Half the team is dead before page seventy. That is not a spoiler so much as a statement of intent: Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson opens with a routine escort mission to a peaceful, unarmed human colony and then removes the diplomats, the scouts and the transport pilot in a single ambush, leaving four young pilots hiding in a forest with no way to call home. Everything after that is improvisation by people who are not remotely qualified for it, and the book is cheerfully honest about that. A note on the byline before anything else. This is Janci Patterson’s book. Sanderson built the Cytoverse and signs off on it, and his name is what sells the hardcover, but the prose, the structure and the voice here are Patterson’s, and her acknowledgments are unusually candid about what it took: a deadline missed by four months, an opening rewritten several times, and an editorial letter that finally showed her how to make it work. Where Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson Sits Riftwake is a new …

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson to Be Adapted for Television The first novel in bestselling author Brandon Sanderson’s young adult quartet, Skyward, will be the next project for Tomorrow Studios and TV writer-producers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. Sanderson is set to be one of the series’ co-writers. Skyward is about a young woman who wants to become a fighter pilot to help humanity on a hostile planet and restore her disgraced father’s legacy. From the publisher description: “Spensa’s world has been under attack for decades. Now pilots are the heroes of what’s left of the human race, and becoming one has always been Spensa’s dream. Since she was a little girl, she has imagined soaring skyward and proving her bravery. But her fate is intertwined with her father’s–a pilot himself who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, leaving Spensa’s chances of attending flight school at slim to none. No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, yet fate works in mysterious ways. Flight school might be a long shot, …