Skip to main content

The end of the Wheel of Time

Well, there are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the wheel of time, but book 14 was AN ending.  This article is about the nerds that understand what the heck that means.  (I warn you again later, but there are a couple of minor spoilers, mainly in noting what does NOT get resolved.)

Okay, so Robert Jordan began publishing the Wheel of Time in 1990.  He passed away after the 11th book, and Brandon Sanderson (of Mystborn fame, among other novels) was brought on to finish the series.  He wrote the last 3 books, and they are among the best in the series.  I'm very glad that Sanderson wrote books 12 and 13, and I'm glad he wrote the chapter The Last Battle for book 14 ... but I wish that Robert Jordan had written another half a book afterwords, and I hope to explain why here.

For those that love the Wheel of Time series, Jordan created characters that we often know better than our closest friends.  I can predict Perrin or Matt's decisions easily, and I felt like I intimately understood Rand's madness.  Egwene and Nynaeve, Moraine and Suan, Lan and Gawain ....  These are close, personal people to me.  That's because of how Jordan wrote.  He was quite willing to spend hundreds of pages on side stories, and (according to his interviews) he thought that selfishness was important -- to understand how a character acts selfishly, you have to understand that character's motivations.  Rand wanted his identity, Matt wanted freedom, Perrin wanted stability, Nynaeve wanted comptence and acceptance, Lan wanted to fulfill his duty ....  The great thing about Jordan is that he never left it that simple.  Almost no characters were painted with brushes that wide.

With Jordan's style, though, came long, long lapses into areas that the plot of story did not necessarily need.  Sometimes we would get lost in wonderful details, a few times for almost the entire span of a book.  Though that was fine by me (I've read most of the books ten times or so), he felt the need to apologize after one of his forays.  For those that were looking for a swashbuckling time, a la Duncan or Eddings or even Dumas, Jordan's pacing was all off.  But boy ... he created a dazzling, granulated world that you could easily imagine.

And then the (to me) unthinkable happened, and Jordan died.  I was much more bothered by that than I probably had a right to be -- I didn't even know Jordan was a pen name, for instance, and I had certainly never met him.  But it was like a whole world died, and it hurt that the talent to create those worlds had slipped away.

I was ambivalent when Sanderson was appointed the replacement, but his first WoT book made me a convert.  As he noted, he didn't try to replicate Jordan's style, but instead to stay true to the characters.  Except for some regretable psychological jumps ("[Character] suddenly knew s/he would never [blank] again"), it was well written, and we were off to the races.  Sanderson had a whole world to work with, and a ton of plotlines to shut down, so he worked in a slash-and-burn frenzy, resolving mysteries by the dozen.  If you have read Mystborn (or, better, The Way of Kings), you understand that Sanderson IS a swashbuckling writer.  Matt was funnier, Rand was darker, Perrin stopped whining .... It was fast and grand.  I think he probably did a better job, at that point in the story, than Jordan would have.

That pace reached its crescendo in the chapter The Last Battle, a 200 page mega-ride where anybody and everybody was fair game for death, maiming, betrayal ....  Tolkien had Frodo make a large point that nobody comes out unscathed from a war (as Tolkien knew intimately from WWI), and it appears Sanderson took that lesson to heart.

But then the battle ends, and ... so does the book.  There is a relatively perfunctorily epilogue, and the world is closed.

What?

If Sanderson took a page out of Tolkien in how to write the last battle, and its importance, he somehow missed that the hobbits have to retake the Shire.  (As a partial mitigation, Peter Jackson didn't understand, either.) It made me think of how Stephen King often has had trouble ending books -- both he and Sanderson tell wonderful stories, full of unexpected happenings, but the ends ... Myeh.  (To be fair, both have works that have effective endings.)  I was looking forward to seeing the aftermath of the last battle.  [A few spoilers here]  What happened with Aviendha's kids?  How extensive was the Breaking?  Did the Aiel and the Tinker's find the Song?  What about Faile's place in the lineage of Saldaea?  Will damane continue in Fortuna's kingdom? (I could list dozens of such questions that were not resolved.)  And how about multi-book plot lines that got a paragraph or so in the end -- how Alivia would "help Rand die," how Min had to solve the final problems of the battle, the importance of Moraine's prescence there, Logain's crown ... Again, I could mention many things.  Either we don't know the answers, or we got perfunctory answers.

As far as pacing goes, I get it.  And another 10 chapters would probably get the same cold shoulder that many give Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Frodo when they face down Sharky.  But the world Jordan created deserved the closure, and I don't think it got its due.

That doesn't mean I don't like the last book -- I do.  A lot.  And I don't want another book -- the main conflicts are resolved, and I don't want secondary conflicts just for the excuse to give details.  But I would not be against an expanded edition, or several extra chapters released only online, or something like that.

One good thing about the Wheel of Time being over is that Sanderson can turn to The Way of Kings again.  I think that is his best book so far, and he plans the scope of it to be similar to the Wheel of Time.  I'm hooked.

What do you think?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Finding facts and data about COVID-19

It's easy to find thoughts on COVID-19, but hard to parse through it all.  This series is my attempt to give my view of the state of knowledge about COVID-19, as of late July and early August  through late 2020. Here are the entries (these will become links as I post the others): Finding facts and data about COVID-19 (this one) Why COVID-19 is much worse than the seasonal flu Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining The path to vaccines To wear a mask or not Deaths and long-term impacts Economic and secondary impacts Safely co-existing Bots and divisiveness Leadership You need to find reputable sources for data.  People are rightly skeptical of what they see online.  In fact, the World Health Organization has declared that, beyond the pandemic, there is an Infodemic, which is “a surge of information about COVID-19 that has made it hard for people to know which news and guidance about the virus is accurate.” If you are actually interested in how to find the best new...

Why COVID-19 is MUCH worse than the seasonal flu

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means ...

Apostrophes

A short rant -- why can't people correctly use apostrophes?   Heck, let's simplify: Why don't people use apostrophes AT ALL? I understand if you sometimes flub on "its" and "it's" .... It's a difficult distinction to make.   But the difference between "were" and "we're"?   They don't even sound the same! My guess is that this development is a confluence of a few forces: (1) Punctuation is not viewed to be important anymore, even by some teachers; (2) it takes an extra stroke to type an apostrophe on an iPhone (and several if you are using the old texting method); and (3) internationalization via the internet has made it more likely to see non-native speakers' work. Correctly using the language is not that difficult, and the rules are not really onerous. Though we shouldn't shoot for perfection, I think caring about how we communicate might increase online civility a touch ... and heaven knows it's nee...