Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson – Review

Published: September 18, 2018

Publisher: Tor Books

Series: Legion #1-3

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 352 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 3.0/5.0

Synopsis:

Stephen Leeds is perfectly sane. It’s his hallucinations who are mad.

A genius of unrivaled aptitude, Stephen can learn any new skill, vocation, or art in a matter of hours. However, to contain all of this, his mind creates hallucinatory people—Stephen calls them aspects—to hold and manifest the information. Wherever he goes, he is joined by a team of imaginary experts to give advice, interpretation, and explanation. He uses them to solve problems… for a price.

Stephen’s brain is getting a little crowded and the aspects have a tendency of taking on lives of their own. When a company hires him to recover stolen property—a camera that can allegedly take pictures of the past—Stephen finds himself in an adventure crossing oceans and fighting terrorists. What he discovers may upend the foundation of three major world religions—and, perhaps, give him a vital clue into the true nature of his aspects.

This fall, Tor Books will publish Brandon Sanderson’s Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds. The collection will include the science fiction novellas Legion and Legion: Skin Deep, published together for the first time, as well as a brand new Stephen Leeds novella, Lies of the Beholder. This never-been-published novella will complete the series.

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Let me preface this by saying I’ve read almost every Brandon Sanderson book on the market at the moment aside from The Rithmatist and his Alcatraz series. Legion is currently ranking as my least favorite of his books, which means that I only kind of liked it.  It just didn’t grab me the way his other books did.

I waited to check out the Legion novellas until the entire collection was released as a single book and ultimately decided to pick up the Audible version for time reasons. The narration was done well, especially considering the huge cast of male and female characters of all ages and nationalities.

Stephen Leeds isn’t crazy, but his hallucinations are. For each new subject he learns, he acquires a new “aspect”, which is essentially a hallucinatory person who dispenses the knowledge back to him whenever he needs it. This is quite the boon in his investigation/consultations and has made him a wealthy man. It is, however, taxing and takes a mental toll on Stephen that we get to explore throughout the novella collection.

The collection is three novellas, each of which is their own individual “case” though the last is more like Stephen resolving his personal issues, both past and present. The first two are much more case-like and as such I preferred those. I never particularly cared for any the characters and found most of them to be varying degrees of irritating.

Overall, I’d say that for Sanderson fans this will be an essential read, though it strikes me as being quite different from his other books. I wouldn’t recommend this be where you start your Sanderson journey, but that’s mostly because I didn’t care for it all that much. It’s not a bad book, just not what I expected from him in terms of engagement/impact.