Wheel of Time

 

The Wheel of Time series is done.  Now, I know there are no ends in the Wheel of Time, this is just an end, but out here in the world where these works are read and loved, the series has reached a conclusion.  I have to say, this is a bitter-sweet moment.  Fourteen years ago I discovered Robert Jordan's immense body of work.  And when I say immense, I mean truly epic (in the literal sense of that word).  Every book is bigger than the Bible; a hardback in your book bag could stop a car.  I've seen them used to prop open blast doors.  They are incredible.  And they are engaging and fun.

My first foray into writing came about through the Wheel of Time.  I wrote fan-fiction (yeah, I'll admit it) set during the time of the Trolloc Wars.  Set a couple hundred years before the main story set in the novels, but frequently mentioned, this gave myself and small cohort that wrote with me, ample opportunity to experiment without the constraints of playing entirely in someone else's sandbox.  I wrote hundreds of thousands of words there, perhaps more, and it taught me important lessons that I've carried into my writing today.  You could say that Robert Jordan was my literary instructor, the mentor I emulated with every written word.  As the years between books dragged on, however, I became disillusioned.  I decided that what I needed to do was put the books down and wait until they had all been published so that I could read the entire series in a single orgy of reading.  But then Robert Jordan died.

I remember feeling a great loss--the sense that something great had left the world and would be left unfinished.  I knew from Jordan's comments that he had written out the entire framework of the plot in his notebooks, so the story would survive, but I couldn't imagine that the Wheel of Time would ever be completed in a way that was truly satisfying to me, as a reader.  I was reminded of J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, never truly completed in his lifetime, and I feared that the Wheel of Time (which the blurb on the first book blatantly declares is the successor to Tolkien's magisterial works) would suffer the same fate.

Then, when Tor and the Jordan estate (through his wife, Harriet) announced that they had found someone to complete the series I was annoyed.  In fact, I was miffed.  How could any author have both the chutzpah and the audacity to think he could finish another author's work?  Furthermore, the guy they picked I'd never even heard of--and at that time I was steeped in the genre.  I knew all the names, all the titles, and had probably read most of them, and this new guy was simply unknown to me.  Brandon Sanderson.  It turned out he got the gig because of a letter, a eulogy really, that he'd written.  I went to his website when I heard he'd be finishing the series and I read that letter.  You can read it here.  I had something of a flabbergasm.  His sincerity, humility and good grace gave me hope that he could not only handle the series, but make it something that would astound and delight me all over again.

I've continually said that when the last book was finished, I would re-read the series.  I never really gave it much thought; I somehow suspected that it would never end.  And now it's over.  Sanderson posted today on all his social media outlets that he'd completed the last word and sent it off to the publisher.  I've got to wonder what it means to the genre to have something this immense finally completed.  It represents two decades of the genre; fantasy has come a long way since then; it's gone meta with Patrick Rothfuss, and noir with Joe Abercrombie and still continues the epic tradition with Steven Erikson's ten-book cycle, Malazan Book of the Fallen.  But Jordan was always the cornerstone.  He was the modern foundation of our fantasy genre.  And for that contribution I will always be indebted to him.