RSSBound to the Wheel
September 18th, 2007 | View Comments
Author Robert Jordan died this weekend of a rare blood disorder.
I was a huge fan of the Wheel of Time series for many years and actually credit it, and the extensive online communities that grew up around it, with helping me cling to sanity during a particularly trying period in my life. There are still traces of that period scattered about. My AIM name, for one, is still the name I bore when I roamed the web as an Aes Sedai of the Blue Ajah.
I abandoned the series and the communities a long time ago, partly because I no longer needed fantasy escapism to keep sane and partly because I was disillusioned with the series. Each subsequent book somehow contained both more convolutions and less plot. Major characters disappeared for hundreds of pages, if not entire books, while minor characters kept being introduced and re-introduced with great abandon. The last book of the series that I read was book 9, Winter’s Heart. I’d always had it in the back of my head that I would return to the series once it had a confirmed end and give it a proper read from the very beginning.
Now that RJ’s gone, I feel almost like I’ve lost an estranged friend.
Yvonne posted this on September 18th, 2007 @ 9:56pm in Life, Miscellaneous, News/Politics | Permalink to "Bound to the Wheel"
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2. Yvonne » September 18th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Tell me about it, sis. (And for those not in the know, Elenita isn’t actually my sister. The fact that we often refer to each other as “sis” is another relic from the aforementioned days.)
The buzz I’ve seen on the web is that the series will be finished, though. RJ apparently left behind notes and audio with the whole story. His wife (and editor, apparently) is rumored to be the one to finish the book. The working title is A Memory of Light, which seems…sadly appropriate.
3. Elenita » September 19th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Awww, very appropriate.
I’ll probably read A Memory of Light at some point. But as classless as it is to admit it, I suspect that I (and his wife, for that matter) will be setting myself up for disappointment. All the notes and audio in the world can’t give his wife his prose and voice. Even if she was his editor.
The best we can hope is that the last book brings closure and is a comfort during mourning. Especially for her.
1. Elenita » September 18th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I found out last night. I’m still unsure how I feel about the series never being finished, but I’m kinda amused that all those roleplaying sites never even crossed my mind. I really do think, on some level, that I thought the giant, unwieldy creation RJ brought into the world would just go on forever.
And did you and I really meet each other eight years ago on one of those sites? It seems so unreal, so unlike who we are now. We both outgrew our characters, I think, much to our credit.