Gah. Was gonna let this die, but if Super's game...
Having read the post, responses keep shoving their way into my brain. Have to write something down just so I can get it out of my head and think about something else. Apologies if you're sick of the topic, folks (though really, I'd suggest you just stop reading it in that case).
HP's going to hold up the test of time, I'd think. Even if it's written off as generic fantasy pop (I haven't read it, can't comment) think about the impact it caused in fantasy and literature in general. How many new and returning readers did HP create? Think about what an event each of the book's release was. In 20-30 years I'm pretty sure we'll see Rowling's work cited as the reason why they got interested in creative writing. Something with that kind of massive, massive fan appeal is going to do that.
It's possible, yes. In the meantime, I'll remain skeptical and favor people who've been established in the field for decades whenever talk of "relevance" starts up. (Again, not that that's precisely what this conversation is about, but the point was raised so why not respond to it? I admit to being curious as to what lists based on that criteria would look like).
I strongly disgaree with casting WoT as standard fantasy. It is fantasy, but the world isn't standard fantasy. Jordan does a good job of setting up several unique countries and settings and uses them to good effect in the book. Being based so much on the real world past helps, and he mixes and matches sometimes to comic effect (Seanchan having a Texas drawl) and sometimes to depressing effects. (Children of the Light). The series is very strong both in how it uniquely presents it's magic and how it handles the male/female dynamic, most fantasy tends to schew strongly towards male dominated characters and worlds, which makes sense. The length of the series also gives the mains time to grow up and mature. The difference in every single one of the younger PoV characters is tremendous from the early books to the mid books to the end books. Rand, Mat, Perrin, Elayne, Egwene, Faile, Nynaeve etc all change and grow based on their enviroment. older ones do as well, Siuan is one of the most compelling characters in the series after the events at the end of the Shadow Rising. All deal with a really chaotic world and do the best they can and fuck it up pretty regularly.
I've actually never been very impressed with the worldbuilding in WoT. The individual countries have some flavor, but nothing ever jumped out to me as being a really cool place to explore. They seem to have developed in a vacuum; there's not a lot of shared history between them. WoT's history was always focused on the macro scale, the passing of the ages. Local color is mostly treated in a cursory fashion. Fine, that's Jordan's prerogative, but I'm a junkie for intricately imagined fictional cultures and none of WoT's countries had the kind of detail to grab me. And the aiel are pretty much lifted straight from Dune, in flavor and in the arrival of a chosen one.
There's worse out there, sure, but I wouldn't mark the setting as one of the series's selling points (did the world ever actually get a name?)
Also, I'd actually cite male/female interactions as one of Jordan's main weaknesses. Far, far too much of it boils down to men inadvertantly slighting the women, with the women calling them woolyheaded and stalking off in a huff.
It also has the best villian cast I've read in general. There are plenty of misunderstood but fundementally decent people who oppose Rand or what's supposed to happen for understandable reasons. The nobles he pushes around, Gawyn (wanker still, but yeah), Elaida.. all aren't good people, but have reasons for doing what they do. That goes through the nastier, the self centered, all the way to the outright disgusting but not evil, like most Whitecloaks and the Seanchan. It gives every one of those points of view in the books, even if briefly. It helps to shed light on the motivations of the characters. In some cases it's nothing more than confirming the reader's thoughs. The other times.. see above. This doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of true evil characters. The forsaken are outright evil by any definition, mass murderers and destroyers. They also aren't all 'rar evil', they think thinks through, make mistakes, and certainly bring an interesting view of things. Hell, one even loves the main character and even gets pushed around by him some. Stupid? Yeah, but it makes for good reading.
The villain cast never really stood out to me. I recall the focus overwhelmingly being on Rand and company (this isn't innately bad, just my recollection). Most of the villains melt together into a "Rawr, power-hungry" blur by this point. More on this later.
Standard but good light fantasy reading is something like Salvatore's Drizzt novels. Even though there are a billon dark elves in everquest now, no one is going to define the books as great reading or truly earth shaking in spite of the sales. It's a mostly static world with characters that change.. some, but not too much. They adventure, overcome problems, etc etc. This changes a bit in later books, but the basic formula is the same. As for what I'd define as bad fantasy? Dragonlance. Yuck. I loved the books when I was younger, but they should have been stoppeafter the twins arc. Even that is flawed outside of some character interaction, thanks to a worthless main (Thanks Tanis, there's a reason you're barely in the series after the orginial three novels) and a largely boring world.
Haven't read any of the Drizz't stuff and don't have much interest in doing so. I pretty much avoid anything adhering to the standard humans/elves/dwarves breakdown these days. I lack faith in the ability of most people to convincingly write non-humans (it's hard enough for most people to nail believable human psychology). Too easy to slide into one-dimensional tropes or just write them as "people but slightly different." There are exceptions, but not enough of them (if you have good, original examples, let me know. By "original," I mean authors writing in worlds of their own design. I don't have much interest in seeing someone write in a setting they didn't create, unless it was part of some collaborative project to begin with).
Wholly agreed on Dragonlance stuff, and pretty much anything franchised. Bottom rung of the genre without question. Weis & Hickman stuff was fun when I was a kid, but that's about it.
He very much has a style. I'm not sure where you're getting that from? Go read generic DnD novels and come back to me with comments like that. His novels are written fairly simply, which I don't mind. They also have a lot of depth depending on how you read. If you put together context clues you can piece together a hell of a lot of what's happening before it's outright said in the books. The way it's handled content wise is something I also approve of. Rape, sex, and violent stuff in general happens but it doesn't get described in detail. Example of this would be Mogheiden's rape at the hands of Shadar Hardin in Path of Daggers, or any of the torture scenes. These are usually in a way to get the horror across without revelling in it or being too graphic.
The basic style is written for teens. A lot of the depth of the series is something you pick up later and on rereads, along with the worst of the darker subtones.
I think you've pretty much nailed it with that bolded sentence there. I'm not a teenager. Should I approach the series with different standards since I'm apparently not the target audience? That's special pleading and short-circuits the entire discussion (not that that would be entirely a bad thing--I'm typing way too much at work). All I can do is approach it the way I do everything else. I draw a distinction between "style I don't like" and "not actually good writing," and Jordan falls on the far side of that. It really stood out with Path of Daggers, after a couple years of waiting for a new installment in the series (and a couple years of personal growth in college). I'm talking about the actual quality of the prose here, words used, phrasing, etc. His descriptions are painfully repetitive. This isn't a style point to me; it's just being uncreative. It
can be used to inject flavor into a setting, but Jordan badly overuses it. At the very least, hearing the same expressions over and over becomes wearisome in a series this long.
Also, I must note that depth showing up mostly on rereads is bad news for a 10+ volume series averaging 800 pages or more per installment. It shouldn't be necessary, and when it takes that much time to find "depth" (the definition of which varies by individual, of course, but these are your words) something's badly wrong with the pacing of the series.
Which brings us to the really crippling problem with Wheel of Time: the appalling lack of pacing and plot movement in the later installments. Path of Daggers in particular was unforgivable and caused me to drop the series. Whether by design to stretch out the series (stunts like resurrecting the dead Forsaken make me consider this a possibility), or through simply getting lost amidst his own web of subplots, the feeling of making genuine progress died somewhere around book seven or eight. A prologue should not be seventy-five pages long, no matter how complicated the plot.
I'm told things have picked up in the last couple books (Saidin being cleansed, etcetera), but I can't bring myself to care any more. Readers should not have to slog through sixteen hundred pages loaded with the minor intrigues of forgettable secondary characters to get to the important stuff. You can say "It got better after that," and this might be true, but it doesn't matter. A lull like that shouldn't happen in the first place and it totally killed what interest I had left in the series. This is the most important point to get across, because it totally overwhelmed anything he'd done right in my eyes. WoT wore out its welcome and lost me for good.
Jordan – a kindly, courteous man – stood up well to such slights, and defended a genre that he felt made it possible “to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face”. “So often in mainstream fiction there are no real value judgments,” he told one interviewer. “. . . Mainstream literature is often the literature of depression for the depressed, written by the depressed and read by the depressed. My characters have a difficult time, they are aware that there is something called ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and they have to struggle to figure out which is which. Morality in mainstream fiction is an amorphous lump of grey.”
Commendable, but having an actual embodiment of evil in WoT blunts the edge of this somewhat. Certainly most of the scenes with villains that I recall mostly boil down to their actions being based on unenlightened self-interest and basic greed. How diverse can a villain's motives really be when they're serving the root of all evil? From what I recall, not very. I remember being intrigued by the one who jumped sides in Crown of Swords (Asmodean? Was that the dude), but he gets killed pretty much immediately afterwards. Main characters and supporting villains are better than the Forsaken, yeah, but still not as far into shades of gray as I like to see (Jordan's still better at it than schlubs like Brooks and Eddings, though).
And his legacy? Jordan kept in contact with his fans to the end, bedeviling them with thousands of RAFO comments (Usually about who killed Asmodean. It was Grendeal, but that's not important). He responded to every critic in a civil fashion and treated his fans and the genre well, something Rowling hasn't always done. Even at his sickest he had his cousin post updates about his health and told his fans about progress in his novels.
This is cool and gives him bonus points in regards to being a decent human being. It doesn't affect my perception of the books at all, though.
His novels make the characters take moral stances without beating you over the head with it or making them saints. One of the major themes of his writing that comes out in his comments from his fans is that he even with the sometimes boggling detail he puts into his works there is plenty to still figure out. A sharp reader can pin down exactly where Semirhage is five books before she actually is revealed or can figure out what happened to Moiraine and Asmodean by book 6 at the latest or where Mesaana is by book 10 at the latest, revealing a Black Ajah travelling with Nyaneve and Elyane three books early, etc. These aren't things that make or break the series, but it does provide a nice layer to things. It goes back to treating his readers with respect and giving them clues but not telling them outright.
If anything, there's too much in the way of minor characters. Far too many to keep track of, and not enough work put in to make all of them memorable. I remember reading the prologue to Path of Daggers and just going "Who are these people?" My impression here--and this goes for a lot of things about WoT--is that the kind of detail I want to see has been sacrificed for epic scope.
But how he encouraged his fans and helped revive the genre is important. He was -hugely- successful as a fantasy writer during a time when almost nothing for fantasy was selling besides for Salvatore's Drizzt novels and the horseshit that was Dragonlance.
I'm just wondering, do we know this for a fact? If we're talking about something measurable, like comparitive sales, statistics are nice.
