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When I was a kid, I read everything I could lay my hands on. At some point after I’d worked through The Hobbit but before I’d moved up to The Lord of the Rings -- so, maybe third grade? -- I found a bunch of my brother’s old Conan the Barbarian comic books and read them over and over again till they came apart. My brother wasn’t too happy about that, obviously, but my dad took the opportunity to tell me “you know, you’ve got a cousin who writes those things.” It took me a little while to realize that “your crazy cousin who writes Conan novels” was the same guy who’d completely blown my little-kid mind at a party a few years previously by taking the time to explain what a Mobius strip was and even making me one to play with out of a bit of torn napkin. I don’t think I saw or heard of said crazy cousin till a few years more had passed and some friends of ours loaned us a VCR for a few weeks. We knew the cousin in question had a “huge” library of VHS tapes, and somehow or other it got arranged that we could borrow some, so we went over for the evening and they let me pick over the tape library; I remember grabbing a complete set of Rocky and Bullwinkle. While we were there, I remembered and asked if I could read any of his Conan novels. They told me I was too young for them but then he started telling me about the book he was working on right then. He said it was about a world where all the male wizards had gone crazy and blown up everything, so only female wizards could handle magic safely. I went back and forth a few more times borrowing different videos and asked more questions about the book. I remember one time he said something about the idea of ages repeating and the same stories getting told over again, slightly differently each time; I remember asking if each version was different like a funhouse mirror and he said, no, more like looking at two tapestries next to each other, and thinking they were the same, but the longer you look, the more details you’d pick out that were different, and more differences with each new version of the tapestry. One time I was talking with his wife about Zork and she told me about how she was editing the new book and putting in a passage where a main character gets a second cloak, because he lost his cloak once crossing a river and once at another point later on. One time he showed me the map and explained how the mountains up near the top go down into the ocean and how he’d put that in deliberately because it was something that couldn’t happen naturally. Anyway, y’all know where all that was going. A year or two later (this would be 1989, over summer break; I guess I was twelve?) that same crazy cousin called me up and said come on over to his house; I walked the few blocks over and he gave me an Advance Reading Copy of Eye of the World. I walked home holding the book up in front of me and reading my way down the street, sat down, and kept going straight through till I finished it. I’ve been waiting for the next book ever since. When the last one comes out, that’s gonna be weird. Anyway, just had to get the above out of my system, and this seemed as good a place as any. Not trying to go emo or one-up or anything (and no, I don’t get advance copies any more, that basically all stopped when the internet came along and they had to start really worrying about leaks). It’s just . . .twenty-three years of my life ago, this series. So strange thinking of it as something that’s going to come to an actual end. I’m thirty-five years old now and I can barely even remember a time when I wasn’t looking forward to the next book.
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Sep 28, 2012 19:10
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api call girl posted:Curious, but did you get to "ARC" for TSR, TFoH, LoC, etc? If so, what was that like? He gave me an early galley proof of Dragon Reborn (which unfortunately got water damaged a few years later) and a promotional wall map of the map from The Great Hunt (the fancy one with the heavily illustrated border). That was all pre-internet, though, at least for me (having not discovered usenet) and my brother had moved away so I didn't know anyone else who was into reading that kind of thing. It was more "oh, fun, new book to read," not "early book" -- Cousin Jim's new book just came out when he called me, not when I saw it in stores. In retrospect I'm actually kinda amazed that he took the time to remember and call the neighbor kid who liked maps and fantasy books. Once the series hit NYT bestseller with tDR and the internet took off, though, they really had to lock down security, and they also sped up the "turnover" time from manuscript to publication pretty dramatically (like down to a single month for some books), so what with being off at school and so forth I usually didn't manage to get advance access after that. I do remember that whatever book the name "Moridin" first shows up in, I read a borrowed copy of that a week or two early, which I only remember because I kicked myself afterwards for not immediately registering the nick in every online game and forum I could think of.
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Sep 28, 2012 20:43
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veekie posted:Don't forget that by the time they get caught they are almost certainly going to be pretty tainted already. Unless an Aes Sedai was RIGHT there to see it happening it'd be months or years before they expose themselves too much, and the taint kills just as well as gentling. I could be wrong on this, but I thought the taint by itself was a passive poison that built up in the body over time -- i.e., basically, something like if you have 1000 "taint tolerance points", at say 800 "taint points" accumulated you'd necrotize and at 1000 you'd die, with a chance to accrue a point every time you channeled, but as long as you were sub-1000 you'd still be alive (however leprous). At some point I need to buy a copy of the d20 gamebook they had rules for this kind of thing >_<.
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Oct 3, 2012 23:20
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evilweasel posted:I think the RPG stuff was just those guys making up poo poo as they went along with very little Jordan involvement, except to veto stuff. Yeah, my second-hand understanding is that it was basically just the RPG guys making up poo poo with, at best, some fact-checking by the people we'd now call "Team Jordan)" (i.e., mostly Maria). It's all pseudo-canonical at best. Still fun grist for theorycrafting though.
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Oct 4, 2012 17:44
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:Holy poo poo. Any more stories you can think of about him, even if they don't have anything to do with WoT, I'd love to hear them. If he was my cousin, he would have hated me. I'd have literally never ever ever stopped asking him questions. Hexaemeron posted:Calenth: I don't know if I'm jealous, since I likely would have bugged the everloving poo poo out of him and I would have been strangled by the time FoH came out. He was actually really intimidating when I was a kid, in a really nice and entertaining sort of way. He once told me he was going to "introduce you to my set of flaying knives" after I made a particularly bad pun. (I had to go home and look up what "flaying" meant). Six foot five guy, after all, vietnam vet. Lots of folks forget the whole helicopter-door-gunner background. So I didn't ask that many questions, for fear of wearing out welcome -- usually just one or two each time I saw him. I remember asking him after Eye of the World if the next book would be the next Age or if it would continue the story of Rand etc. I also asked him if Thom Merrillin was really dead or not and he wouldn't tell me. AFter TGH I asked him if Lanfear was a deliberate allusion to H. Rider Haggard's She and he said not consciously, that he hadn't read She since he was a child. I'm still working my way through a slow re-read of Eye. It really is just weird -- I keep getting flash backs to reading the book on my parent's old couch two decades ago, or finishing the first book that summer afternoon and thinking "wow." It's also really striking how much Thom Merrillin reminds me of him, especially of Jim's public persona. He was the sort of person who'd be telling stories in the corner of a party (one in particular I remember centered around his history of being physically incapable of lying to women, and the problems that caused him) and after an hour or so he'd just have a ring of twenty people around listening in. If I had to point to two author-insert characters in the series, it's definitely Thom and Loial, with Thom his public persona and Loial what he saw as his private persona. He and his wife are the only two people I've ever met who I had real problems just keeping up with conversationally -- they'd throw out so many jokes, references, etc., in their conversation that I had to mentally "run" in my head just to keep up with them. Harriett gets a lot of flak from fans but she's extraordinarily sharp and deserves a lot more credit than she typically gets for the series' success. Their house was & is a little bizarre, but in a good way. They kept a large chinese gong in the front hallway instead of a traditional doorbell. Most of every wall was & is covered in books -- I remember him estimating to me that he read about 400 books a month. For a while in my teens, I'd head over there every month or two and they'd give me a pile of books -- either second copies of things they'd purchased by accident or leftover promotional copies they'd been sent. Sometimes I'd just go over and hang out in his library for a while (I read most of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series that way). There were usually swords and other weapons piled everywhere; once I was talking to Jim and he casually picked up a rapier (out of the pile of rapiers, no joke, on the table in front of him) waved it around, and whipped it down to point at my fly, which was undone; that's just how he chose to inform me of the fact.
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Oct 10, 2012 23:10
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Algid posted:Is this just something you picked up, or has he said that that was what he was conciously going for? I've always thought that the books were presented as though they were written by Loial. I don't think he ever explicitly said so, no, at least not to me that I specifically remember. It's just . . . if you ever saw him in a public setting, he was Thom, injured-leg-limp and mannerisms and wry humor and all. His Loial side didn't show up as often, was more private, but equally there. I don't think it's an accident that the two characters who are explicitly storytellers are the two most directly like him in personality, though. He knew what he was doing. There was a little of his personality in all his male characters, of course. It's just the least filtered/altered in Thom and Loial. One more story that even I never really understood: I went over there once to give them a present, a "cuddly chthulhu" toy I'd bought several of to give as gifts and then realized I only knew like three people who would appreciate them. I walked into the back room in the back house while he was writing, only time I ever walked in on him while he was writing. He was seated in his large wooden throne, at the computer, wearing a fez, and listening to japanese timpani drum music. Never really did figure out what he was writing just then, though I suspect a Seanchan scene. Calenth fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 03:13
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Anyway, with apologies for filling up the thread --just finished my re-read of Eye. A few thoughts as I try to separate my years-long relationship with this book from the book itself as a story: 1) Wow, the last third or so of this book reads like a comic book/ manga. There are a lot of descriptions, especially of Caemlyn, the Ways, and the Blight, that just pop into my head in illustrated-panel format, I don't *think* that's an artifact of years of fan art -- I've never actually read the Eye of the World comic book. Just really iconic, precise, colorful description. When Moiraine blasts Machin Shin or Rand watches plants decay in the Blight, it just reads like a splash page illustration, somehow. 2) When we first run into her in Caemlyn, Elaida mentions "Unbelievers." Struck me as a really odd useage, perhaps one of those first-book artifacts. Who are the unbelievers? What do they un-believe, precisely? Religion in the WoT universe (or more precisely, the narrative treatment of religion in WoT) would be interesting subjects for papers. Well, interesting to me. 3) I know this is going to sound incredibly stupid to EVERYONE, but it's bizarre to think back and realize that I was still arguing with my brother over which of Rand, Mat, and Perrin was the Dragon Reborn as late as the publication of The Great Hunt (I remember my brother getting mad about the cover of tDR because he said it was a spoiler). Admittedly I was in fifth grade then and my brother was my brother but still, I can't believe I was dense enough that I speculated. 4) I know I'm biased but I still think Eye holds up really, really drat well for a fantasy novel with 20+ years of age on it. Parts of it are a little dated -- it's still, after all, a "rural farmboys go on Epic Quest to Save the World! With a magic sword! And a wizard!" story -- but maybe it's just that I still remember how crazy it was in 1989 to read a story where the Epic Prophesied Hero was someone everyone feared, or hell, just a story where the Wizard Mentor was a woman, and not only a vagina-haver but one with a developed, complex personality and goals which had nothing to do with dating a male protagonist. I don't know how a modern modern viewer would react to it -- it's had so much influence on the genre that it might have lost some of its initial impact -- but at the time I remember thinking it was just fundamentally new and different. A "novel" in the sense of a new thing.
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Oct 12, 2012 18:42
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Streebs posted:Calenth, I enjoy your stories about RJ, sounds like he was a really unique person. Thanks! I'm trying not to drown the thread in "This one time, I saw RJ, and he had a pipe, and he said a thing" stories! It's just hard for me to talk about the books at all without talking about Jim, and it's hard to read this series period without talking about it (again, at least for me). evilweasel posted:I think it's a word that made sense in an initial draft but really stopped making sense once he fleshed out the world as a whole. Part of the whole idea of the world was that religion was so obviously true that there wasn't any actual organized religion. I think when you think of the process of writing the book, it makes perfect sense why it would have snuck in but why it doesn't belong. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. caleramaen posted:Good literature is good literature. It doesn't go "out of date." WoT's claim to the title of "literature" is an interesting point of discussion in and of itself. On the one hand, it's genre fiction about wizards. It rambles on and on for volumes. There's a forty-five-page sequence where a character does nothing but take a bath. Parts of it are (arguably) derivative of Tolkien and Herbert and other prior authors. It's escapist fiction (if you consider that a bad thing; Tolkien's rebuttal to the "escapism" argument was that if you're in a cage, there's nothing wrong about wanting out). It's a young-boy-on-quest story in a genre that was already pretty drat full of young-boy-on-quest stories even in the 80's. On the other, though, there's really a lot of neat stuff going on in it -- from subtle meta-fictional critiques of fantasy conventions (ta'veren: in the old tongue, "protagonist"), to psychologically realistic characters going through realistic changes and arcs, to complex literary and mythological allusions, to fairly bold subversions and inversions of genre tropes (Everybody's scared shitless of the Prophesied Hero; Gandalf is a woman). It's (to my knowledge) the longest written "story" in the English language, and possibly any language, beating out Remembrance of Things Past by a huge margin, which alone gives it a certain amount of cachet (I say "single plotline" because there are numerous character serials, like the Tarzan books or Perry Rhodan, that beat it out in sheer quantity of verbiage, but they aren't single works, they're multiple works with a recurring character). The analysis that's really springing up at me right now on this re-read is how it's really easy to read WoT as inspired by the Vietnam War, in much the same way that Lord of the Rings was inspired by World War One. The hero isn't loved or praised, he's hated and feared by the very people he's trying to save; everything is political; the battle scenes are chaotic, confused, hurried, and incredibly brutal; the central fantasy behind the entire series, right from that first prologue with Lews Therin, is (at least arguably) "Lord, please give us a do-over." In early drafts and outlines, the Tam character, a returning war veteran, was the protagonist. On to The Great Hunt! Calenth fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Oct 13, 2012 |
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Oct 13, 2012 03:58
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Willie Tomg posted:I've said this a couple times before in these threads and I'll say it again: WoT is an American shonen manga without any pictures--right down to the filler plotlines. Yeah, that's a pretty fair critique. I mean, three women all in love with the protagonist, a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette? Galad's a virgin-mary bishounen, etc. . . I have my own theory on the filler-books problem -- partly I think he just lost control with so many plotlines and characters, partly I think he kinda lost focus on WoT for a while and was working and thinking about his planned Infinity of Heaven series instead; he used to talk about it a lot. I completely understand why people think he was padding out WoT with filler -- it's a valid theory on the facts presented -- but personally I think it was more just a lack of focus & loss of narrative control on his part. I don't have any substance for that other than my own personal speculation, apart from a few conversations (prior to his diagnosis) where he spoke with real frustration about how he wasn't going to live long enough to write all the books he had plotted out. Anyway, as the re-read continues, next point: 1) Looking up every single character online as you do a re-read is immensely rewarding, especially for all the random Aes Sedai, Two Rivers folk, and Cairhienin nobles. For example, there's one character (Neysa Ayellin) that Perrin variously refers to as "horse faced" and "goat faced" at different points but that Rand thinks is "almost as pretty as Egwene" -- a nice little difference-of-perspective detail. I also hadn't realized that the Cairhienin noblewoman who ends up with Lamgwin is one of the three who corner Rand with propositions at the Barthanes Social in Book 2. 2) Similarly, re-reading knowing who's going to turn out to be a darkfriend or not adds a whole new layer to a lot of the text, especially with the Aes Sedai. Calenth fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Oct 15, 2012 |
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Oct 15, 2012 19:02
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Wow. Twenty three years, eleven thousand pages, four million words. I can't believe I've read the whole thing.
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Jan 9, 2013 06:13
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Haggins posted:
D'oh! I went to it yesterday. Trip report: There was a half hour or so of question and answer from Brandon, Harriett, Maria, and Alan, then book signings. About ~250 people showed up total. They didn't answer questions involving spoilers for the last book. One guy asked if you got pregnant in tel'aran'rhiod if you would remain pregnant in the waking world. They all sortof looked at each other like "well, that's a weird question" and said they didn't know, then Maria said that if an injury stuck with you then pregnancy probably would too. A couple questions still got answered with "REAFO", which apparently is "Read (the upcoming Encyclopedia) and find out." Some questions are never going to be answered because Jordan wanted plot threads to be left hanging. Someone asked who killed Asmodean. They said it's in the glossary to (whichever book) and you can look it up. They also said that the reason for this was, the only note they had confirming the answer was a post-it note stating "this is correct" attached to a printout of a fan theory. So they felt putting the answer in a glossary at the end of (Towers of Midnight I think?) was a way to give readers that same sense of "what?!" they'd felt. Somehow the topic of the 200-page chapter in Memory of Light came up. Brandon said that was deliberate on his part; he wanted his readers to have the same sense of exhaustion the characters were feeling at that point, to think to themselves "I'll just read one more chapter" and then it just goes on and on and on etc. There was some talk of the "outrigger" novels. Those are definitively not going to happen. Apparently the only real notes on those were two sentences Jordan wrote (which contained spoilers so Harriett wouldn't repeat them), so they would have amounted to "sharecropping" in Jordan's world, not detailed working from his notes, and that was something Jordan very much opposed, so it's not going to happen. Those two sentences probably will be in the upcoming encyclopedia. The encyclopedia's going to include all the various cool background details about specific characters that never made it into the direct text. Currently planned for one volume but they're not really sure of details etc. on it yet. The exhibits were kinda cool. They had some printouts of early early drafts of Eye of the World (Padan Fain's name: originally "Nikal Fain", with Nikal crossed out in pencil and "Padan" written over it), copies of 3.5" floppy disks with the Dragon Reborn drafts on it, an old Apple IIe Jordan had written the first novel(s) on, various foreign-language editions of the books, and a "Perrin's Axe" and "Mat's Dagger" that Museum Replicas made up years & years ago to Jordan's specifications (&which I don't think you can buy anymore). Also mannequins wearing an Aiel costume with spear and shield, an Asha'man costume, and a costume for Rand (both with the Museum Replicas heron-mark swords). The exhibits should still be there if you want to swing by the library and take a look -- it's right off Calhoun St. The college will be putting up stuff from Jordan's papers over time; there's a blog you can look at for updates on that here: http://blogs.cofc.edu/thetruesource/ Calenth fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jan 13, 2013 |
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Jan 13, 2013 16:01
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