Now, I realize as we’re talking that there’ll be listeners who aren’t actually familiar with the Wheel of Time series. I know this is a ridiculous question, really, but could you briefly tell us what it’s about?
Well, you know, fortunately I have listened to radio interviews that Robert Jordan did, and someone asked him that. And so I can just give his answer. His answer for the Wheel of Time: the Wheel of Time is about what it’s like to be told when you’re just an ordinary person that you have to save the world, and it’s about the journey that an ordinary person makes, becoming the person who has to ultimately probably sacrifice himself, his life, in order to save the word. And I think that’s an eloquent way to put it.
In a more general term, I can talk about fantasy for those who haven’t read it, what it is and what it means to me. Because I came to fantasy kind of late; I discovered it as a teen. I wasn’t reading it when I was very young, and it is the genre of imagination. And I worry that sometimes, in our modern-day lives we get so hung up on what is that we forget that, as human beings, part of our job is to, you know…part of our souls is to imagine what cannot be, and fantasy books in my vision are kind of like push-ups for your imagination. We tell stories about what maybe could be, what we wish could be, what could not be but we imagine could be, and that’s what the Wheel of Time is really about. It’s about that imagination, about creating a place that feels real while you read it, completely real with its own history and its own culture, its own everything, and for those brief moments, making that place is impossible become something real.
And it’s got strong elements of mythology that feel as though they’re drawn on European models, Asian models…
Yes.
There’s a lot about….well, the Wheel of Time is to do with the cyclical nature of time that I guess we associate with Asian, mystical religions, I suppose. There’s a creation story in there that sounds a little bit like the Christian story.
Yep. He was very much a mythologist; Robert Jordan studied myths and legends, and the Wheel of Time is fascinating in that what he tried to go about is, the characters in these books he implied are founding myths that will eventually become stories and legends during our time, as the Wheel turns back to our time, and yet, things they reference in their lives were myths started by our time. It’s cyclical, and so they’ll talk about ancient legends that you pick out are them talking about the Cold War, America and Russia, except they become giants that threw spears of light at each other, and things like this, and yet we have people who are fulfilling things like the Odin mythology and the Loki mythology, kind of on the sly. You don’t even figure it out unless you know mythology, and you’re like, “Wait a minute. These people then found myths that, during our day, are our stories and legends, and yet we are their stories and legends.” It can be kind of mind-breaking to try and parse it all together and figure it out.
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.