I’m pretty excited about the recent news from Tor Publishing. After the tragic passing of the Fantasy world’s titan, Robert Jordan (Oliver Rigney, Jr), in September of 07,  Brandon Sanderson has done an admirable job of picking up the pieces left behind by Mr. Jordan and completing the next installment in the Wheel of Time series which will be in stores October 27, 2009. At the time of his death, Jordan had only one book left to complete the colossal twelve book series that had taken the Fantasy world by storm. But, Sanderson, after taking time to review the extensive notes left by Jordan, and pondering the many meetings he had with the author just prior to his death, decided that he would need three books to finish the cycle. The original intent was to finish the series with A Memory of Light. However, the next book will be entitled The Gathering Storm. Book thirteen, The Pillars of Midnight, is scheduled for late 2010, and A Memory of Light is tentatively slotted for 2011.

I have been a huge fan of The Wheel of Time series since I started reading them in the early 90′s when I was in my early 20′s. Many have called Jordan this era’s Tolkien, to which I whole heartedly agree. Are the books perfect? No. The middle books suffer from a slower pace than the first three books, and has an inordinate amount of detail on secondary and tertiary characters, in my opinion. Cynics say he’s just stretching the series out to make more money. I disagree. Jordan could write anything and it would sell well, so he didn’t need to stretch this series out to make more cash. No, he did what he did with the series because he loved it and it was what he felt he needed to write to do the world he had created justice.

The series has also suffered, some would say, from long spans of time between books, sometimes as long two years. But, lets be fair, shall we? Every one of these books is massive by any standard, ranging from 226,000 words all the way up to 393,000 words. You don’t just rip such prodigious books off in a few months, no matter how fast or organized you are. It’s an exceedingly complex story and keeping all the storylines organized and coherent is a herculean job. Also, to put things in perspective, Tolkien took between 1937 and 1949 to write his famous trilogy (well, they’re actually 6 smaller books, but they were merged into 3 volumes), and they weren’t even published until between 1954-1955…mind you, there was a disruptive German fellow to distract him, and, when not at war, he still wasn’t writing full time since he was also an Oxford professor. But, all that aside, Jordan wrote at a respectable rate. The reason it seemed so long in between books was because they were so damned good that we couldn’t wait to keep reading them. And, lets face it, in today’s instant gratification society, we’re just not used to waiting for anything anymore.

So, all that is to say, I will be buying the book the second it hits the shelf. And, to prepare myself, I’m going to pick up Mr. Sanderson’s first book, Elantris, to get a sense of his writing style.