The Emperor’s Soul is a novella by Brandon Sanderson about a world in which a “Forger” has to recreate the soul of an assassinated emperor. Alive but brain-dead, the senile emperor is a threat to the political positions of his advisors.
The protagonist, Shai, is adept at forgery: the magical ability to alter objects like paintings, furniture, and clothing. She’s so proficient that she can alter the souls of humans. The story is about Shai recreating the emperor’s soul to restore him to his pre-assassination-state.
Like Elantris, The Emperor’s Soul has a compelling, grounded magic system. By altering a person or object's past, Shai can change the physical properties of the object in the present. It’s like she can reroute the river(s) of time, adding and subtracting flows, influencing nature and nurterment. In an introductory example, Shai rewrites the history of an abused table so it assumes the state of one that had been maintained.
The heady parts of The Emperor’s Soul are those where you wonder about the origin of the common objects around us — there’s a not-subtle nod to Shintoism’s respect for the “spirits” that inhabit physical things. Each object, like people, has a rich backstory. Shai’s mastery comes from her deep knowledge of objects’ sources, like the veins of rock from which bricks were mined.
There is an interesting tension between Shai and the other characters. She understands people and objects, both logically and spiritually, while the political advisers do not:
The arbiters had no idea what they were asking. But of course they didn’t. They hated Forgery, or so they claimed. They walked on imitation floor tiles past copies of ancient vases, they let their surgeons repair a body, but they didn’t call any of these things “Forgery” in their own tongue.
A real-world parallel might be our ignorance of manufacturing. We order an iPhone from the Apple store, use it daily, and imagine it was carved from a magical rock by Steve Jobs’ ghost. But it was mined, smelted, hammered, and assembled in Zhengzhou, China.
My issue with The Emperor’s Soul is the same as my issue with Sanderson’s other book, Elantris: the characters are too perfect. Shai is a mega-genius that can read any situation and is always three steps ahead of everyone else. Reading The Emperor’s Soul is equivalent to reading about superwoman in a knife fight. There was never a doubt that Shai was going to 1. succeed in restoring the Emperor and then 2. forge her way out of danger.
I still liked the world of The Emperor’s Soul though. His magic systems are surprisingly plausible, which Sanderson, in the epilogue, attributes to his grounding them in a scientific veneer.