first impressions
Okay, so I’ve started The Eye of the World, the first Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan. After a brief prologue, which mentions the Nine Rods of Dominion — anything like the Nine Rings of Power Sauron gave to men? — I turn to a map that shows part of a large continent, with an ocean to the west and a large north-south mountain range marking the eastern boundary of the map. Like the maps of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, in other words. The story proper begins with the comment that memories become legend, and legend becomes myth, which, substituting “history” for “memories,” is a close paraphrase of a comment we find in Tolkien. We’re told that the story takes place in the Third Age of the world, just as The Lord of the Rings does.
The first chapter is set in a place that’s near the ocean, but not right on it — overlay a map of Middle-Earth on Jordan’s map and the Shire would be just slightly north of Two Rivers. One notable feature of the landscape is the Mountains of Mist, presumably not to be confused with the Misty Mountains in Tolkien’s world. We meet characters in Two Rivers who comment on the strangeness of people in the not-too-distant town of Taren Ferry, in exactly the way that people of the Shire talk about folks from Bree. And all of Two Rivers is excited about an imminent festival at which fireworks are promised, in precisely the way that, at precisely the same point in The Lord of the Rings, the residents of Hobbiton await Bilbo’s birthday party, at which fireworks are promised.
Soon there arrives a strange cloaked man, who, it is speculated, could be a Warder who lives in the north, fighting forces of evil. Might those Warders be anything like the Rangers of the North in Tolkien, who also work to keep evil at bay?
Sigh. Okay, I know that Jordan’s fictional world will diverge from Tolkien’s, but why in the world doesn’t he start by at least making an effort to differentiate his creation from Middle-Earth? This is like Stephen Donaldson all over again. I’ll keep going, but good grief, how annoying.
I actually put off reading Jordan for a couple years because I was so annoyed by the blatant rip-offs in that map. “Mountains of Mist”? “Mountains of Dhoom”? And there’s more to come – you’ll hit some pretty obvious homages to the Nazgul and the Orcs before you’re much further along, and the narrative arc of the first book bears more than a passing resemblance to the pre-Rivendell half of Fellowship of the Ring.
That said, the Wheel of Time isn’t The Sword of Shannara (the most blatant LOTR rip-off in all of recorded literary history), and I think you’ll find that the Tolkien homages fade into the background as the story progresses, and that Jordan does have a lot of originality in him. But he’s definitely working more in the footsteps of the Master than, say, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire or Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (to pick my two favorite recent high-fantasy sagas) …
— Ross Douthat · Jun 13, 10:48 PM · #
Do yourself a favor and stop reading now. The story goes on to ripoff the Bible, Dune, and Star Wars. The plotline becomes so fractured it is difficult to keep up with any single storyline. One of the few original concepts Jordan put in was this “World of Dreams” junk that is so boring and meaningless. Jordan takes the reader the this dream world with frustratingly increasing frequency. It actually caused me to put the series down on the fifth book.
— Dan · Jun 14, 05:01 AM · #
The single most annoying thing with the series is that virtually ALL the characters are irrationally stubborn, headstrong and bitchy.
— Jesper · Jun 14, 05:26 AM · #
I had heard that the series slags a bit around the fifth book or so, but I rather enjoyed the sixth book. The Tolkienisms peter off significantly by the end of the first book, and I don’t see much of a problem with originality after that (I haven’t read Dune, though. Dan, are you talking about the parts in the Aiel Waste?).
I will say it is a very leisurely series, to put it charitably. I’m reading Glen Cook’s Black Company stories right now, and there was a situation he described in about a page, which I realized would have been an entire chapter by Jordan. The flip side of that is that everything is very evocative; every part of the world gets its own culture and situations, right down to architecture, fashion, and modes of speech.
The frequent female nudity often seems a bit gratuitous, however.
— Blar · Jun 14, 06:19 AM · #
Also, Warders turn out to be quite a bit different than Rangers in concept.
— Blar · Jun 14, 06:21 AM · #
man alan. you’re tempting the indwelling of the nerds with this post. a few comments
1) unlike some, i don’t think jordan is very original or compelling as a world-builder. not only are the geopolitics stock, but they lack verisimilitude.
2) the strength in the early part of the series is plotting and the inevitable but satisfying emergence of rand as the messiah figure.
3) i’d say that the book really started dropping in quality for me after #2, and i stopped at #6. jordan seems to have lost control of the plot threads, and
4) as a commenter above observed the characters didn’t seem to be developing much. jordan claimed that his female characters were all based in some way on his wife. i doubt i’m the only one who was wondering how his wife felt about this admission to the general public.
5) mad props for jordan for opening up a clear and obvious marketplace for tolkien-clones who are a step above terry brooks and david eddings level of quality, but, here are my favs for fantasy authors right now
a) george r. r. martin of course. i would say that has pulled off, so far, what jordan was attempting with somewhat better execution. the world building is better (though somewhat derivative), the characters more multi-textured, and martin hasn’t lost total control of the plotting yet (even bets though that we’ll look to book 4 of his series as the beginning of the end).
b) r. scott baker. the main negative is that his books are somewhat overwritten, but the world-building is incredible. baker even interjects science fantasy elements seamlessly into a high fantasy. the prince of nothing series sometimes reads like the warlord chronicles by bernard cromwell, and some of the evil is just really f**king sick.
c) the monarchies of god would be my dark horses. less well known than the other two, but paul kearney’s series are written with economy and have excellent plotting. the world building is sufficient, though the brevity of each book makes the characters a bit less multi-dimensional than you might want.
— razib · Jun 14, 06:48 AM · #
Alan,
I’d have to concur with Ross and Razib. Tad Williams, R. Scott Bakker, and George R. R. Martin offer far more engaging epics than Jordan. Jordan started out good, but in all honesty he has pushed The Wheel of Time far past the point of even the most forgiving reader’s forbearance. Maybe not as badly as Terry Goodkind has, but close.
You know, you might want to give a few female writers a try. Robin Hobb’s Farseer, Livership Traders, Tawny Man, and Soldier’s Son epics are brilliant in their in depth character building. Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars is excellent. Then there are Lois McMaster Bujold, C. J. Cherryh, and Jo Walton, whose works I buy on sight whenever I come across one I have not read. If you want to get away from the whole “Ah, but Tolkien gone and done this” sort of thing, I’m sorry to say, you needs must leave the dudes behind.
Then again, if you did that, you miss Steven Erikson, whose massive epics stand out in a crowd of massive epics. Remember the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film Solaris? I’m not talking the Soderbergh update, but the original. For the length of the movie, the events as they occur, the story, time, what is real, and what is not all flow in a massive cloud of WTF that whirls through the viewers mind, until suddenly, for no apparent or definable reason, an ineffable, yet visceral understanding coalesces. You can’t put what the what is in words, but you get it. You grok it. Well, Erikson’s books are like that.
Any of the above are worth dropping Jordan for. Please do so.
Oh, and what’s with the Donaldson smackdown? Other than cosmetic similarities, the Covenant books are a hell of a long way from the Middle Earth mode. I mean, can you imagine Frodo actually being a leper who rapes a woman and gets cheered on as a hero?
— James.O'Hearn · Jun 14, 02:45 PM · #
Somewhat paraphrasing David Milch, I was young enough when I started reading Wheel of Time that I have no hope of acquiring critical distance; like Star Wars, the series opened for me entire vistas of imaginative space, and when I revisit, I still get that feeling: an opening-out of, a removal from, and a pulling into.
Now, the fact that it was Robert Jordan’s books, and not, say, Martin’s, is probably arbitrary, a shot-gun marriage of chance and adolescent necessity. Fine, whatever. I still recommend them.
— JA · Jun 14, 03:46 PM · #
Just wanted to second James O’Hearn on Steven Erikson. I like George R. R. Martin as well, but Erikson is not as well known. The Erikson books do tend to be a bit overwhelming in terms of world detail, but if you just flow with it you can figure it out well enough. And I doubt any would accuse him of just recreating a Tolkein universe.
— Greg Sanders · Jun 14, 04:18 PM · #
Do yourself a favor and stop reading now. The story goes on to ripoff the Bible, Dune, and Star Wars. The plotline becomes so fractured it is difficult to keep up with any single storyline
Seriously. I slogged through all dozenish books, and I’d never recommend the series to anyone. It’s not that Jordan’s legion of fans are wrong, only that everything that Jordan does reasonably well is done better by other authors and with many fewer pages.
— TW Andrews · Jun 14, 04:18 PM · #
Glory Road, anyone?
— Lifafa Das · Jun 14, 04:19 PM · #
Maybe this place is like the Spock’s Beard alternate-universe version of Middle Earth. That would explain everything.
— Mark in Houston · Jun 14, 06:51 PM · #
Okay, I’m done. Random thoughts:
1) It got much less Tolkien-derivative as it went along, even in this first volume.
2) The last hundred pages or so were very good indeed. Loved the Green Man.
3) It’s more than twice as long as it should be. Trimming of overly detailed descriptions — which is to say, almost all of them — and cutting of “adventures” that don’t contribute anything to plot, theme, or character development would leave about four hundred pretty interesting pages.
4) The fact that everyone says that Jordan gets more wordy and digressive and less disciplined as the series goes on terrifies me.
5) I’m not likely to read any further. I might, but I don’t think so.
Random thoughts about other comments on this thread — and thanks to all for them —
1) I read the first two Ice and Fire volumes and liked them well enough, though probably not enough to keep going. They are very well done, but much more like historical fiction than like most high fantasy. This isn’t a bad thing, it just means that “world-making” is a secondary activity for Martin. I actually think the books would be just as interesting if you cut out the supernatural elements altogether, and you can’t say that about many works of fantasy.
2) If you’re going to mention women writers Ursula LeGuin should certainly be the first on the list. Earthsea is a major achievement, even if it is YA fiction. (I’m not a fan of Bujold or Cherryh at all, though I haven’t read Walton.)
3) But if you want to get WAY away from Tolkien, you can do so by reading China Miéville or Gene Wolfe. Interesting that no one has spoken up for Miéville yet — maybe all his fans are over on Crooked Timber. In the end I think he’s an immensely talented failure, in large part because he’s always trying too hard to be the anti-Tolkien. And Gene Wolfe is more gifted simply as a writer than anyone we’ve mentioned here, with the exception of LeGuin. And a brilliant (if really weird) world-builder. Though with Wolfe we’re moving from high fantasy to science fantasy, so maybe he doesn’t belong in this conversation — but it’s worth pointing out that he’s several leagues above this competition.
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 14, 08:14 PM · #
alan,
re: martin, he has explicitly said he wanted to do a “low magic” series (he considers the lord of the rings low magic as well). that being said, the magic quotient increases in every successive book, and it he has promised that it will end up far more magical. it has to do with the reemergence of dragons in the world. i emailed martin once and he admitted to me that he is a big fan of the warlord chronicles, and i think there’s a lot of similarities there.
also, i agree that gene wolfe is head & shoulders above any of the writers mentioned here as a stylist. i really like the book of the new sun series…but it isn’t something that most unsophisticated young adults are going to be able to digest. i attempted it it when i was 14, had to give up, and came back it it when i was 17. i also don’t think that the plotting is necessarily as good. but hey, what i know, you’re the critic ;-)
— razib · Jun 14, 11:18 PM · #
Alan,
You’re right, that any mention of women writers of fantasy should include Ursula K. LeGuin, and also Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Madeleine L’Engle, Katherine Kurtz, and perhaps even Anne McCaffery and Mercedes Lackey. They are all talented, and have large and adoring audiences. In regards to high fantasy, however, their work is an ill fit for what we were talking about.
Sure A Wizard of Earthsea is an accomplishment, but then so is Harry Potter. Accomplishments like these are great, but they are an entirely separate category.
Look, I liked Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and enjoyed Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. On the other hand, I have a hard time recommending them to anyone. Why? Let’s use film as an analogy for a moment. Say you love Kurosawa, and to you the greatest film he ever made was Ikiru, a movie which has a convoluted and confusing structure, and is understated to the extreme. To the uninitiated, it starts off as a confusing mass of tedium that does not invite continued viewing. So do you recommend this, your favorite Kurosawa film, to your uninitiated friend? Or do you ease him in with a bit of Mifune ass kicking? No question. You get the glower on.
It’s the same with high fantasy. Wolfe is awesome. He really is. But his work is dense. He is the Joyce of fantasy, and while just about every literate person I know respects Finnegan’s Wake, none of them have ever picked it up to immerse or subsume their conscious mind in its narrative flow.
High fantasy is the ultimate escapist literature. Stories last for thousands of pages in pervasive worlds with recurring characters the reader can follow around and imagine themselves as. The key in this narrative form is to ensure that the reader is constantly drawn through the story, with as few distractions as possible, which might pull the reader out of the fictive world and back into reality. These distractions often take the form of thinly veiled analogy, or allegory, and out of place politics or ideology. Pullman’s work suffers from it’s virulently anti-religiosity, as C.S. Lewis’s work suffers for the opposite. Goodkind kills the reader with his necromantic summoning of Ayn Rand. Marion Zimmer Bradley sometimes reads like the the Friedan/Steinem bedside resder, as does LeGuin’s Tehanu. All respect to LeGuin, but it’s her science fiction that really shines, not her fantasy. In A Wizard of Earthsea, did Ged conquer some external evil force? No. The evil was within him, it was his shadow, and in the end he triumphed over himself, just as we all need to triumph over the evil inside ourselves. Gee Pelagius, is it really true?
Seriously, I read that when I was 14, and even then I was saying “Are you kidding me?”
Sorry, but when it comes to high fantasy, the average reader is not looking for some expository excursion into the nature of gender roles, or new age psychoanalysis. Contemporary lit’s already got that covered just fine. The average reader is also not looking to admire the use of literary devices, or stand in awe of the writer’s sentence construction (Yo! Sup, Richard Ford!). Each and every element that, from a writers point of view, makes another writer interesting, is more often than not detrimental to a high fantasy narrative.
Just ask yourself this. When you read epic fantasy, do you see the words on the page? Really. Do you? Because I sure don’t. When the narrative draws me in, I see the story, hear the characters, and engage this new world with all of my senses. Two hours and two hundred pages will pass and I will be unable to recollect neither the time passing nor turning the pages, yet there I am, deep into the story, with the sun touching the horizon.
What defines truly great high fantasy is that very quality. Read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, or any of Tad Willam’s works, and this is what occurs. What they do, they do well, and if you were to go over it with a fine literary eye, there is much that you would find that is worthy of attention. Yet never once in your reading is your conscious mind kicked to the fore by the jarring imposition of “something important” that the author now wants to discuss.
As for Mieville, I take him like I take my Charles De Lint. Quirky, interesting, but out there. He makes you think, which is why his work is best sipped, not gulped. High fantasy is not a fine wine, it’s a two liter super-wow size cup of Caf-Pow!
— James O'Hearn · Jun 15, 06:16 AM · #
James, a couple of comments: first, I think you’re generally right about the narrative drive that marks the best high fantasy, or “escapist literature” more generally; but there’s no quality of writing about which there’s more variability of response from reader to reader. So, for instance, Tad Williams does nothing for me. Can’t be helped. On the other hand, Gene Wolfe does, and there are many people to whom I have recommended his books. They don’t remind me much of Finnegans Wake.
Tolkien understood this variability, which is why he wrote,
The Lord of the Rings
Is one of those things;
If you like it, you do;
If you don’t, then you boo.
Second, I think most of the categories you see as distinct are actually overlapping. Many of the features you prize in high fantasy are precisely the ones that have made the Harry Potter books so enormously popular, so I don’t think those books belong in an “entirely separate category” from Jordan’s or Williams’s or Martin’s. Ditto with Wolfe’s science fantasy, if you want to call it that. We need some good Venn diagrams here.
And razib, thanks for that tidbit about Martin. Interesting!
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 15, 06:06 PM · #
“Okay, I know that Jordan’s fictional world will diverge from Tolkien’s, but why in the world doesn’t he start by at least making an effort to differentiate his creation from Middle-Earth?”
Actually, it was an authorial decision to rip off Tolkien in the beginning. Fairly or not, RJ felt that it was a good selling point/good idea to give readers something familiar at the start. It does indeed quickly diverge, but I agree with almost all of the criticisms above. The logorrhea got so bad that one of the latter books was an entire book of “moving the chess pieces into place,” with no action, and the following book was 700 pages of climax and immediate aftermath. Too wordy, not enough editing. Still, I also agree with the other point that he was part of the “better quality writing” movement in SF and fantasy. (I’d through in Guy Gavriel Kay as another fantasy-ish suggestion.)
Anyway, on the original issue, I think many of us would disagree with his decision to have such obvious Tolkien references and tropes; it’s quite limiting and I don’t think it really makes people comfortable. In any case, anything gained by extra appeal to some subset of genre fans is probably made up for by people it loses.
— John Thacker · Jun 16, 03:33 AM · #
Nobody likes Glory Road by Heinlein?
— Lifafa Das · Jun 16, 03:36 AM · #
Any interest in Mervyn Peake?
I don’t know if the Gormenghast books exactly count as high fantasy, but they’re definitely fantasy of some sort – “Poe meets Dickens” is how I describe them to the unacquainted. They also happen to be my second favorite fantasy novels of all time (after The Lord of the Rings).
But if you’re in the mood for a long series of high fantasy, may I humbly suggest the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett? :)
— Ethan C. · Jun 16, 04:04 AM · #
Actually looking back at my comment now, I’m wondering if anybody thought “Glory Road, anyone?” was some sort of gross sexual proposition.
— Lifafa Das · Jun 16, 04:10 AM · #
I have to jump in and second all praise of Erikson’s Malazan Book of The Fallen series. for years after losing interest in the Wheel of Time for all the usual reasons, I gave up on epic fantasy, and limited myself to trying to find excellent single books that merited reading once or twice – e.g. Dune, Neuromancer, American Gods. Somebody finally convinced me to try Gardens of the Moon (Erikson’s first Malazan book), and I was just stunned. The sheer fecundity and depth of the world-building, and the fiercely original (to my mind) anthropological approach – and the excellently paced revelations of vaster levels of plotting – and the characters! (Kruppe, Cotillion, Kalam, Anomander Rake)
I await the final 3 books with real excitement.
— donald · Jun 16, 07:40 AM · #
John C. Wright’s Everness and Chaos series are mindblowing good reads.
— Adam Greenwood · Jun 16, 02:28 PM · #
Lilafa: Isn’t Glory Road a gay biker bar in the East Village? Maybe I’m misremembering. No, seriously, there was a time in my youth when Glory Road (along with a couple of Heinlein’s other boy’s-own space-potboilers, like Tunnel in the Sky) was among my favorite books. But though there are more fantasy elements in that book than in any of Heinlein’s others, as far as I know anyway, it still strikes me as not having a lot of overlap with the high fantasy tradition.
John T, I had read Jordan’s comment that he was intentionally echoing Tolkien — I just didn’t think there would be that many echoes, and I don’t think he made a good decision there.
I think I’m going to pay Malazan a visit soon, and Adam G’s comment reminds me of some other good things I’ve heard about Wright.
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 16, 05:06 PM · #
re: guy gavriel kay, he’s going in the opposite direction as martin. e.g., look at the balance between historical and magical elements as you shift from tigana to last light of the sun. i do enjoy him though.
— razib · Jun 16, 05:54 PM · #
I agree with Mr. O’Hearn: Steven Erikson’s books are, bar none, some of the finest works within the fantasy genre to date. Don’t believe the reviews that say you can read them out of order, though: there’s a far richer story to be had if you read them in order as intended. Erikson will blow your mind.
I disagree on R. Scott Bakker. I was hugely impressed with his world-building the first time I read the series, and I still respect his utter refusal to have an admirable character in the entire series. His writing, however, isn’t all that great on a second read-through, though. I had to put the series down midway through the second book and give my copies to the library. I appreciate not having characters that are like shiny beacons of morality or good decision making, but is it too much to ask that some of them be at least likable if not show a redeeming quality? At least James Ellroy gets you to <i>like</i> his characters, even when they’re all schmucks.
— James F. Elliott · Jun 16, 07:58 PM · #
I thought the first two or three books of the series were of the quality that you describe here, Alan. While the writing and editing don’t improve in the 2nd and 3rd books the story itself became (for me) more compelling as additional characters and subplots were introduced to good effect, with some parts that are, as you say, “very good indeed.”
But then you can just see it all start to spin out of control somewhere around book 4 or 5, as the weaknesses of Jordan’s writing become both more annoying due to repetition and significantly more pronounced, as new characters and subplots continue to proliferate at an exponential pace. The series finally just becomes a caricature of itself – and it was only “ok” to begin with. My irritation with Jordan finally outweighed my desire to find out “what happens” and I quit reading after book 10 or so, wishing I had stopped much earlier. If you enjoyed book 1 I think you’d enjoy the next couple of books as well, but the same weaknesses will remain and begin to grate, and your irritation will boil over at some point. I almost hope you’ll read and comment on the next book or two just so I can enjoy reading your reaction. I found myself thinking that “if so and so tugs on her braid one more time, or if yet another woman is said to have “folded her arms beneath her breasts” I am going to scream and throw this book out the window.”
— Karl · Jun 16, 08:34 PM · #
Wolfe’s recent two-volume Wizard Knight series is high fantasy – a chivalric romance that mixes together Norse and Christian mythology (and keep an eye out for the Green Knight). Not as great a work as the New Sun books, but very good.
The Devil in a Forest (I like how the pronouns in the title imply that the forest is that part that’s unusual) is a short little gem that feels more like historical fiction with a dash of the fantastic (or maybe it’s just historical fiction by an author who believes miraculous and fantastical things really happen). It was inspired by a detail in the carol “Good King Wenceslas.”
The Soldier series (including the recent Soldier of Sidon) is every bit as good as the Book of the New Sun. Maybe better. It’s the story of a mercenary in the Persian army who receives a head wound during the battle of Thermopylae such that he can only remember things for about a day. So he must keep a diary each day and read it each morning to find out what his name is, where he is, who his friends are, etc. The conceit of the book is that you are reading his diary, creating lots of dramatic irony, since the hero doesn’t always get a chance to read it before he writes. Oh, and also, the Greek (and, later the Egyptian) gods feel free to show themselves and speak to him and use him as a pawn in their manipulations of the politics of Athens and Sparta.
High fantasy or historical fiction? Wolfe has an interesting bit in the introduction where he says, “Fantasy? I’m just writing about the gods the way the Greeks themselves did in some of their historical accounts.” As I mentioned in the other post, it feels a little bit like C.S. Lewis’s best book, Till We Have Faces.
— Michael · Jun 17, 05:20 PM · #
It’s always fun to see what subject matter gets the most comments. This is definitely a dude blog.
— Joules · Jun 18, 01:40 AM · #
Lifafa Das-
I loved Heinlein’s Glory Road! I think Alan’s right that it’s not really in the genre that this thread is mostly about; but it was definitely one of Heinlein’s more enjoyable adventures. More like Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter than like Jordan.
— Sue · Jun 18, 03:52 AM · #