Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time" Visible Spoilers Thread

[Ashamanchill]

I read Lord of Chaos as everyone I knew was talking about it how great it was, and I thought it was ok but meandering. I basically said "Eh, I'll read the set when the series is finished." Then it turned into the literal Never-ending story, and I was glad I never bothered.

Wait wait wait, I need a clarification here. As in, you read the series up to The Lord of Chaos, or you just picked up Book 6 and said "what the hey?"

[SurfD]

Thomas Covenant was so much better than the Wheel of the Time to my memory though it's been a long, long time since I read it and I may have some severe rose colored glasses. I know it has some super problematic elements as well (seriously, what was it with fantasy authors in the 80s and 90s?) but it was still a very good series and actually told the story in a reasonable page count.

Covenant was pretty neat because it was a fairly non standard, really rather dark story with a lot of fairly heavy themes about a guy dealing with a literal mountain of personal mental issues getting sucked off to act as the literal Jesus style saviour of an entire fantasy universe. Almost very OG "return to oz" style story, but with a much heavier fantasy bent.  I seem to remember a lot of the themes in it having to do with him having recently been through a pretty bad divorce or something like that + dealing with a potentially life threatening illness (might have been leprosy?) before he gets yoinked to the fantasy world, and you are never really sure if what is happening is really happening, or if he is just imagining it as his way of working through his problems.

It's probably been 20 years since I read it though, so the memories are pretty vague.  Might actually grab it from home when I am down for Christmas and give it another read.

[Johny Cee]

Oh no, I spotted it immediately and laughed my ass off.

The thing about the Wheel of Time is very much rooted in when it was released. Epic/Tolkein-esque fantasy was in a pretty barren patch when these books were first released. You either had just blatant (and very bad) ripoffs like Terry Brooks' Shannara or you had bodice rippers that were Conan ripoffs (ironically some of which Jordan wrote). Eye of the World was a pretty AT THE TIME "fresh" take on the Tolkien-esque epic fantasy that took it to a different place. Unfortunately, what talent Jordan had was pissed away by not having a good editor (his wife) who could objectively prune some of this shit AND being so successful that the publisher had no reason to reign him in as well. I worked at a bookstore around the time of Lord of Chaos' release, and that shit just sold like gangbusters, better than just about anything else in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section. No publisher was going to tell him "You need to finish this now," even though by then it was clear he was just spinning his wheels.

What?  No.

1. Epic Fantasy was in the doldrums in the '70s when Brooks hit big with Shannara in like '77.  The '80s you had huge amounts of fantasy from Eddings, Feist, Dragonlance, Salvatore/Forgotten Realms, etc.  just from memory of what was big.  That's leaving aside anything I can't specifically date to the '80s or didn't get bigger until later or just disappeared.  If you dig into mid-listers, there are a huge amount of Epic Fantasy...  hell man, Black Company is 1984 and subverting tropes and that wasn't even Cooks first Epic Fantasy series.

Fantasy had a really shitty literary reputation, even in the genre, until the late 90s.  That's why you had things that were unabashedly fantasy being labeled as Science-fantasy.  Dying Earth stuff was popular in the '70s/'80s but it's Science-Fantasy not that nerdy Fantasy!! Pern?  Science Fantasy!  Dragons are genetically engineered and telepathy is science-y!  Epic Pooh/all fantasy is Conservative authoritarianism schlock opinions.

Jordan really helped Fantasy's literary rep in the genre, which ended up with the Big Book well regarded fantasy epics like Martin and Erikson and etc.  Look at the Hugo noms and winners '80s and '90s.  It's going to be a bunch of SF books you've vaguely heard of, a bunch of "round up the usual suspects" of famous SF authors (Bujold, Gibson, Wiliis), and the occasional true classic. (I do really, really like Bujold.  Bujold should not have been nominated for every slight work that left her pen, though.)

Jordan also had a huge effect on world building in the genre, which has had big knock on effects till today.

2.  Jordan wrote licensed Conan books.  It was "for hire" work that people thought well enough of to give him his chance for Eye of the World.

3.  Jordan's wife was Harriet McDougal, who had a long and illustrious career as an editor before they were married.  This included working with or supervising many of the big name editors/publishers now (Baen, Doherty).  She edited/worked on both The Black Company and Ender's Game....  before Jordan started Wheel of Time.  Reducing her to "haha get a gud editor not ur wife lolz" is shitty.
_____________________

Like.... I don't even like Jordan.  It was fine.  No interest in reading the last few books, or the show.  No interest in rereading it.  I just don't get how angry people get about it to the extent that it needs to be objectively bad.

[Ashamanchill]

3.  Jordan's wife was Harriet McDougal, who had a long and illustrious career as an editor before they were married.  This included working with or supervising many of the big name editors/publishers now (Baen, Doherty).  She edited/worked on both The Black Company and Ender's Game....  before Jordan started Wheel of Time.  Reducing her to "haha get a gud editor not ur wife lolz" is shitty.
_____________________

Like.... I don't even like Jordan.  It was fine.  No interest in reading the last few books, or the show.  No interest in rereading it.  I just don't get how angry people get about it to the extent that it needs to be objectively bad.

I love the series. Those that have read up to the end of book six will realize that i literally put a part of it in my name here. It, and especially Tolkien, got me through my parents undergoing a vindictive scorched earth divorce when I was 16-17, trying to pull me to either side. But yo, starting about book 4 and increasing logarithmically as the series went on, it really fucking needed a proper editor. Proper, as in, not married to the guy who was over indulging himself in his world. I don't care how good Harriet McDougall's work was elsewhere, it is objectively bad editing in her husband's WoT series. There is constant misspelled shit, repeated parts, and just plain confusing laid out scenes, and that is not including the rambling incoherent story threads that amounted to nothing. Just read Jordan's work, then read Sanderson's work when he picked it up. One is just so much more tightly written and edited, and it's not the one with familial strings attached. There is literally a whole book that RJ admitted was shit and he never should have seen print (Book 10, Crossroads of Twilight), and it's obvious because no one told him, no, focus on what is important.

[Sir T]

I read Lord of Chaos as everyone I knew was talking about it how great it was, and I thought it was ok but meandering. I basically said "Eh, I'll read the set when the series is finished." Then it turned into the literal Never-ending story, and I was glad I never bothered.

Wait wait wait, I need a clarification here. As in, you read the series up to The Lord of Chaos, or you just picked up Book 6 and said "what the hey?"

I was going though a phase of reading the last book of a series before reading the previous books. Basically I was so full of anxiety in general that I needed to know how a story ended before going trough the whole story as otherwise I could not relax into it. Yes, I was crippled with anxiety and more than a little crazy at the time.

Anyway I just checked which book I actually read. It was book 3, not 6. I read Book 3 as I rather naïvely assumed that Book 3 had to be the last book. When I found it wasn't actually the last book I basically said I would wait for the last book. 20 fucking years later I read the last page at a bookshop out of curiosity and out of a sense of completion.

[Sir T]

I seem to remember a lot of the themes in it having to do with him having recently been through a pretty bad divorce or something like that + dealing with a potentially life threatening illness (might have been leprosy?) before he gets yoinked to the fantasy world, and you are never really sure if what is happening is really happening, or if he is just imagining it as his way of working through his problems

Ya, it was Leprosy he was suffering from. The whole "is this real" thing was a big part of the story, as when he gets cured of the Leprosy he rapes the woman that healed him, and does some other pretty evil stuff as "why not, this is just my imagination!" Then holding onto the doubt of the reality of what he is experiencing becomes a shield in his head as the guilt over what he did threatens to drive him crazy.

He was truly "the Unbeliever" as he had to be to survive. The fact that the big Magic McGuffin was his wedding ring also helped in the symbolism.

[slog]

I seem to remember a lot of the themes in it having to do with him having recently been through a pretty bad divorce or something like that + dealing with a potentially life threatening illness (might have been leprosy?) before he gets yoinked to the fantasy world, and you are never really sure if what is happening is really happening, or if he is just imagining it as his way of working through his problems

Ya, it was Leprosy he was suffering from. The whole "is this real" thing was a big part of the story, as when he gets cured of the Leprosy he rapes the woman that healed him, and does some other pretty evil stuff as "why not, this is just my imagination!" Then holding onto the doubt of the reality of what he is experiencing becomes a shield in his head as the guilt over what he did threatens to drive him crazy.

He was truly "the Unbeliever" as he had to be to survive. The fact that the big Magic McGuffin was his wedding ring also helped in the symbolism.

Yes  and there is ZERO chance that a showrunner could make that work today. 

[Ashamanchill]

I read Lord of Chaos as everyone I knew was talking about it how great it was, and I thought it was ok but meandering. I basically said "Eh, I'll read the set when the series is finished." Then it turned into the literal Never-ending story, and I was glad I never bothered.

Wait wait wait, I need a clarification here. As in, you read the series up to The Lord of Chaos, or you just picked up Book 6 and said "what the hey?"

I was going though a phase of reading the last book of a series before reading the previous books. Basically I was so full of anxiety in general that I needed to know how a story ended before going trough the whole story as otherwise I could not relax into it. Yes, I was crippled with anxiety and more than a little crazy at the time.

Anyway I just checked which book I actually read. It was book 3, not 6. I read Book 3 as I rather naïvely assumed that Book 3 had to be the last book. When I found it wasn't actually the last book I basically said I would wait for the last book. 20 fucking years later I read the last page at a bookshop out of curiosity and out of a sense of completion.

You know what? Thank you for sharing that. i had heard of people that did that, but I could never imagine why they would do that. Now I understand.

For what it is worth, the series was initially pitched as a 5 part saga, and it roughly sticks to that aim through the first 3 books. After that, the author just says fuck it, I'm going to do whatever I want. As Haemish said, there was no way his publishers were going to tell him no, every release was a trip down to the mint to print money. And as we discussed, for whatever reason, his editor and wife wasn't saying no either. So 14 Books and a new author later, it's done.

Roughly speaking, i would classify and group the books thusly:

Books 1-3 Are the foundation of the series, and all have a similar pacing style to one another. These are the tightest written.
Books 4-7, and 9 (in parts of it) Are RJ realizing he had lightning in a bottle and a captive audience, and expanding on his world, ideas, characters, etc. Important stuff still happens in these books, whether interpersonal or politically in the world.
Books 8, 9 (in other parts of it) 10, and 11 are completely lost meandering affairs, where little happens, whole main character PoVs are absent from entire books, replaced with the introductions of nobodies as characters. You could condense there 3 and a half to one book no problem at all, with only the climax of 9 (Winter's heart) standing out.
Books 12, 13, 14 Increasing written by Sanderson as RJ had passed away, with RJ working with and leaving extensive notes for Sanderson. Unlike that fat piece of shit George R R Martin, he wanted to see his life's work complete and in print. You can see the series tighten up in these 3, with plot threads tied up, or deemed not important enough and left to die on the vine.

[Rendakor]

That's a pretty fair assessment, though I can't really remember what the big thing that happens in Book 9 was.
The same thing that happened in Books 8-11 is what Martin's going through with ASoIaF in Book 4 and 5.

[Ashamanchill]

Yes to the Spoiler. You have to admit that is pretty big. Also, The rest is pure, uncut, RJ faffing. Hence why I divided it.

[Johny Cee]

3.  Jordan's wife was Harriet McDougal, who had a long and illustrious career as an editor before they were married.  This included working with or supervising many of the big name editors/publishers now (Baen, Doherty).  She edited/worked on both The Black Company and Ender's Game....  before Jordan started Wheel of Time.  Reducing her to "haha get a gud editor not ur wife lolz" is shitty.
_____________________

Like.... I don't even like Jordan.  It was fine.  No interest in reading the last few books, or the show.  No interest in rereading it.  I just don't get how angry people get about it to the extent that it needs to be objectively bad.

I love the series. Those that have read up to the end of book six will realize that i literally put a part of it in my name here. It, and especially Tolkien, got me through my parents undergoing a vindictive scorched earth divorce when I was 16-17, trying to pull me to either side. But yo, starting about book 4 and increasing logarithmically as the series went on, it really fucking needed a proper editor. Proper, as in, not married to the guy who was over indulging himself in his world. I don't care how good Harriet McDougall's work was elsewhere, it is objectively bad editing in her husband's WoT series. There is constant misspelled shit, repeated parts, and just plain confusing laid out scenes, and that is not including the rambling incoherent story threads that amounted to nothing. Just read Jordan's work, then read Sanderson's work when he picked it up. One is just so much more tightly written and edited, and it's not the one with familial strings attached. There is literally a whole book that RJ admitted was shit and he never should have seen print (Book 10, Crossroads of Twilight), and it's obvious because no one told him, no, focus on what is important.

I don't agree. 

The first six books were published in a 4.5 year time frame (1/1990 to 10/1994).  Its really obvious that the broad story is outlined to that point, right down to Dumai Wells, which seems to be the last major high quality set piece until book 9?  Quality is great through book 6, aside from the first two books very obviously being a bit more derivative/weaker with outs to wrap up the series as a trilogy.  I think for the fact that they were pushing out a huge book every year, and then moving to every two years later in the series, things held together pretty well. 

I also don't think there is that much filler.  The problem was that Jordan fucked up his story threads/timeline, and he needed to then burn 2 or 3 books to set the table for the finale.  Its really uninteresting, but it makes solid progress towards setting the stage for the finale.  "Filler" for me is something like that middle stretch of the Aubrey/Maturin novels were it was "Jack's broke!"/Go to sea/Major victory & wealth/Jack loses money/is arrested restart.  There were a couple empty storyines to keep characters busy while the rest caught up, but largely the overarching story was advancing well. 

Crossroads was terribly uninteresting, but it was the last batch of everyone catching up.  Generally, the fandom seemed to think that Knife of Dreams was back up in quality and then Sanderson took over.



I actually give Jordan a shitload more credit then Martin....  Martin is sitting at the same crossroads.  He already fucked up by not taking the time jump he wanted to, and his last two novels were attempts to move all the pieces into place for the grand finale but still having big issues and probably two more books before he can even think about the finale.  He'd rather let the series die.  See also Patrick Rothfuss.

[lamaros]

Famous author starts tight series and it goes to bloated shit with timing, "editing", etc as it gets popular and prints money for publisher...

Blaming this on the editor being his wife is naive. This happens time and again to other authors too. Harry Potter the biggest example that springs to mind.

Those who have limited idea of how publishing works really don't understand the role of an editor that well, and blame it as a magic cure all for problems they have. But most of that comes from the author and publishing house decisions. Editors have a different role, and unless you have editors changing mid series (very rare) a reader is in no place to judge what their influence is. (Source, worked in publishing industry).

[Riggswolfe]

3.  Jordan's wife was Harriet McDougal, who had a long and illustrious career as an editor before they were married.  This included working with or supervising many of the big name editors/publishers now (Baen, Doherty).  She edited/worked on both The Black Company and Ender's Game....  before Jordan started Wheel of Time.  Reducing her to "haha get a gud editor not ur wife lolz" is shitty.

I know we're talking different mediums here but compare her editing of the Wheel of Time series to Marsha Lucas's editing of Star Wars. There is some very real evidence that the first Star Wars movie wasn't a monstrous disaster solely because Marsha Lucas edited the hell out of the movie. You can find Youtube videos that go into detail about how she fixed that movie. Hell, the entire 3rd act of that movie is only good because of her skill as an editor.

And then we have Wheel of Time which just narratively spins its wheels for thousands of pages. She may be a good editor and if she did the Black Company and Ender's Game then it is likely she is. But for some reason her work on the Wheel of Time is not that good. Perhaps she was too close to the material. Perhaps Robert just was overbearing and didn't listen to her. I don't know. But when books are released with entire chapters that do nothing for the on-going story and arguably an entire novel is written that does nothing for the plot of the series then you have to wonder what happened.

Considering her other work, my money is on the publisher and Robert Jordan not giving her much room to edit. But the fact is, the man needed someone to truly edit that shit down. Hundreds of pages could have been trimmed from the Wheel of Time and it would have immensely improved the series. I think why people get angry about it as you contend is that the series is so close to greatness but RJ lost control of the plot and just spun his wheels. Someone needed to tell him no but since people snapped up the books, no one ever did.

[Ashamanchill]

So even disregarding editing the content of an author, let's not forget this:

There is constant misspelled shit, repeated parts, and just plain confusing laid out scenes, and that is not including the rambling incoherent story threads that amounted to nothing.

There is, or was, entire sections of Wot fan pages dedicated to, essentially, shit that Harriet missed. In the first book there used to be a scene that straight up happened twice because Jordan forgot he had it already, and Harriet missed it. They removed it in new prints around like 1997. Like, even if you are taking the story of Street Fighter and stretching it out into a Magnum Opus, it is the editors job to catch that shit.

[lamaros]

Maybe she was an average editor, maybe they had poor production processes and older manuscripts got sent to print by mistake, maybe she was dealing with really shit material and there was so much shit to correct and the publisher wanted the money train to continue she couldn't keep up and skipped over issues. Maybe also she was a bit close to RJ and didn't push as hard as a result.

Not saying books can't have bad editing, just saying that the reason a book has issues isn't necessarily "editor was too close to the writer".

"Editor" as a role is also something that varies by publisher and industry. I don't think talking about Star Wars scripts really makes the comparison. Large concept and structural issues, rewrites, etc often comes in with the publisher-author (publisher being a role, not the publishing house) relationship, or not at all if the author is really hard to deal with/not open, etc. There's also a blurred line between publisher and editor in a number of places, with one person doing both roles, especially for high profile authors.

[Ashamanchill]

The fact that her other books, written by other authors, would suggest that is the case.

[lamaros]

The fact that her other books, written by other authors, would suggest that is the case.

Maybe. Maybe those authors put in tighter manuscripts. Maybe they didn't sell as much and the publisher said "push this out by 6 months and fix it" rather than go "eh, good enough and we need the revenue". It's all speculation unless you've got some source.

[Ashamanchill]

The source is the books themselves. They are poorly edited. What happened to make them so is indeed speculation, but the speculation that doesn't require an insane amount of also speculative scenarios is that she was too light a touch when it came to her husband.

But wait, there is also a control writer for this series: Brandon Sanderson. His portions are far more polished than RJ's, what ever other flaws they have, and he was very communicative about how diligently she worked with him. So, either she worked as hard as she did with Jordan as she did with Sanderson (who also got those 3 books out within a year of each other, so not taking his time as opposed to rushed Jordan), and she still let a whole bunch of shit through. This doesn't happen on her other books though. Or, for some reason she was a very light touch on her husband's work.

[lamaros]

Again, the main variable here is the author, not the editor. (Sanderson also seems to be very polite about how this TV series has been handled too). You want it to be one way though so, sure, make that your canon.

[Ashamanchill]

That's my point. If Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson are handing in polished works and she's not needed, great. But Robert Jordan wasn't, and a more thorough eye was needed, which she didn't take. The alternative is, she's just not a good editor I guess. Weird that it's her husband's  work where that sticks out.

[Riggswolfe]

Again, the main variable here is the author, not the editor. (Sanderson also seems to be very polite about how this TV series has been handled too). You want it to be one way though so, sure, make that your canon.

I think a case can be made that Sanderson handed her more polished manuscripts and that after RJ's death she was deeply invested in making those final books the best that they could be. I don't necessarily think she is a bad editor. I think the editing work done on the Wheel of Time series was bad.

[Khaldun]

I don't really agree with the history of fantasy writing laid out here--there were a lot of Tolkien-esque ripoffs coming at a pretty steady pace and WoT was just one of the last of them. I think oddly WoT killed them because it was both a better pastiche than Shannara or the Belgarion etc etc. and because it went on for so so so long that even people who liked it said "I'm ready for something different, finally". I mean, the Shannara books or Eddings' awful fucking shit had people who were big fans too, despite how bad they were.

The Covenant books are a complicated exception. I don't think they're good but they were trying to do something different. For one, they were a portal story (e.g, Covenant isn't of the high-fantasy world) and second they were giving us a portal-protagonist who was absolutely not a nice person and who could not really afford to *believe* that the story was really happening. The problem really is that Donaldson didn't know entirely where to go with that, so he just kept looping back to the starting premise. You either have to have Covenant's self-loathing become morally real in the Land and start to have emotional weight there to the people he's meeting and relating to, or what happens in the Land has to start affecting who he is back in the world. That's basic to portal stories--one or both of those have to happen, or otherwise it's just a really really really fucking interminably long Twilight Zone episode about a dream a guy is having, or a really really fucking long version of Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", where it's a dying/suffering person hallucinating as they die/suffer. The characters in the Land don't even really reflect or comment on Covenant's life in the real world much, so it's hard to take the idea that it's all a delusion very seriously.

Anyway, at least he wasn't just doing the usual shit. Sort of.

[HaemishM]

So to clarify, when I worked at the bookstore in the '90's, there really wasn't much fantasy that was moving. Tolkien sold, mostly the Hobbit because it had become required reading at schools around here. Shannara still sold but not in great numbers. Terry Goodkind's first book, Wizard's First Rule, had come out and was getting good reviews. Literally nothing else was selling in any memorable quantity, and what was on the shelf beyond those was mostly either Eddings, or D&D tie-in novels, which all sold fairly well (Dragonlance and Salvatore were big sellers in that line). And just about all of those sales were paperbacks. We were a decent sized mall bookstore (B. Dalton's which wasn't like the Waldenbooks store, we were one of the bigger stores in the mall). This was Summer-Christmas of 1993 and then Christmas 1994 - September 1995.

Jordan was moving HARDBACKS. Giant, Bible-sized hardcovers. He was moving them in boatloads. I can't think of one fantasy release during that time I worked there where we got more than say 1 or 2 hardcovers in inventory. We got BOXES of Lord of Chaos. We had people asking about that book a year before it was released. There simply wasn't anything in that time period in either fantasy or sci-fi that moved paper like that. For like 3-6 months after release, we couldn't keep them in stock more than a few days. Hell, he even released a hardcover that was some revolutionary war historical novel and it sold (though obviously not as well as WOT).

I'm assuming a lot but I'd guess that the fact his books were moving that kind of quantity is the reason the publisher let him continue with his wife as editor, even though anyone could see the quality was going downhill. Some writers really need good editors, even things that are considered literary masterpieces. One of my most profound memories of reading and learning about the craft of writing was reading Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. An absolute amazing epic book that needed an editor so bad it actually hurt to read it.

WOT was a gravy train in the '90's and no one wanted it to stop, which is why the series ended up as it did.

[Lucas]

Heh, just stumbled upon the (leaked) image of a certain character that will appear in the season finale. And no, it's not from Battlestar Galactica :P

Under spoiler just in case (can you see the pic?)

[Rendakor]

Is that LTT?

[Ashamanchill]

It kinda fits the canonical description of Rahvin.

[Lucas]

There is a place entirely devoted to the show leaks, so I'll just let you discover that (not that it is that difficult to find :D).

Just this once, while we wait for the season finale, two leaks: one about the beginning of the episode

and toward the end

[Ashamanchill]

Ohhhhhhh I can't wait to see how they do the Seanchan accent, which is supposed to be a Southern style drawl. Really looking forward to Dale Gribble, of the Blood.

[MahrinSkel]

I read a lot of crap. I'm currently reading an RPG-lit Kindle Library series of 18 novels that is just a bare inch from being furry porn (the protagonist and some of his harem are weres, and it doesn't dwell on what form they are in when they fuck). I put down Path of Daggers halfway through and I am resolutely refusing to read further. I have literally never stopped reading anything else halfway through a book.

WoT went to absolute shit, and Robert Jordon and his editor shit the bed. If the TV showrunner is shitting in his skull? Good.

--Dave

[Lucas]

I read a lot of crap. I'm currently reading an RPG-lit Kindle Library series of 18 novels that is just a bare inch from being furry porn (the protagonist and some of his harem are weres, and it doesn't dwell on what form they are in when they fuck).

Don't stop there. Tell us more.

 

[Lucas]

Lots of episode 8 promotional stills from Amazon press site. A couple stand out (spoilers if you prefer to wait for the broadcast):

He's definitely not Voldemort, ok:

WTF 

[Sir T]

Nice that the Guald from Stargate are getting work.

[Rendakor]

Who's the top guy? Ishamael? Or one of the mook Forsaken in the Eye?

[Lucas]

Who's the top guy? Ishamael? Or one of the mook Forsaken in the Eye?

Might be, but in this turning of the Wheel he's just a guy strolling in the Blight while he tries to sell one of his jackets to casual visitors; or some magician from "The Prestige", I don't know.

[Threash]

Looks like a James Bond thug, but not one of the generic ones. Like a mid tier boss thug.