Brandon Sanderson announced he would be releasing a new Cosmere universe book at his annual local Utah convention this week, detailing how it would be released next year, marking the first book since he declared his universe to be changing permanently to be pushing the LGBTQ agenda in fantasy.
If one has followed Brandon Sanderson for a while, a reader knows that he comes out with a new Cosmere book about every year. This is his universe in which he planned a series of novels to all connect and tell a greater story with a multiverse-traveling character named Hoid, and at Dragonsteel Nexus, a convention he holds in Utah each year, he announced the 2026 offering, “The Fires of December.”
“For a number of years now, we’ve had a Cosmere novel every year,” he told fans. “And people started to ask me, ‘Brandon, well, 2026, where’s the Cosmere novel?’ We’ve got one,” he said, and then revealed the cover to the new book.
Sanderson detailed that this would be part of his “special projects” series, that act as standalone novels that he originally introduced as a Kickstarter a few years back, which became the most funded book Kickstarter project of all time.
However, since that point, he’s released more books in his Stormlight Archives, including the end to a recent arc that turned off a lot of his fans by its rampant modernisms in the writing along with multiple pushes of LGBTQ activism in the fantasy setting.
He posted at the time, saying, “My current stance is one of unequivocable support for LGBTQ+ rights. I support gay marriage. I support trans rights, the rights of non-binary people, and I support the rights of trans people to affirm their own identity with love and support. I support anti-discrimination legislation, and have voted consistently along these lines for the last fifteen years. I am marking the posting of this FAQ item, at the encouragement of several of my LGBTQ+ fans, with a sizable donation to the Utah Pride Center and another to The OUT Foundation.”
He continued saying this new stance would influence his books like The Stormlight Archives, saying, “I put LGBTQ+ people into my books, and will continue to do so. Not because I want to fulfill a quota, but because I genuinely believe that it is right for the characters–and is a good and important thing for me to be doing.”
In the book he released earlier this year, the character Rlain is an outcast from bridge 4 who suddenly becomes cross-species romantically interested in a human male who’s the most powerful man in Roshar named Renarin. The two are in such different scopes within their stories it borders upon nonsensical. A reviewer called it “pandering on a page.”
In addition to a gay romance, Brandon Sanderson unveils an openly transgender character who seems to get no pushback for his lifestyle within the book.
While Sanderson didn’t mention anything regarding identity politics in the new Hoid-based novel, he has shared his commitment to continuing with normalizing these lifestyles and we can expect more of the same coming from this not-so-secret “secret project.”
At his event, he spoke about what this would be about, “I really enjoyed writing ‘Tress of the Emerald Sea’ and ‘Yumi and the Nightmare Painter,’ and I thought, ‘There are more terrible things that have happened to Hoid in the Cosmere.’
“And so this is now a series. This is the stories of Hoid’s travails, in which terrible things happen to Hoid, and he tells you a story about it.”
He proceeded to read the first two chapters of the book to the audience, which he said would be made available online at a later time.
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Wind and Truth was a DNF for me. The modern language and the sheer whining of the characters really rubbed me the wrong way. His "disappointment" at not winning the Best Series Hugo proves that these were added in as "award bait."