Party atmosphere. The conclusion is left clouded in ambiguity, and Sanderson suggests that the big questions may be beyond our ability to resolve. Agent: Joshua Bilmes, JABberwocky Literary Agency.

October 6, 2014
The quest for a stolen corpse in an alternate present-day U.S. dominates this sequel to 2012’s Legion. Yol Chay, owner of Innovation Information Incorporated, sends investigator Stephen Leeds in search of Panos Maheras, a researcher whose body may hold the key to stopping a well-intentioned but disastrous project to store computing data in human cells. Leeds musters his corporeal friends and 47 personalities, called aspects, to investigate amid pursuit by Zen Rigby, a hired assassin working for rival high-tech company Exeltec. Continuing the theme of Legion, Sanderson explores Leeds’s efforts to understand his independent-minded aspects and his need for them. Discussions of quantum physics and the infinity of time lend a slightly contrived profundity to Leeds’s examination of reality and illusion, as he muses, “I’m not crazy, I’m compartmentalized.” Alas, Sanderson fails to take this debate into the broader world; the sometimes flighty, sometimes assertive aspects are intriguing, but the conceptual basis of the work is never developed beyond sitcom level.

October 15, 2018
Through a compilation of three novellas, Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive) takes readers on a science fiction thrill ride through the life and mind of a schizophrenic genius as he solves high-tech mysteries. Stephen Leeds has 47 different hallucinations—people that only he can see—with each representing a different part of his brilliant mind. As he investigates cases, he takes his hallucinations with him as though they’re living people; always included are J.C. (his protector), Ivy (his psychologist), and Tobias (his philosopher and historian). Others come along as their specific knowledge is needed. In the first story, they are called upon to find a stolen camera that can take pictures of the past. In the second, they seek the stolen body of an engineer that has vital information encoded into its cells. The final story answers why Stephen’s love, Sandra, left, and whether she needs to be saved, possibly at the risk of his hallucination friends. Readers will get drawn into the fascinating world of Stephen and his friends—real and imagined—as they work together to solve the seemingly unsolvable. Agent: Joshua Bilmes, JABberwocky Literary.