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

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.

Comments

Re:Oooo ya

[anyGould]

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.

Re:Why all the dissin'?

[chill]

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.