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Just finished "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson. Book one of the Stormlight Archive.
The ebook went on and on and on and on and... just had a look at the dead tree page count. Egads! 1001 in hardcover 1258 in paperback.
I liked it. It's set on on the rather different fantasy world of Roshar. The planet has periodic "highstorms" that have winds so strong they blow rocks horizontally through the air. Buildings are made of stone, with roofs that slope down to the ground in the direction of the "origin" where all highstorms blow from. Over most of the land the plants have hard shells and retractable leaves and tendrils. Far from the origin is the land of Shin, where the plants don't hide from the weather and they actually have soil.
Semi-magical tech is called "fabrials", powered by gemstones. The gemstones are charged by putting them outside during a highstorm. For money they use gemstones encased in glass spheres, and they glow - the glow charged by exposure to a highstorm.
The sphere-money, or bare pieces of gemstone, is also used for lighting. Small diamonds are fairly plentiful so a glass goblet of stormlight charged diamond spheres makes a good white light for reading or doing surgery. Some characters can draw power from charged gemstones or spheres. One is an outcast from Shin, an assassin with a "shardblade" (see below) who must do whatever anyone holding his "oathstone" commands. He charges up from spheres to perform "lashings" that allow him to walk on walls and ceilings, and make objects fly across rooms, or stick to things. Quite effective to "lash" some guards to the ceiling, but not fun at all for the guards when the stormlight powering the lashing runs out.
Gemstones also power certain ancient tech such as "soulcasters" which can transmute materials, depending on the skill of the person using the soulcaster. Need iron? Soulcast some plants into it. Need basic food? Soulcast small rocks into bread. Of course the soulcasters charge for the service. The gemstones powering their casters eventually break and need replacing.
Another gemstone powered ancient tech is "shardplate" suits of armor. Unlike ordinary metal armor, shardplate totally encases the wearer, with tiny articulated plates at the joints providing 100% protection. The only point vulnerable to conventional weaponry is the vision slit in the visor, which is an odd thing to have since with the visor down the helmet turns transparent from the inside. Shardplate will repair itself and even regenerate destroyed parts. A new suit can be generated from a small part like a lost gauntlet but it takes a large amount of gemstones and attention to complete the process. Left alone, lost or discarded pieces will disintegrate.
What can damage shardplate? A "shardblade", a sword around six feet long, summoned by its owner. It takes ten heartbeats to appear and forms from a mist, coated with drops of condensation. Drop it and it mists away, unless deliberately set down or stabbed into something. A shardblade cuts almost effortlessly through non-living matter but doesn't cut anything alive. What it does to living things is worse, it destroys the nerves. Slice an arm and from the slice down the arm is forever dead. Go through a person's spine and he's dead, with his eyes burned out.
A person wearing shardplate can leap great distances, jump down from heights that would break bones or kill a person, and have the strength to damage another person's shardplate, with or without a shardblade.
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