The Wheel of Time is probably the most important epic fantasy series of my generation. A lot of people from the generation before grew up reading Tolkien. Well, my generation grew up reading the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, and it was…it’s very Tolkien-inspired, but it goes in its own direction, and basically, Robert Jordan—who started this series—once was asked, “What is the series about?” Well, it’s now fourteen books and a prequel, so what is that about? But he had a really good answer. He said, “The story’s about what it’s like to be told that you have to save the world, and that you’re probably going to die doing it, and you’re just a normal person.” And that’s really where it starts; it starts with a young man who is told that he’s this figure from prophecy, that he’s going to have this whole world on his shoulders, and what does that do to a person? What is the life like once you’ve learned this? How do you figure out what you’re supposed to do? You’ve just been told this… And it’s really a character study about him and several other people, and the life they go through.
If I was being facetious, I would compare that to Buffy the Vampire Slayer .
Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, Buffy’s very like that, because Buffy’s like, you know, here’s an ordinary person smashed into something extraordinary, and that’s kind of the soul of what we do in speculative fiction. I like to say that what we do….um…a lot of people accuse fantasy of being backward-looking. I don’t see that. Yes, we’re dealing with kings and queens and magic and things like this, but what we’re really trying to do, is we’re trying to explore human nature in a controlled way. We’re going to control—just like in a scientific experiment—we’re going to control for a lot of things, and we’re going to make this stable, and we’re going to control the government, society, and these things, and then we’re going to change a few really interesting things that could never be changed in our world. You know, if our world, you can’t be told this is what’s going to happen, you have to do this. We want to explore what that does to a person, and I find it a very forward-looking genre in that we’re trying to explore what human nature is capable of doing, and what we would do under extreme circumstances.
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.