Moving on to the Wheel of Time, I’m sure you can remember exactly where and when you were when you first laid eyes on The Eye of the World ; what, in your opinion, makes the Wheel of Time series so popular?
I do remember exactly where and when I first laid eyes on The Eye of the World . It was right after the paperback came out, and I was at the local comic store where I bought all my fantasy books. While browsing the new paperback shelf, I saw this huge fantasy novel there. I can almost feel that moment, standing and holding the book in my hands, listening to someone play an antiquated upright of Cadash in the background. I think the cover of Eye is the best Darryl Sweet has ever done–one of the best in fantasy. I loved the cover. The feel of the troop marching along, Lan and Moiraine proud and face forward. . . . The cover screamed epic. I bought the book and loved it. I still think Eye is one of the greatest fantasy books ever written. It signifies an era, the culmination of the epic quest genre which had been brewing since Tolkien initiated it in the ’60s. The Wheel of Time dominated my reading during the ’90s, influencing heavily my first few attempts at my own fantasy novels. I think it did that to pretty much all of us; even many of the most literarily snobbish of fantasy readers were youths when I was, and read The Eye of the World when I did. Robert Jordan showed us what it was to have vision and scope in a fantasy series–he did a wonderful job giving his readers a sense of immensity to his story, while at the same time focusing on the specific lives of his characters. He did an excellent job of creating a large set of empathetic characters and keeping them straight in the reader’s mind. He’s a model writer for walking the line between familiarity (the “farmboy saves the world from an evil overlord” story) and originality (his use of magic, his political worldbuilding). The descriptiveness of his writing is great. And the prologue to The Eye of the World is hands-down one of the most interesting introductions to any series. All those factors have won readers over and cemented the Wheel of Time as one of the most popular fantasy series of all time. Nobody in the adult fantasy market today has left more of an impact on more people’s lives than Robert Jordan.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.