What shall we do with the Wheel of Time?

[Stormbringer]

Interestingly enough, I think Jordan started writing WoT before I was even born, or shortly thereafter.

The first one was published in 1990. If I recall right he had started writing it some where in the latter half of the eightie. It might be.

[Stormbringer]

That's something that a really good writer (or Jordan with the Editor of Stupendous Might and Magnitude) would have done better; staged the showdowns so that the 'Al Thor and company thought they were facing the Dark One, but the readers could tell from fairly early on that it was just an underling and the real Power is only just stirring... It's called Dramatic Irony! It's a good thing.

I don't know about other but I did figure that out. When you pay attention to the little details and such there's more than enough evidence to see it.

[The Drunkard Kid]

I like the series (in fact, I've been reading Book 4 again, to pass the time on the train), but I think it should be ended, and soon. Neither I, nor Robert Jordan are getting any younger (but especially Robert Jordan), and I don't wanna have to read book 28.32 using a Ouija Board.

As to how to make it better: Kill off Egwene. Seriously, she adds nothing but blatant stupidity to the entire planet. If you try to think of the dumbest thing she could possibly do in any given situation, she'll completly embarass your stupid genes by doing something incomprehensibly dumber. Even if she has to break out a plot device ability to do so. Really, I'm 98% certain that the Shadow sent Halima over to make sure that no one interferes with Egwene, cause she's done more to help their cause with her bumbling, hypocritical arrogance than all the Forsaken put together.

Also, I'd have Rand and the Black Tower invade and loot the White Tower, leaving an empty husk for Egwene's forces to take over, while simultaneously gaining hundreds of ter'angreal and massive amounts of information.

[haas mark]

...What shall we do with the Wheel of Time?
Ear-lie in the mornin'?

Okay, so Wheel of Time: most people agree that it started out gang-busters, and then at some point between books 3 and 7 started to suck, move the overarching along with all the speed and grandure of a leporous sloth, and spending generally too much time with trite sexism or describing dresses, and not enough with inspiring wonder or blowing shit up.

What, hypothetically, would you do to save the series from itself? Or, since RJ is more or less unstoppable at this point, infintessimally less hypothetiaclly: should be done to salvage the series after (if) it's over: for movies, whatever.

...slit 'im in the gut with a rusty sabre...

Even as a fan of the Wheel of Time, I think he should just finish the damned series. Books 5 and 6 could be condensed into one book, if he were smart about it. I think about book 5 is the general consensus of the time when it starts to suck.

~ver

[Eleas]

Like hell. You have to read other books to get a remote fucking clue about whats going on (like with the Elves, for example.) LOTR makes references that only make sense if you've read the other books.

Precisely. Just like in the real world. One thing that made LotR work was its sense of interconnectedness with the rest of the world, something it shared with Star Wars. Jordan, of course, didn't understand this principle, and so fucked things up severely.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Tolkien was a language fetishist. He was among the cutting edge in the field of linguistics. And thus, the languages he created made sense. He also knew his history; Rohan may have been a bit of historical mish-mash, but it's well-brewed mish-mash.

In contrast, Jordan picks random words from existing languages, in the hopes that the reader is stupid enough to not notice. He creates a world without any sense of historical depth or plausibility, and the cultural references he makes are rambling and impossibly heavy-handed.

And the magic. Oh, yes, the magic. Let me go on the record as stating I still think D&D magic impossibly boring, but WoT actually managed to eclipse it. Use the old tiresome four elements (with a filler element for everything else), shake and stir, add the Holy Grail, and presto! you have a bunch of kindergarten children with nukes roaming around.

...and one or two of them are certifiable, too. Yet, for all their vast power, they are shallowly painted and seem mired in the same inertia that grips the story.

Jordan's world would have been worth knowing more about if it were original. But it isn't. It's all been done. The Aiel are ripoffs of Fremen, the Ogier hail from Thomas Covenant and Guy Gavriel Kay, the Dragon could have been photocopied from Zelazny's Changeling (and given a severe inferiority complex coupled with lobotomy), Shai'tan (the saddest among many sad name-rips) is a stand-in for every sneering Lord Foul-wannabe that ever cackled a badly-phrased threat, and the Trollocs are just plain Orcs. Add a neck-line here, some poorly written sex there, pour in five hundred pages of verbal diarrhea about characters unimportant to the plot. Zap it with 10,000,000 Volts and watch the Hamster Wheel of Time come to shambling life.

This thing should not be saved, not be salvaged. It's beyond repair and redemption. It should be shot into the sun but for the fact that it would surely be forcibly expelled. I suppose the smartest thing to do would be to bury it in somewhere in a distant desert and hope no one will ever find it again. Lest we all fall prey to its evil powers.