The Wheel of Time

[timothy]

Book 13 is sopposed to be released next year. I love jordan as much as:

Terry goodkind
Terry brooks
George r.r. martin
Robert e. Howard

[Admiral_Young]

The Memory of Light will be published on Jan 8th...as Brandon Sanderson and Tor announced on his blog a few weeks ago. Very excited about the finale, it's been a long time coming. I started reading WOT when I was 13 years old, and only the first three novels were released at that point!!

Also sometime afterwards the Wheel of Time: Encyclopaedia will be released. Harriet is overseeing this apparently with no release date yet...my guess if it does come out it won't be until late 2013 or 2014.

As for casting...I've no idea. This has always been a difficult thing for me to think about.

[Mark de Vries]

Caliburn24 wrote:

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Absolutely one of my favorite fantasy series, but is it because it is good, or because I grew up with it?

The latter's absolutely true for me. I read the first book when I was a teenager, and I immersed myself in the world that Jordan created. For some reason the chapters that deal with Rand and Mat's journey to Caemlyn are among my favourite ones. Classic story of two characters bonding over a shared experience.

It's been years since I stopped reading (I think Path of Daggers was the last book I read), but I still intend to pick it all up again, probably when the final book is out.

[Admiral_Young]

Sanderson has done a really good job of getting things back and track and the plot has evolved since he took over. I know there was a time where I was disgruntled with WOT like most other fans, sometime around "Crown of Swords" I think is when the plot started stagnating. The last two books have been great and tons has happened.

[JD]

I'm an LOTR, and SoIaF fan looking for some more fantasy along those lines. Would this be a good choice to get more of that kind of stuff?

[Caliburn24]

I'd wait until the last book arrives. If it pulls off a solid satisfying ending the series is worth it.

[Admiral_Young]

Just a friendly reminder that A Memory of Light is released tomorrow. Tarmon Gai'Don has finally arrived after all of these years, and the Wheel turns one last time. I'll be picking it up in a couple of days. Anyone else going to be reading? I started reading WOT when I was 13 years old (I just turned 33) so this is the end of a era for me. Looking forward to it.

[Brendan Moody]

I have a copy being delivered sometime today. I'm not much of a Wheel of Time fan anymore, and have read the early spoilers and already know the general shape of the plot, but for nostalgia's sake I'm giving it a read.

[Stiletto]

I just finished listening to the audio books in preparation for this last one a couple of months ago. I will be picking this up today at some point.

[Brendan Moody]

My copy has arrived. Michael Whelan's cover art looks pretty nice on the book itself, which is good; in online images it looked remarkably bland, inferior to the incomplete cover Darrell Sweet was working on at the time of his death. I still think Sweet's cover is a better concept, but I imagine Whelan wanted to do his own thing, and I can respect that.

[Skywalker]

Well, now that the last book is out I guess I can finally read through the entire series. I started it years ago and got about halfway through The Dragon Reborn until I learned about how the series just kept dragging and dragging with no end in sight. So I decided to stop and wait until the series was finally completed.

I've got a lot of catching up to do...

[Greg Cox]

Wow. Hard to imagine that this day finally arrived. I still remember when The Dragon Reborn hit the NYT list for the first time. There was much rejoicing in the Tor offices and we all went out to an Irish pub to celebrate!

That was longer ago that I want to think about . . . .

[intrinsical]

I've just finished reading the last page of the last book. As expected, it was a relief and a little disappointing. Relief that the series was given a proper ending. Disappointing because I felt Brandon Sanderson didn't do a good job with the finale. It was a totally passionless account of Tarman Gai'don that could have been condensed into:

"The shadow attacked with overwhelming force and trickery. The forces of light suffered massive losses. People died. Mat saves the day. Perrin saves the day. Rand does what he needed to do. Light won, barely. A funeral pyre for the Dragon Reborn. End of story. "

I suppose this is the best possible outcome given that Robert Jordan is dead and Brandon Sanderson inherited a pile of characters he has no investment in. As a result, there were no heroic send-offs even for characters who have been with us from book one. There was no poignant epilogue. It was like Lord of the Rings without Bilbo sailing to the Undying Lands, Harry Potter without seeing Harry, Hermione or Ron's kids in the future.

There were a couple of loose ends that were never tidied up. The one that stands out the most for me is the prophecy about the Tinkers and their search for the song.

[Admiral_Young]

Keep in mind that when reading the ending, that the ending Robert Jordan originally intended was used by Brandon Sanderson in the book with a couple of slight very minuscule changes. So the ending is RJ's almost 100 percent. Jordan talked about having an open ended finale for the possibility of books (this was years ago) down the road so it would seem that Brandon and Harriet chose to honour this and keep it intact.

I just started reading the book.

[Brendan Moody]

Further books down the road were more than a possibility when Jordan was doing his work on A Memory of Light. He had signed a contract for an "outrigger" trilogy set about ten years after the end of the series, and planned to start work on it as soon as A Memory of Light was finished. He'd described the premise for the trilogy; since some might regard it as a spoiler, I'll code it.

It would have followed Mat and Tuon in Seanchan.

Also, Jordan's notes make clear that the Tinkers will never find the Song; they're looking for something that doesn't exist in the way they think it does.

What Rand was doing in Tuon's garden was "the Song" in the sense of being the original thing the Tinkers are remembering, but they wouldn't recognize it if they heard it now.

As Admiral Young says, the epilogue was written by Jordan, except for one scene (I'll say which in a spoiler box below), so he wouldn't have done any heroic send-offs beyond what you get there.

The added scene is the one where Cadsuane is told she'll become Amyrlin; Sanderson hasn't said yet whether that's a detail from Jordan's notes or something he invented himself.

I do think Jordan would have written a final book that was less focused on hundreds of pages of battle scenes and more on character interactions.