Defending Elysium: A Cytoverse Novella

by Brandon Sanderson

Genres: Alien Contact; Alien Invasion

Synopsis

As Brandon Sanderson’s #1 bestselling Skyward series celebrates its third volume, Cytonic, travel back in time to the origin of Cytonics in the novella Defending Elysium.

Centuries before Spensa looked skyward from the planet Detritus—back on Old Earth before it was lost—Jason Write faced a crucial question: was humanity ready to join galactic society?

When faster-than-light communications were discovered by a small telephone company in 2071, alien species such as the Tenasi and Varvax overheard them and came to visit Earth. Because the Phone Company controls all communications with the aliens, their operatives like Jason operate above the law.

Now, on the space platform Evensong, one of the Phone Company’s scientists has gone missing before surfacing in a hospital with amnesia, and Jason is sent to investigate. Right as he arrives, the body of a murdered Varvax ambassador is discovered, sure to cause a galactic incident. Coln Abrams of the United Intelligence Bureau seizes the opportunity to investigate Jason as he deals with the crisis. This could be the UIB’s chance to discover the Phone Company’s secrets—how does FTL communication work, and what is Jason hiding?

Winner of Spain’s UPC Award for Science Fiction in 2007.

 

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Release date: November 23, 2021

Publisher: Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC

Sample

PREFACE

Late in 2017, I needed to write a book really quickly. I’d pulled The Apocalypse Guard from my publisher, feeling that the novel wasn’t quite up to my standards yet. I’d promised them a replacement.

Fortunately, I had an idea. A story about a group of humans trapped on a planet, fighting a mysterious enemy, with no understanding of why they were confined there (on what was essentially a prison planet). And this fit perfectly with an old idea I’d had—and even written a story about. That story being Defending Elysium: the tale of a universe that wasn’t ready for humankind to be unleashed upon it.

I’d always felt Defending Elysium had more potential than just one novella. I turned away from it not because of any flaw in it, but because I wanted specifically to establish myself as a fantasy novelist. And as one of the last stories I’d written before getting published, Defending Elysium was really a picture of Brandon as a professional who hadn’t yet been able to make a sale. It represented the best of what I could do in those months before I finally broke in. 

But now I had a chance to do that setting justice. I’d always been intrigued by the idea of people who could teleport, and built both stories (this and Skyward) around the existence of people who were themselves the source of faster-than-light travel in the universe. And as I was working on Cytonic, the third book of the Skyward series, I felt it was time to really start talking about Jason and his story, and how it related to Spensa and her story. 

As such, it’s now time to re-release this story digitally, so people who are reading the Skyward series can (I hope) discover the origin of the Cytoverse and the ideas that (after pupating for over a decade) gave rise to Skyward.

This story was written on a beach near Monterey, California, and remains the only published piece of mine I did entirely in longhand before transcribing it to the computer. I’d never been to Monterey before, and a friend was able to trade something he did at work for a week’s stay in a little condo-style hotel. We had two rooms and a very nice view over the city down toward the water.

So I guess I was doing the whole bohemian thing. During these days, I hadn’t yet gotten published (this would have been late 2001 or early 2002). I had graduated from college, but had been rejected from all of the grad schools I’d applied for. I’d written about a dozen novels, and was annoyed with myself recently for not writing books that were true to what I wanted to be as a writer.

The call regarding the sale of Elantris would not come for another year or so. I was working a graveyard shift at the hotel, renting a room in a friend’s basement for three hundred dollars a month, and spending all the time I could practicing my craft. (In part to delay thinking about what I was going to do with my life since my writing wasn’t selling and grad schools didn’t want me.)

Over the next year, I would write a book called The Way of Kings (different from the eventual published version, and now known as The Way of Kings Prime), the best—yet most flawed—book I wrote during my unpublished years. A massive, beastly epic that was my symbolic discarding of any desire to chase the market or write anything that was not the type of writing I loved to read.

That was my mindset. I remember a couple of long afternoons sitting on the beach, listing to the waves and staring out over the ocean as I wrote. A good friend named Annie was there for most of it—you may know her as the woman that Sarene from Elantris was based on—writing in her journal. Micah (Captain Demoux from the Mistborn books, and the official Brandon Sanderson jacket flap photographer) was in and out. Mostly he was off taking photos.

I remember wanting to see if I could imbue a short story with the type of characterization and multiple plots that I liked in my epic fantasy. I had an idea for a character with a deep and interesting past, alongside a nice dissonant element (a secret agent working for the phone company). That, along with an interesting idea for an ending, grew into this story.

Oddly, I was able to make this work in a short story the way I wanted, while writing shorter novels hadn’t worked for me. I chalk that one up to me starting to find the natural size for a story and writing it at that size. Ironically, the novels I’d written recently (Final Empire and Mistborn, ...