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A Memory of Light To Be Released January 8, 2013
First time accepted submitter Hotawa Hawk-eye writes "Tor Books has announced that the release date for the final volume in the Wheel of Time series of books, A Memory Of Light, will be January 8, 2013. [Barring a Mayan apocalypse, of course.] The fantasy series, started by Robert Jordan and continued by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death, will span 15 books and over 10,000 pages."
the Mayan apocalypse..
After Sanderson took over the books have tremendously improved, almost back to the initial volumes.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We can finally get an official count on the number of times somebody tugs on a braid or smooths a skirt in the series.
As the Tor announcement stated, it will take place at the end of the Year of the Dragon. Cool beans.
I got to get dinner with Sanderson and Harriet Jordan on the Gathering Storm book tour. They're both very good people, and are the right people to be finishing this series.
I have no idea how Sanderson could possibly wrap up all the loose threads in just one more book, but if anyone can do it, he can.
This is great. Now we can get Sanderson back on his own stuff. More Mistborn! And maybe the sequel to Way of Kings. Sanderson is one of the best fantasy writers alive today. It will be good for him to go back to his own, very original stuff. His own works are much more groundbreaking than Jordan's. So for example, in the Mistborn books he's been far more willing to play around with the tech level of "fantasy" universes. His most recent book in that universe, "Allow of Law" is excellent and essentially amounts to a demonstration that contrary to common belief, fantasy worlds can have guns and not suck.
Fucking Epic.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
kid finds out he is magic && author discovers he can milk 4 books into 9 && author gets a divorce and hates women && author discovers he can write even more books without moving the plot along && author dies without finishing the story.
Robert Jordan's books redefined the level of crazy that I will accept from an author. They're fantastic writing, a wonderful, deep, involved storyline, but come ON, the length is way too self-indulgent and unnecessary. The story is nowhere near as complicated (or worthy) as, say, FOUR Lord of the Rings trilogies, but it's substantially longer. The sadness is that it is comparably well written -- length notwithstanding.
I'm currently using four of the books as monitor stands (I actually won't go so far as to use them as doorstops).
More importantly, though, this has changed the way I'll read connected books or watch TV shows. I fear the abandoned story line too much now, and I blame Robert Jordan. "Heroes", the TV show, was a similar letdown... I waited until "Lost" was finished, for fear of it falling into the same pit as "Heroes", and nearly did the same thing with "Battlestar Galactica".
Is there a name for this? Can we call it the "Robert Jordan" effect? -- the situation where you get too involved with an author or storyline and they just go on forever or (no disrespect) die?
And the expanding-storyline theme is amazing. Eight Harry Potter Movies? Really? Five Twilight movies? I love a good trilogy, and (other than the quality of the prequels) appreciate that the Star Wars trilogies are built so that you can watch the original without needing the rest to complete the story. Many authors have interwoven stories and worlds... How many books did Terry Pratchett write? Many of which made reference to one another, but at least they each had an individual story arc. The Ender's Game series is similar... Terry Brooks' series can be read in myriad configurations of trilogies and tetralogies.
ugh... the Jordan series is fantastic in many ways and I'm very glad to see it completed -- I hope the finale lives up to the series -- but please noone ever do this again, or at least give good warning so that we can avoid going down the path until it's complete.
A bunch of man-haters try to kill male magic users because they go crasy. One reincarnated guy get magic, picks up a harem and adds pool cleaner to the magic well. Meanwhile sniffing in disdain, clothing derumpled and beards being stroked fill the books while female chauvinism abounds.
Think I made it to book..six? seven? before failing to care.
I have to disagree, I specifically liked the series because it's as different from LotR as you can get while still being an epic fantasy.
Count the number of times the words "wizard" or "magic" appear in the books. Then go hunt down the amount of terrible, terrible, terrible songs and poetry. Jordan purposefully avoided the hyper-nerd stuff, and actually gave us a story with interesting, capable main characters, instead of a story where the "heroes" essentially stumble their way to victory because they're so utterly useless.
I know the "ordinary people extraordinary things" is appealing to some people, and art is always a subjective thing, so please don't take it as if I'm literally saying the books are awful--I know they're probably great (except for the poetry, that stuff was flat-out terrible and the subjective rule of art be damned), I just use hyperbole to make my points and personally didn't like them.
And if you didn't like LotR the same as me, you might like WoT.
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There will be a Mayan Apocalypse. The Mayan Apocalypse is not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning...
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I rather liked the magic system. Magic power comes in 3 varieties: The One Power divided into male and female parts, and "True" Power from the evil side which is so dangerous it's not used much and doesn't play much of a role. Each magic user has some mysterious upper limit on the amount of power they can wield, and it varies greatly by individual. Most people are of course unable to use any magic at all.
There's not much to say of the general plot. Very stock fantasy in many ways, which becomes very tiresome thanks to the length. At the start of the series, the past is a lost golden age of much greater power and knowledge than the present, the male part of the One Power is tainted since the end of that Age of Wonders, male mages are rare and not trusted, and are cut off from the power if the women catch them. 3 boys (really, just 1 boy, the Dragon Reborn who can wield more of the One Power than anyone else), and 2 girls from a completely ordinary village rise to become the great heroes who will save the world, spending the rest of the series running all over the world fighting evil and treachery sometimes by bluffing but usually by applying superior force, and collecting power, followers, knowledge, advice, scars, and honors, and trying to get the dozens of kingdoms to pull together and cooperate to fight evil with the favored method for accomplishing that last being to have the monarchs swear obedience or in the case of queens, love to the Dragon Reborn.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"