Important Information

Title: The Wheel of Time, comprising (so far):

The Eye of the World

The Great Hunt

The Dragon Reborn

The Shadow Rising

The Fires of Heaven

Lord of Chaos

A Crown of Swords

The Path of Daggers

Winter’s Heart

Crossroads of Twilight

A New Spring

Author: Robert Jordan (and perhaps others)

Publisher: Tor/Tom Doherty Associates

Cover art: whatever  

Length: 8,704 pages in hardcover and counting!

Rating

4 out of 7 (just imagine this for a second… just imagine what people would say if all eleven-plus books had been published all at the same time! Now you know where our review is going.)

We feel compelled to make some sort of statement regarding The Wheel of Time. We’re what, eleven books into the thing now? And counting!! After all, one can hardly go to a bookstore of any size and not see Robert Jordan’s name plastered across all of one shelf. That sort of bookshelf dominance demands comment from anyone claiming to try to elevate the genre.

But this is not going to be a regular review… more of a commentary. And it’s going to have to serve as our review for all of the Wheel books up through New Spring.

Your question: Have you read all of the books?

We answer: Why yes, we have. Every single word no matter how many times it was repeated.

Your question: But you’re not going to review each of the books?

We answer: God no, we’re not.

Your question: Aren’t you at least going to compare some other critical review.

We answer: No, we’re not. I mean, what can we or they possibly say to sway you at this point?

Those quick answers will tell you quite a lot about how we feel towards Jordan’s Wheel. We’re going to move on about why we made these choices in a moment. But for the review part—our review will parody the colossal, glacial, and interminable Wheel of Time by being composed of only three sentences:

1. Jordan’s writing is not bad—purely from that perspective many elements and some books probably deserve a rating of a 5 under our system.
2. The series’ idiotic length has actively harmed the sub-genre of fantasy and the genre of speculative fiction as a whole and made it sort of a laughingstock in the mainstream critical world thus earning it a rating of 3.
3. We elected to average these two ideas together and award this mess a 4—which is really sort of a surrender on our part because we don’t know what else to do with this unholy thing.

Good then. Now that the review is over with, let us tell you what we think of the Wheel from the perspective of how it affects the genre.

There is no work of literature, no author, and really no subject, that can support the number of pages Wheel already(!) is much less how many more it’s going to be when they finally nail Jordan’s coffin shut. There is nothing, anywhere, in the entire realm of the written languages of any country or any period of time where a work of literature is considered “great” and is the kind of length that Wheel has already(!) become. Here are a number of works and series of books who are notorious for interminable length. Are any of them longer than Wheel?  

Not The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Not any of the history series chronicling entire world wars.

Not the combined works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Not the complete works of Shakespeare.

Nothing by Chaucer, Milton, or even the prolific Charles Dickens—an author who got paid by the word!

Not Durant’s History of Civilization.

Nothing by the great philosophers Plato, Hume, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Kant… or even all of them combined together!

Not War and Peace.

Not The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Bible, or The Koran or even all of them combined!

All of these works are dwarfed by the words pouring forth from the pregnant pen of Jordan.

Are you getting our point yet? One of the unforgivable, immutable laws of great literature is its accessibility:  it must not be so forbiddingly long that people are unwilling to pick it up and actually get around to reading it. For God’s sake, Jordan Fan, what could be so important for him to say that it’s going to take well over ten-thousand  pages to get the point across!!!

Now, Jordan Fan, consider for a moment: when you have children of your own or otherwise want to introduce Wheel to someone 10-20 years hence, what are you going to do? How are you going to go about it? Say you want to introduce your buddy John to Jordan’s opus. “Why John,” you say, “Jordan is one of the best. I highly recommend you read him. Here you go… here are the first thirteen volumes for you to read. Let me know when you’re done and I’ll hook you up with the rest.”

Do you think John’s going to be happy about that? Do you think he’ll thank you? Do you think there’s the tiniest quantum chance that John’s going to actually begin reading the thing much less finish it?

Our point is that even if Jordan’s stuff were the most superb thing ever written in the history of all writing, there’s a very small likelihood that it can survive due to its length. Jordan Fan needs to come to grips with that idea.

And, we’re going to have to pause to mention this, despite the fanboys all screaming on the blogs about how slowly things have moved lately in the Wheel, Jordan’s most recent publication—New Spring—is a  prologue to the very first book!!!

Clearly, Jordan and Tor are exploiting you. They are doing this because they know you’re going to buy the things and that you have too much invested in them now to stop easily. The Wheel will not end until either Jordan dies or buying interest slackens to the point where the publisher gives up and lets it end.

[Incidentally, we feel like there’s a strong likelihood that Jordan is no longer penning all of these novels but rather provides ideas that other writers fill in. Things are moving too unevenly, characters behaving too erratically, and plots moving in too uncoordinated a fashion for it to be the work of one author. That being the case, even Jordan’s death will probably only herald a bunch of posthumous publications “based upon notes left by the author.”]

Aside from the absurd length, the writing is okay. Though it inarguably has very pedestrian moments and—overburdened by the series’ size—what once would be harmless descriptions of climate and clothing suddenly becomes onerous and irritating to the reader. Is Rand interesting? Yes, he truly is an interesting, evolving character of depth who we like reading about. In fact, chopping the Wheel into only those sections dealing specifically with Rand leaves quite a compelling work—and it’s only about 3-4 books long (currently) instead of eleven and counting! Are there other moments that are interesting? Yes, early on there was some stuff about Perrin and Matt that were interesting. Even some stuff about Aes Sedai were of marginal interest before they degenerated into some chauvinist’s idea of a women’s political structure paralyzed by feminine indecision, gossip, and jealousy. Jordan’s concepts of lost and regained magic, while done many, many times before, were at least going over old ground in interesting ways. It’s not high literature to the point where we’d have given it anything better than a 5… but that’s a pretty good score from us. It’s not devoid of merit. But it has grown and grown until it acts like an out-of-control tumor on the publishing world of speculative fiction. It needs radical surgery to be healthy again.

The Wheel of Time is acting on the genre like a poison. It’s when these kinds of works turn in to soap operas that all well-educated people begin to think that speculative fiction has nothing of merit to offer. They know as well as we do that nothing can be good enough to warrant this kind of length. So they avoid it. And speculative fiction takes another step into the ghetto that the rest of the reading world regards it to be—particularly the fantasy elements of speculative fiction. This is very, very sad since there’s some very good stuff to be read here. Robert Jordan—through a discipline of strict self-interest—has ensured that many readers will never experience what other, better authors in the genre have to offer.

The Wheel has replaced comic books. Comic books never end, their characters rarely grow or change, final resolution never takes place. For those readers out there who enjoy soap operas and comic books equally, then Wheel will satisfy you as nothing else will. You’re not reading these books to find out what ultimately happens—you’re reading it to find out what happened in this issue. You’re reading them only because they’re familiar and safe and they’ll be regularly published for you like clockwork. The only other reason to read these books is if some enterprising publisher published a condensed version of those sections dealing only with Rand. This might be a worthwhile read… assuming that Wheel ever ends, which it shows no signs of doing.

If you’ve ever noticed that the thing is eleven volumes long and still growing with no end in sight then you’ve answered this question already. There are better writers in the fantasy genre. Better works of literature in the realm of speculative fiction, and even if you like certain parts of stuff in Wheel, you’re going to be punished for those likes by the unbearable length of the series as a whole. There is every reason not to get involved with this thing. Like living your own life for one. Like not enriching exploitive publishers for another.