Category: Books

When I was nine years old, way back in 1990, Robert Jor­dan pub­lished a fair­ly large and inter­est­ing fan­ta­sy nov­el called The Eye of the World. It was one of a new breed of fan­ta­sy sto­ry, the mega-gigan­to-epic, tales that are planned from the out­set to exceed the typ­i­cal tril­o­gy set-up by vol­umes and vol­umes. Ter­ry Good­kind and George R. R. Mar­tin join Robert Jor­dan as the top three super-enor­mo-epic writ­ers [and prob­a­bly J.K. Rowl­ing now that I think of it…]. Ter­ry and Robert have anoth­er thing in com­mon, they both betrayed their sto­ries in favor of a larg­er bank account. They’ve both turned their worlds into ser­i­al killers, into Sto­ries From The Black Lagoon, things that nev­er seem to end. Each book is around 700 pages. Robert Jor­dan’s Wheel of Time series was ini­tial­ly slat­ed as an 8 vol­ume tale, but after vol­ume 4 popped out, it was obvi­ous he was get­ting seri­ous pres­sure to drag out the tale as long as pos­si­ble. Now it is set for a twelve vol­ume series. After read­ing vol­ume 11, I think num­ber 12 is going to be unabridged OED in size, unless, of course, he extends it again.

Jor­dan’s writ­ing style [and now that I’m quite grown up, I real­ize he could­n’t write his way out of a paper bag. Tell a good sto­ry, yes. Write, hell no. He’s a physi­cist.] is very detail ori­ent­ed and descrip­tive. It got way overblown when vol­ume five came out and instead of skim­ming over descrip­tions and trav­el sequences we start­ed get­ting details about what each and every char­ac­ter, no mat­ter how minor, looked like, wore, you name it. The plot basi­cal­ly dragged to a stand­still and sprout­ed sub­plots like a sow drop­ping piglets. And now he’s stuck like Peter Jack­son and the third LotR movie, with tons of ground to cov­er and not much time to do it. Knife of Dreams starts to get back to the action, but it is obvi­ous that turn­ing to the tale back on course is tak­ing a lot of torque. Pon­der­ous is still the word. I think the end might be in sight though. I’ll be glad, that is for sure. I’m tired of being on this road for 15 years. I’ve real­ly turned away from fan­ta­sy nov­els because of the ten­den­cy to blovi­ate, peo­ple imi­tat­ing Good­kind and Jor­dan. There isn’t much good fan­ta­sy that gets the recog­ni­ti­tion that it deserves. Instead the focus is on cre­at­ing a fran­chise. Thank­ful­ly John Crow­ley and Patri­cia McKil­lip stick to one book sto­ries and write robust­ly.