Robert Jordan

[frodo potter]

In 1997, when I graduated from high school my then girl friend gave me a book to keep me busy over the summer.

The book, all 1000+ pages of it, was The Eye of the World. I read the whole thing in less than a month and was forced to buy all the other books in the Wheel of Time series.
Thus began my love affair with the works of Robert Jordan. At the time I joked with her that I hated reading unfinished series incase the author died before the end leaving the world unfinished and the reader unfulfilled. Little did I know how prophetic my words would prove.

In college, every time I would get a new book, or when one would come out, I would reread the whole series to that point to be up to date on what was going on. I have probably read the Eye of the World 10 times in the last 10 years and yet still it entertains.

Jordan's stlye, if you have not read any, is at once deceptively approachable and fiendishly dense. The shear scope of the series, close to 10,000 pages of written word, is awe inspiring. Indeed, I have reached a love hate relationship with the series where I need to reread the whole thing to figure out what is going on but cannot take the 3 months such an activity would entail. Yet for all of that the richness of Jordan's world and the depth of his love for it, is a thing of beauty and lend a genuineness to the series that is matched by few authors.

All of this is just to underscore the tragedy today of Robert Jordan's death at the age of 58. He died of a rare blood disease in his home town of Charleston where he had lived most of his life. The death while not sudden, he was diagnosed in early 2006, was still a shock to all and a loss to the Fantasy Genre.

His great series remains incomplete at the time of his death, still purportedly 2 books away from the conclusion, as it has been for the last 2 books and probably would have been for a few more. Jordan was always striving for perfection in his work and vision in his tale.

Will his estate go the way of Tolkien and publish posthumously, or leave his life work the way he left it? Only time will tell, but for now we have lost a great voice and we will miss him.

[Chernabog]

I was saddened to hear about Jordan's death, especially since he was working on the last (12th and promised final... he said even if it were 1500 pages long it would be the last) book of the Wheel of Time series. He DID leave notes on the chapters (and it is partially written), however, so whoever picks up the reigns and "ghost writes" the last book will have it end the way Jordan wanted it to. According to Wikipedia, the decisions on making that happen are with Jordan's wife and head of his publishing company.

As far as the Wheel of Time itself goes - sort of a love/hate thing there with me (and many MANY other readers). Look at some of the Amazon reviews of the first 5ish books of the Wheel of Time, versus reviews of the last 6ish. People got angrier and angrier as time went on.

The world Jordan created was wonderful, on par with Frank Herbert's Dune, IMHO. However, he got greedy. He got bogged down in so many side-stories that there was one book that the MAIN CHARACTER didn't appear until page 600 or something. He starting describing the grass and the trees to such extent that his readers just went... "Get ON with it already!!!"

My wish is that he had written more about the main quest, making tighter novels in the end with better storytelling. He did wonderfully in the first 5 books, where the plot advanced and people grew. But the last books were not like that. For instance, when one character started a rebellious march towards a particular city, and 3 books and thousands of pages later she hadn't even GOTTEN there yet... the book is too bloated.

Robert Jordan got me started on reading George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series, another epic fantasy with a huge backstory and copious amounts of characters, but each chapter has a point. Each chapter advances SOMETHING. Robert Jordan went from well-edited and fast-paced, like Martin, to slow and bloated. Jordan publicly recognized that he made a mistake in doing so, however. By telling the story in 12 books instead of 7-8, he sold that many more books, at the expense of good storytelling.

Personally, I stopped partway through book 9. I just couldn't take it anymore (having been bored to tears with major sections of books 6-8, all those side-stories that should have been in different volumes after the main story was completed). I loved the characters but I vowed not to even go back until the whole thing was done.

With each book, the die-hard fans kept saying "oh, it is just setting up the final battle, the final book, the ending to this long and wonderful journey", just to justify slogging through. Unfortunately, the journey is more important than the destination. We KNOW that Rand is going to win already, we've known it since Eye of the World. It just didn't have to be so slow going getting there, because the world he created was truly awe-inspiring.

RIP Robert Jordan.

[Alex]

The Dune world was fantastic for exactly one book. That's about how long it lasted for me with Jordan as well.

Better than Terry Goodkind, though.

It sucks, though, when an author doesn't live to finish a series, even if it is one I personally didn't care for. Wasn't that the big impetus that finally got King to finish the Gunslinger saga?

[Chernabog]

Originally Posted by Alex

It sucks, though, when an author doesn't live to finish a series, even if it is one I personally didn't care for. Wasn't that the big impetus that finally got King to finish the Gunslinger saga?

It was the impetus for getting him to finish them so quickly, I think. Books 5-7 of the Dark Tower series were written and then released like in 6 month increments. It is another series that is very worthy of reading -- and again, it moved along at a much faster clip than Jordan.

SK had come |thisclose| to biting the bullet when he got hit by the car before book 5 was done, so he decided to get the damn thing over with after he looked death in the face. He wrote that experience into the Dark Tower books themselves (as well as his excellent nonfiction book "On Writing").