Twenty years have passed since I was unwittingly sucked in to The Wheel of Time series. Twenty years. I didn’t even like the first book. After I finished it, I said to the friend who recommended it, “It’s a cheap Tolkien ripoff. He’s got orcs and Nazgul and Ents. Worse yet, one of the biggest, baddest villians was killed by the talking tree, and the tree killed him so easily that I don’t know how I can take the books seriously.” That was back in college. I went on to law school, got married, divorced, almost married, married, had a daughter, started a job, changed jobs, quit, started working for myself...basically, what one would expect from twenty years of life. My friend did convince me, though, back in the Fall of 1993 when he got me to read The Eye of the World as a college freshman (because of course college freshman don’t have enough to read), to try The Great Hunt. I found that one entertaining, though it was clear that the series was written for the comprehension level of young adults or people with limited mental capabilities – the endless repetition, the awful descriptions and the excessive use of the cheap device of using internal thoughts to explain things to the reader were all in evidence. I didn’t really expect much more of a fantasy book, though. Aside from Tolkien, almost all fantasy and science fiction that I had previously encountered seemed to be written at a young adult reading level (C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, the Dragonlance books, Orson Scott Card, the Gord the Rogue series by Gary Gygax). I ignored the flaws of the work to let Jordan’s story unfold, and by the end of The Great Hunt I was interested. He also seemed to be writing the books at a fast clip, ensuring that what was at the time supposed to be an 8-book series (if I remember correctly) would be done by, oh, 1999 at the latest.

As plot-driven books, Books 2 through 6 were pure dynamite. Jordan left clues throughout the books as to what would happen, between Min’s viewings, the Prophecies of the Dragon and sometimes just a carefully placed word or phrase. He then had the tension that he had built up throughout each book resolve in a huge climactic battle or struggle at the end, each one of which brought his world closer to its epic Last Battle.

As the pace of the books and the quality seemed to ebb, I had that curiosity that makes one want to know the ultimate resolution. What would happen? How would it all play out? Was this person or that person a Darkfriend? Where was Demandred hiding? Who killed Asmodean? I realized, around 1999, that there were entire websites with lots of this information, theories compiled by people who read the books multiple times and picked over every word. This coincided with starting my first real job, a job that demanded roughly 60 hours a week on average, but at which I could find myself sitting and doing nothing for two or three hours at a time during the day on at least two or three days a week. I found wotmania that way, back before people could log on. If you wanted to send a theory, you sent a “name under which you want the theory posted”. Although I went to all sorts of other crazy websites to stave away boredom, I came back to wotmania about once a month or so, and then finally wrote a theory or two. “Attribute it to ‘The Voice of Lews Therin’”, I wrote in the email (was it to Vercingetorix? I think it was; it’s been so long even since that that I don’t really remember well).

That’s how, later on, when the message boards started, I chose that screen name. It was just about being consistent. I only went to the website rarely, and mostly for theories, until 2001. Then, in an effort to stem constant shopping on amazon.com (which failed anyway), I started to participate in the message board more actively, and by 2002 I participated in my first gathering.

I don’t think anyone discussed the series at that first gathering. It was really just a great opportunity to meet the sort of people who would read Wheel of Time in the first place – smart, sort of geeky (or maybe more than sort of) people who were, more often than not, very interesting.

This does get back to The Wheel of Time. It is a reflection of the skill of Robert Jordan at coming up with a fantastic story that it attracted the quality of people that it did. It didn’t just attract their attention, either. It held it, for decades, as the story dragged on without any final resolution. That’s a damn good story.

Of course, it was just at this point that the series plummeted in quality. Each book seemed to be a greater disappointment than the previous one. Crossroads of Twilight was a book that never needed to be written. It almost seemed like Jordan was just fucking around with his readers, intentionally not advancing the plotline to milk the series for all it was worth. And then we found out Jordan was dying, and he died without finishing the series.

I think that Brandon Sanderson did the best with what he was given, and I think he was the right choice to finish the series. The author was dead, and someone needed to wrap up an overly long series quickly to keep the fans from quitting the series. So much had happened to discredit the series since its high point, Lord of Chaos, which had come out in 1994 (back when he was putting out a book a year, and they were the best ones of the series). It wasn’t about finding the person who might best capture Jordan’s “voice” because his “voice” was never his strong point. It was the story, and Sanderson wrote at a breakneck pace and delivered good light action. Perhaps someone else could have mimicked Jordan’s style better, but I personally had had enough of endless dress descriptions and cheap clichés. I would rather see the series ended and done with as quickly as possible.

The first part of the trilogy finished by Sanderson was good, on balance. It resolved a lot of plotlines and moved the story forward, and the pacing seemed “right” when judged by the standards of early Jordan novels (the good ones). The second was a disaster. The pacing was off, and plotlines were ended in an abrupt and sloppy fashion. Stories that had stretched over books were disposed of in a line or two, as though the tension built up over those books was just a waste of the reader’s time. It warned me that the final book would probably involve more of the same.

It did. The final book had the same jerking pace, and characters who, despite being very wooden and static in their interactions, had become familiar to readers and beloved to many, had to vie for space in the book with people who never mattered at all. It reminded me of all the problems that plagued the later books of the series.

At the same time, it provided the final resolution. I had low expectations for the book, and perhaps as a result, it met them. There were glimmers, here and there, of the former books and Jordan’s sense of the epic. Oddly, it was when Lan was getting ready to charge a huge Trolloc army at Tarwin’s Gap early in the book that I felt it the strongest. The parallels to the first book were strong, and although I’ll never know who wrote the scene, it reminded me of what I liked about the series as a whole. After that, the book got very tedious – how many ways can you describe Trollocs attacking? – and nothing of interest happened for a very long period of time. No plotlines were resolved early on, no one died who mattered. It wasn’t until the bloated Chapter 37 that anyone important died, and even then, the only significant deaths in the book on the side of good were Egwene, Gawyn and Siuan. Everyone else who died was an “extra”, so to speak.

I think that if Jordan had been in charge, he might have handled the pacing better. Even so, it’s not clear that he would have, given that he botched the pacing, more or less, for Books 8 through 11 of the series. He put in too many people, bogged the series down too much and made the end result less elegant than it might otherwise have been. Worse yet, because Sanderson had to finish the series after the author’s death, the end result is one step removed from what it might have been.

To paraphrase the final words of The Wheel of Time, it might not be the end that people had hoped for, but it was an ending. A commitment of 20 years, which tangentially lead to great friendships with an entire community of interesting people, is concluded. I think I’ll sit out the next “epic” fantasy series until it’s done in retrospect, but I don’t regret having spent time on Robert Jordan. Thanks, Dan, for pestering me to read the series.