Tag: Fantasy

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I missed this news from a couple of weeks ago: Tor has announced that A Memory of Light, the final Wheel of Time book, is going to be split into three volumes. A Memory of Light Part 1: The Gathering Storm is due on November 3, 2009. Working titles for the others are AMOL Part 2: Shifting Winds and AMOL Part 3: Tarmon Gai’don.

Author Brandon Sanderson, finishing the book from Robert Jordan’s manuscript and notes, explains how the decision was made: basically, it was turning into a 750,000-word novel. Consider that 250,000 is seriously long already, and Nanowrimo considers just 50,000 to be the lower limit. So we’re talking the equivalent of 15 Nanowrimo Novels. Not only would it need the proverbial luggage cart, but he wouldn’t be able to finish and revise it in time for a 2009 release. They figured 2011 at the earliest.

So they’re splitting it into three physical books, the first coming out in 2009 as promised to fans, and the others following — one hopes — in 2010 and 2011.

On one hand, I’m annoyed. I thought we were one book away from the finale. I thought we were only going to have one book worth of material polished by another author. And suddenly the single $25–30 purchase for one hardcover is turning into a probable total of $90 (over the course of several years, sure, but still…). Regardless of the actual reasons, it feels like a money-grab by the publisher trying to squeeze two more books out of a dead author’s fan base.

On the other hand… I’m not exactly surprised. Given the sheer amount of detail in Robert Jordan’s magnum opus, the number of open plot threads, and the scale of building up to full-on Armageddon, I think I’d rather see everything handled properly than get the Cliff Notes version of the series conclusion.

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Listening to “Into the West” (end credits song from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King). Lyric, “Across the sea a pale moon rises.”

It’s all about crossing the sea into the west to go to elf heaven. Presumably the speaker is standing at the Grey Havens, waiting for the ships to arrive and carry her off to the Undying Lands, looking across the sea…to the west.

So since when does the moon rise in the west?

Admittedly, it’s a fantasy setting, but Middle Earth is set up to be a mythical past for the real world, so I’m fairly certain the sun and moon still rise in the east…

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The Value of Space Exploration, via Phil Plait.

Neil Gaiman on The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a painting by a madman that’s inspired its share of stories.

And from Comics Worth Reading, our WTF entry for the day: Paradise by the GoPhone Light. It’s a commercial done in the style of a music video, featuring Meat Loaf and Tiffany as the parents of a kid who wants a GoPhone. Completely surreal, especially once the random explosions start.

It’s just occurred to me that, aside from it being some sort of cell phone, I have no idea what a GoPhone is. [/me types “gophone” into Google] Ah, OK. Pre-paid cellphone. Meh. (And now I’m imagining how much spam is going to get posted to this thread. *sigh* )

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The Born QueenWe’ve both finished reading The Born Queen, the conclusion to Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. Yesterday we spent the day reading in tandem on the couch: I read book 3, Katie read book 4, and finished within an hour of each other. Determined to catch up, I read 100 pages last night and spent this morning and afternoon reading the final book.

It was well worth the wait.

The series is set two millennia after humans, led by Virginia Dare (explaining where the lost Roanoke colonists went), overthrew the demonic race that had kept them as slaves for generations. Virginia had discovered how to harness the sedos power, essentially magic. The last of humanity’s oppressors warned them that the sedos would eventually destroy their world. Of course, no one believed him.

2200 years later, this corner of the world is not unlike Europe in the early Renaissance. Except that the church is based on the sedos, in the person of saints, and its priests walk the paths to harness the sedos powers.

The world is also beginning to rot. Things of nature are dying, human alliances are crumbling, and terrible creatures thought to be myth are walking the earth. There are several factions who claim that they want to save it, but their true goals are suspect, and their methods differ greatly. The various viewpoint characters are thrust into the middle of things without any real sense of what’s going on: a holter, a princess, a novice priest, a knight, a swordsman, a composer and a queen.

One of the things I find so fascinating about this series (as I mentioned when I first read The Blood Knight) is the fact that everyone is acting on partial information. This makes them screw up, sometimes mildly, sometimes horrifically. And there’s a curveball that comes about 1/3 of the way into The Born Queen that turns everything on its head.

I don’t think it’ll give too much away to say that one of the key struggles in this book is for control of the sedos. Even 100 pages from the end, I wasn’t sure which faction would give the world a better chance of surviving.

Music also figures importantly, starting with the second book, where it’s learned that certain combinations of sound can have a profound effect on the human psyche. I found myself wondering whether Keyes had someone set any of the songs to music.

By the end of The Born Queen, most of the major questions about what’s really going on have been answered. Of course, they’re answered in pieces, by different characters with different agendas. The major characters’ arcs reach (mostly) satisfying conclusions, with some finding what they want, some finding what they need, some doing what needs to be done, and some getting what they deserve.

It’s weird to finally be done with the series, which started around the same time as this blog. The first post that I made that wasn’t “Hey, look! I have a blog!” was a review of The Waterborn and The Blackgod, Greg Keyes’ first novel and its sequel. In it, I mentioned looking forward to The Briar King when it came out.