Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 992 -
Buy: Book/eBook
Five volumes into the Wheel of Time series, I find myself struggling more and more to pay close attention to all the details. The earlier novels were easier in that the number of subplots were very few and generally no more than a few chapters separated any bunching of each subplot. The narrative was relatively straight-forward and although the prose never was anything to write home about, enough interest was generated in the characters to make the first few novels at least bearable to read and on quite a few occasions, enjoyable.
However, by the fourth volume, The Shadow Rising, my interest began to waver. I noted in my previous commentary that I believed Jordan tried to cover too much, to explain more than what was vitally essential to the main plot of the series, that of the Dragon Reborn being readied for the upcoming Last Battle. Here in The Fires of Heaven, my complaints about the previous volume probably can be multiplied by at least a factor of ten. Although I recall enjoying this volume almost the same as the previous one when I first read it in 1997, a decade away from reading it has reminded me that time might have the ability to remove bad memories and to enhance the few positive ones that remained. The Fires of Heaven was at times a terrible mess of a novel to wade through. Read More »
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 336 -
Buy: Book/eBook
Epic Fantasy is in the midst of something of an identity crisis. See, mainstream readers love to lap up recognizable tales of valourous kitchen boys, big magic, elves, dwarves and warring kingdoms. Such novels sell like hotcakes, and publishing companies love them. And why not? We all grew up on it, didn’t we? Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist, Barbara Hambly, or Tad Williams — they built worlds unlike any we’d ever seen before. On the other hand, there are more critical fans who, perhaps, associate their love of Fantasy with an ever-expanding need to find works that push the boundaries of imagination, explore the issues of culture, politics and gender in our world through the lens of an imaginary universe where rules are different, where freedom and fairness might exist.
There have always been authors who push against these boundaries set on the subgenre by its legion of fans. Early in her career, Robin Hobb released the Farseer trilogy, which took the foundations built upon by Tad Williams and Robert Jordan and refined and redefined them, crafting a world and genre that was familiar, but spun the tropes (kitchen-boy-turns-king becomes bastard-prince-becomes-assassin; not an elf or dwarf in sight and conflicts that are cultural, rather than racial) in new, interesting ways. Going even further back, Terry Brooks revitalized Fantasy from its post-Tolkien doldrums by effectively re-telling modern Fantasy’s greatest tale, but, alongside him was Stephen Donaldson and his The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever trilogy, a work with similar roots to Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, but an entirely different interpretation and subversion of genre tropes. While pushing the genre forward isn’t entirely anathema to commercial success, it’s a rare few authors who have managed to capture lightning in a bottle with their daring works. Read More »
With each passing year, I find it harder to wrap my head around the fast-fading memory of a time when media was not, with its informational and emotional impact on our world, a graven image on the mountain top, mouth agape, roaring.
Before anyone gets the wrong impression, I agree with you. The internet is a wonderful thing. My twelve year old can gaze into the palm of her hand and “see” that eight miles to the west there is a frozen custard shop, that it’s open, and that her friends have arrived there. She has more access to insight and divination in the palm of her hand than King Solomon ever had. “Hey, dad. It’s going to snow on Friday.” Power on this scale would have made her my court magician in a different era.
But we all know there is a darker side to this coin.
Consulting with demons for insight often gets you tricked. Just the other day, my co-worker mistook a gag news article for the real deal and told the whole studio that the Pope had decided not to resign after all. That’s right, the pontiff was taking his hat back. And no matter what you believe about Julian Assange, it’s irrefutable fact that in the aftermath of the greatest military leak in history he was attacked and to a large part neutered by events (real or fabricated) that were scooped and fed to us world-wide. If I’m not mistaken, he’s still living in an embassy, barely out of reach from hands that would like to strangle him for good. Read More »
The second volume of Brandon Sanderson’s oh-crap-Tor-needs-someone-to-fill-the-hole-left-by-the-end-of-the-Wheel-of-Time series, The Stormlight Archives, now has a name and a release date.
Sanderson speaks a bit about the project and the title:
The Way of Kings was Kaladin’s book. He will have a lot to do in Book Two, of course, and you can expect some great sequences within his viewpoint. However, the flashback sequences in Book Two belong to Shallan. In my notes for the series, I had planned for Shallan’s book to be named after the tome she is given at the end of the first novel: The Book of Endless Pages. On Roshar, that is a book of knowledge that can never be completed—because people should always be learning, studying, and adding what they’ve learned to it.
[…]
Lots of people weighed in with their feelings on Stormlight Two. For a while, I toyed with titles that still had “book” in them, as I liked how that fit with Shallan’s scholarly nature. The Book of Lies was one of these, as was The Book of Dusk and Dawn. (As a side note, being a fan of Magic: The Gathering makes naming things harder sometimes, since the creative team over at Wizards has named A LOT of cards—and the titles I think of sometimes sound too much like things they’ve done. That’s why Book of Fact and Fiction was dead the moment it occurred to me.)
[…]
In the last few months, the title that has really been sticking with me is Words of Radiance. (Admittedly, “radiance” is a synonym for “light,” but at least it’s a step away.) With “words,” it still has a slight tie to my original desire to have “book” in the title, and I believe it’s significantly meaningful for people who have read the first novel. It also works very well for reasons that I can’t tell you now without spoiling the story.
Hey, it’s not cover art (or even news about who the artist will be), but we all pathetically salivate for even the smallest drop of information about our favourite authors, don’t we? Words of Radiance is set for a tentative November, 2013 release.
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 1008 -
Buy: Book/eBook
In my last commentary, I commented about how one of the major reasons why I decided to do these re-reading projects was to learn more about myself as a reader and critic and to explore how my takes on various novels had changed over an intervening period of several years. For the first three Wheel of Time novels, my overall attitude had shifted only slightly. I still liked the first book, The Eye of the World, better than the second and third volumes, The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn. What I liked and why, however, had changed, sometimes drastically.
In particular, I found even the first three volumes to contain several annoying features. Among them, average, pedestrian prose, laziness in using quirks and invented stereotypes to describe characters and imagined cultures, and the beginnings of what author/critic Adam Roberts has referred to as “decor-porn.” Despite these annoying narrative features, I was able to enjoy those three volumes as long as I focused on viewing the books as a sort of quest narrative. If I had devoted more time to looking at the numerous “prophecies” and their ilk and tried to predict as-yet-untold events rather than concentrating on the story at hand, I suspect I would have grown bored quicker than I have. Read More »
