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New Wheel of Time Book — Chapter One Online, Released Oct 27

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the here's-to-sanderson's-health dept.

Tor Books has made the first chapter of the latest Wheel of Time book available to readers for free via their website. This is the first book to have work from Robert Jordan's replacement, Brandon Sanderson, since Jordan died in September of 2007. The Gathering Storm is complete and will be released on October 27th of this year. In addition, the prologue to this book will be available in e-book format on October 17th for $2.99. The whole of the Wheel of Time series will also be released as e-books with several of the books receiving new cover art as well.
Update: 09/07 23:42 GMT by KD : Reader Daniel Benamy points out that the correct release date for the prologue e-book is September 17.

8 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Neither. try 3... by tehdaemon · · Score: 3, Interesting
    3 volumes, and it would have been around 1200 pages. Apparently binding such large books is hard/expensive

    T

    --
    Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
  2. Re:Oooo ya by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What makes you think that? According to the article, the new author was selected by Robert Jordan's widow.

    I think it is one of the most difficult jobs in the world to finish a bestseller series. You can almost never do it right. You are always "not the original author" and therefore second best or worse. I certainly hope that Mr Jordan left enough notes for the series to be finished in a consistent state. I think it takes a lot of courage to take up this task.

    Oh. And I am grateful that I will know how the story further develops!

    --
    Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
  3. BRANDON SANDERSON! by greenskyx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The author of the new Wheel of Time Book rules. He is a fairly new author, but has some awesome books. They are some of the best epic fantasy books I've ever read. I highly suggest you read Elantris (http://www.brandonsanderson.com/book/Elantris) or Mistborn (http://www.brandonsanderson.com/book/Mistborn).

    1. Re:BRANDON SANDERSON! by jallen02 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I concur with the parent. I recently purchased and read through all four of his most popular novels: Elantris and the Mistborn Trilogy. Sanderson's default writing style is actually shorter and less descriptive... but then for first books you don't always get the luxury of killing an entire forest to describe a bedroom.

      That said I have read the annotations for most of his books, Brandon's blog posts regarding his writing (cruise to his website and read up if your remotely interested) and the entire WoT series again. I have decided that with the amount of information Jordan left behind (plot) a writer of Sanderson's talent can pull it off. Sanderson has a much shorter paragraph length on average and his stories had great potential plot wise, he just chose to keep the stories shorter, though he has the vision of the grand epic. The real challenge will be nailing the details and tying up all of the plot threads on a coherent manner. The writing style, I think, Sanderson probably fell into after a few months of writing. Since Sanderson has already managed reasonably complex plots and seems to be keeping it all together (based on his blog posts) I hold high hopes for the completion of this series.

      This is a series I started reading in early high school and have treasured to this day. Some books are better than others, but this series is THE epic fantasy story of the last 20 years. It is more of a brute force presence in the fantasy fiction world than something someone did decades ago like Tolkien. Jordan has defined an entire decade of writers and readers that have had to come to terms with his stories when they contemplate the fantasy epic. When an author sits down and thinks of a plot and story for a fantasy epic it is, in my opinion, Tolkien and Jordan that you struggle with: how do you do something different? How do you spin threads of a story of epic length while making the same old good triumphs of evil (epicly!) enjoyable? There are a lot of other great writers in the epic fantasy space and I don't mean to reduce it to the two most well known.... but they are where they are for a reason.

      Anyhow... my rambling is done. I highly recommend Elantris and or the Mistborn trilogy. Though I suspect that most of us that have been eagerly waiting have already begun studying up on the man to finish up Jordan's legacy.

  4. Re:Oooo ya by anyGould · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just look on the bright side - at least the new author will actually finish the series

    You can say a lot about Jordan, both good and bad (my wife likes the series, I wouldn't have read it if it wasn't in the house already), but the man did not know how to finish a story. I suspect he would have died with the series unfinished, whether he died now or 50 years from now.

  5. Re:Oooo ya by bane2571 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you'd actually read the series you'd know that it is nothing like Dune, those books had a clear ending, wheel of time basically left the whole series one or two books away from the climax. The people that have read the 13 books would really like to see some kind of finish line even if it isn't Jordan's.

  6. Re:Why all the dissin'? by chill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why? You really don't know? Okay...

    Because the first three books were damn good. The problem was, what should have been by all rights a 5-6 book series has turned into, what...12? The remaining books sort of meandered around, filling in niggling details and sub-plots that every other author on the planet saves until the second series set in the same locale. Jordan, however, crammed it in the middle. He admitted he had only outlined it to about 5 or 6 books.

    Hell, I'm sure there are four WHOLE BOOKS of material in there that can be summed up as repetitions of "the men and women in this series can't communicate with each other worth a damn, and have egos the size of elephants".

    Jordan was verbose. He made Tolstoy look parsimonious. A word used a couple times in WoT novels, by the way. The man probably bought thesauruses by the case.

    The remaining books hit the best seller list by fans hoping he would finish the damn story before he died. And yes, that was the joke going around YEARS before he was sick, much less actually dead.

    When I finally read Knife of Dreams my first thought was "Damn! He really is picking up the pace. I wonder what got into him?" I later learned it was cardiac amyloidosis is what got into him. A year and a half later he was dead. My first thoughts being "Wow. He DIDN'T finish the story before dying. Who'd a thunk it?" followed by "There are gonna be a lot of people online who now feel like assholes for jokes from years past!"

    Thus, the commentary here Slashdot. There was a lot of sentiment expressed that Jordan was milking the series for all it was worth. The George Lucas of epic fantasy novels, if you will. I'm not convinced he wasn't, which is why I didn't get Knife of Dreams right away. I waited for the reviews before I decided it probably wasn't yet another string-em-along filler book.

    That being said, I'll probably buy the final three novels in ebook form and acquire the others -- which I currently have in hardback -- as ebooks.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  7. Re:Oooo ya by plastbox · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As someone who isn't big on reading but has finished the entire WoT series twice now, I can't see this as first and foremost being about making money. Of course the publisher wants as much money as they can get but from interviews I have read they seem to also have a healthy respect for Robert Jordan's work. I feel like I "know" the characters of WoT in a way, and I desperately want to know how their stories end! I have faith in Harriet (Jordan's widow) finding a good author to complete R.J's legacy and with the amount of notes and work Jordan left behind, the "finish line" of which you speak will be the one Jordan intended (if the brand of shoes used to get there might be different).