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Fantasy Author Robert Jordan Passes Away
willith writes "James Oliver Rigney Jr, author of the long-running fantasy series The Wheel of Time and better known to millions of fans by the pen name Robert Jordan, died on 16 Sept 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with the disease in March 2006 and vowed to beat the odds, but determination and gumption sometimes just aren't enough in the face of a disease with a median survival time of just over two years. Jordan was in the process of writing the twelfth and final book in the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, but the book was not slated for release until 2009 and is still incomplete. While there is hope that the book will still be finished from Jordan's notes, this is devastating news to all of us who have been reading the series since 1990."
It's so true. He should have done what R.A. Salvatore has done. Rather than taking his trilogy and making it 12 books long, he just wrote another trilogy using the same characters and then another. Then he wrote a prequel trilogy and so on ad infinitum. The end result is a story-line that is nearly as long as WoT, but is manageable because you take it in chunks. Each series of books is fairly self-contained, and tells a story in itself while still leaving enough loose ends on which to base another series of books.
Actually, now, as I am writing, I am reminded of the best at this, Terry Pratchett. You don't even have to read the books in order. He really is a genius at making every book completely self-contained, yet having them still sit in a larger story line. In many of his trilogies I have actually read the second or third before the first, and it made complete sense.