Eye of the World. Image courtesy of Tor Publishing.
Well guys, we have important news to discuss. Not about Trump, or coronavirus or climate change. About the Wheel of Time finally getting a freakin’ series order! I don’t understand why the United Nations isn’t discussing this.
Let me set the stage. It was 1996 and I was in the 5th grade. For most of my life we’d had this enormous book sitting on a shelf in our house and all I really knew about it was that it had this cool cover art (see above). It appeared to be about a knight and a woman on a horse. 5th grade is around the time when little aspiring nerds start getting into epic fantasy lit, and I was no different. I threw open The Eye of the World and I started reading. And, basically, I never stopped.
The Eye of the World was published in 1990, the first book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy epic. Eventually, the series would conclude in 2013 after 14 installments and 4.4. million words. Jordan himself died before he could finish it, and the last 3 books were written by Brandon Sanderson. Had he not passed away, I suspect Jordan never would have finished the series as he had become too bogged down by his own mythology.
For non-nerds, the Wheel of Time is best described as a Tolkien rip-off. It’s about a couple of country bumpkins living in an isolated farming community (suspiciously like… the Shire) who are enlisted by a wizard to go on an epic fantasy quest to defeat the embodiment of evil who lives inside a fire mountain (suspiciously like… Sauron). Along the way, they are dogged by magical black-cloaked figures who ride horses and inspire fear just by looking at you (suspiciously like… Nazgul). Instead of ogres there are Ogiers. And instead of trolls and orcs there are Trollocs (suspiciously like… someone just combined the word troll with orc).
And yet, it never feels derivative. Jordan, through some alchemy of the craft, possessed this preternatural gift for world-building. He took Tolkien’s ideas and the basic structure of the narrative, but he built something unbelievably immersive and compelling from those bones, something what was in all fairness wholly his own. The Wheel of Time books will grab you, pull you into their world and not let go… until Book 7 or so. And that’s a testament to Jordan’s skill. He built such a fully formed, textured and imaginative world that readers wanted to stay in it, and revisit it.
Since 1996, every few years or so I will pick up Eye of the World and think to myself “Oh I’ll just read a bit to kill time.” And then before I know it I’m in Book 4, reading 15 hours a day and anticipating the next book even though I already know what happens. That’s how good it is. Book 7 is the last one that can be charitably described as good, however. After that, something befell Robert Jordan which seemingly gets all popular fantasy writers: his editors stopped telling him no.
From Books 1 to 6 (and maybe 7, and a little bit of 8) these characters that we loved so much were on a clearly defined journey, inside an exquisitely constructed fantasy world, and we cared deeply about them and the journey they were on, and every new corner of the world they explored delighted us. But then everything just fell off a cliff, coinciding with the immense popularity of the series. Suddenly the editors at Tor found themselves unable to tell Robert Jordan “Perhaps you should cut this subplot or this character.” And the books began to get longer and longer, and became filled with more and more new characters and more useless subplots while the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of narrative threads Jordan had already created just dangled.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s exactly what happened to George R. R. Martin. The quality of the writing, and the characterizations, suffered. Suddenly everyone was pulling their braids. And Rand became a very disturbingly weird person. And then there was an entire book about wheat that had gone off. 1,000 pages which I kept reading hoping it would build to something - but in the end, it was just weevils. Jordan got stuck, because the world and the narrative he created were too big and too expansive and he couldn’t bring it to a close. And he had so much clout that there was no editor who could step in and say “Sorry man, this is shit. We need to cut it.” So we got it all. Unfiltered. And raw. And it was terrible.
This angered me immensely. Because the first 6 books had been so good and promised so much, and then he couldn’t deliver. After he died, Sanderson finished the series but it was generally unsatisfying. Robert Jordan knew how he wanted to end it - and it would have been a great ending! If he had done it a little sooner.
But those first 6 books are magic. Really. They epitomize the fantasy genre. They are not challenging or graphic, like Song of Fire and Ice. They are straightforward Good vs Evil stuff in an immaculately realized world. And they have long been thought to be unfilmable.
Why? Well, until recently creating a totally fictional fantasy world of that scale and depth was beyond the abilities of our modern dream-makers. But Lord of the Rings was proof of concept. And Game of Thrones set down the template for developing a series/world that went beyond 3 rather smallish books, into a deep and complex mythology. Now they knew it could be done, and that there was a huge global audience for it. But there was a legal problem.
Jordan had sold the film rights to a shady company called Red Eagle Entertainment and in 2015 they made a hilariously awful pilot for a Wheel of Time show that was basically just meant to ensure they retained the rights, since they knew this property was gonna be hot after the success of Game of Thrones. And they were right. I don’t know how much Amazon ultimately paid them, but I bet it was a lot. Like “fuck you, move to Monaco” money.
So Amazon acquired the rights and they are developing the series as we speak. Does this inspire confidence in me? Not really, because the reason I signed up for Amazon Prime a couple years ago was to see what they did with The Man in the High Castle and it was really, really bad. But with a huge budget, and a bottomless well of IP, they might be able to pull it off.
It looks like they are going to combine The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt into one 8-episode season, so roughly four episodes for each book. I think this is a mistake and it might turn out terribly. But I am open to the possibility of being pleasantly surprised. If it was me, I’d do one season for each of the first 6 books and then summarize the last 8 in one season since that was a bunch of garbage. But anyway, I just hope we get to see the line of Trollocs charge over the rolling hills outside Shadar Logoth, after Mat finds the dagger. That to me was the quintessential image of the books, and I hope they do it. But I doubt they will.
And that’s the other downside of these fantasy epics. Millions of nerd-fans have already formed their ideas of what it should be or what their favorite parts are. And, by God Amazon, if you don’t live up to them then I hope you burn in the fires of Shayol Ghul. Regardless, I am super hyped and cannot wait for this series to air!
