Blog Post: I hate James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

I hate James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

I really, really hate him. It wasn’t always like this. Back in 1990, when I was in junior high in Guam, I fell in love with the guy. That’s right. L-O-V-E, love. I was a nerd who spent a lot of time exchanging crappy old 50’s pulp paperbacks I picked up at yard sales for like 5 cents for nice shiny new fantasy novels in the local library’s trade-in section. You young ‘uns don’t know how much eBay went and fucked things up for you.

Anyway, I was there in the library and I come across this huge (I could barely wrap my pudgy twinkie coated hands around the thing) novel with that unforgettable cover art by Darrell K. Sweet. It wrapped around the whole book, some 670 pages, and when you opened it up, there was another unbelievable painting. It was beautiful. Now I know what they say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, but I’m not kidding, as soon as I saw this I was hooked. I immediately pulled “The Eye of the World” from the shelf and placed some silly Choose Your Own Adventure novelette in its place.

And lo and behold, right on the other side of the shelf was “The Great Hunt”. I brought the books home and started reading. What a world this guy had created, full of all the same things we had (economics, politics, differing social mores), but with all sorts of other stuff too (magic, monsters, adventure). It was populated by all sorts of people with all sorts of languages and customs. The characters felt more like people than the ones in Tolkien’s works, which had always felt to me like reading homework. These I couldn’t put it down.

I found “The Dragon Reborn” about a month later thinking it would be the last book, considering that the whole thing was about “The Dragon” being reborn. I was so excited to see how it would end. No such luck. After the third book came another. And another. One trilogy became two. Then three. Finally, 11 books and 18 years later, Wheel of Time fans still don’t know what happened at the end of the Third Age.

It got to the point where I was writing my own fan fiction on a role play site just to get by. Sadly, I must admit that my stories are no where near as engrossing as Jordan’s, and appreciation of them were limited to members of the old Wheel of Time Roleplay site. It was a poor substitute for the real thing. So we waited and waited and waited.

Then, on September 16, 2007, at the age of 58, James Oliver Rigney, Jr., better known to his fans as Robert Jordan, author of The Wheel of Time, died from cardiac amyloidosis.

I was devastated. I had waited for this man to finish a story I had loved for more than half my life and he up and croaked. I had feared this would happen since the rumors first started about his poor health. The time between chapters was getting longer and longer, and as each book came to an end, I kept thinking, “We’re not even at the Last Battle yet! How on Earth is he going to wrap this up in time?” Then, instead of finishing work on the last chapter, it was announced that he’d be working on 2 prequels to the series. I was incensed. I know this is callous beyond belief, but I wanted my ending. I wanted to see what Mr. Jordan intended for these characters when he started 2 decades ago.

Thankfully, Mr. Jordan didn’t leave without thinking of his fans. He had prepared enough notes for someone to take over. In 2008, the new author was Brian Sanderson. If you’ll go to his website at www.brandonsanderson.com, you’ll find his readthroughs of the entire series as prep to his work on the final book. It looked like he was set to do a great job continuing Mr. Jordan’s vision.

Having just read his first chapter on www.tor.com I’m skeptical that his prose will have the same impact as the first books. From what they’ve given us, his sentence structure is much more flowery than Jordan’s. I remember that Jordan’s was much more simple and easier to read. It really throws me off. I’m reserving judgment until the first part of A Memory of Light, The Gathering Storm hits shelves on November 3rd 2009.

Here’s hoping the 20 year lead up is worth it. We’ve got 3 more years of wait ahead.