Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

THOMAS GROSSNICKLE

THOMAS GROSSNICKLE

Where did the idea of the Wheel of Time come from?

If you mean simply the concept of time as a wheel, that comes from the Hindu religion, though many cultures have or had a cyclical view of the nature of time. If you mean the books, then the idea came from many things. From wondering what it really would be like to be tapped on the shoulder and told, "You were born to save mankind. And, by the way, you’re supposed to die in the end, it seems." I wondered what a world might be like where the feminist movement was never necessary simply because no one is surprised to see a woman as a judge or ruler, a wagon driver or a dock hand. There’s still some surprise at a woman as a soldier—a matter of upper body strength, and weapons that need upper body strength—but by and large, the question of a woman not being able to do a job just doesn’t arise. I wondered what it wold be like if the "wise outsider" arrived in a village and said, "You must follow me on a great quest," and the people there reacted the way people really react when a stranger shows up and offers to sell them beachfront property at incredibly low prices. I wondered about the source of legends, about how events are distorted by distance—either spatial or temporal—about how any real events that might have led to legends would probably be completely unrecognizable to us. This is getting entirely too involved, so let’s just say that the books grew out of forty-odd years of reading everything I could get my hands on in any and every subject that caught my interest.

Question

Robert Jordan

Question

Robert Jordan

Question

Robert Jordan

All:

The dynamic duo has returned from the Mayo with mostly good, but certainly mixed results. Amyloidal deposits are measured as monoclonal free light chain fragments. There are "good and bad" light chains. The good news is that the ratio of good to bad has definitely improved. The mixed news is that both numbers were up. We are ecstatic that the news is positive, but would have liked the offending Lambda light chains to have stayed level or decreased in number. Overall though guys, this is very good news.

The computer has been relocated from the office to the house and RJ was working, some. Not right now though guys. In preparation for the trip, the docs pulled him off of Lasix, a diuretic, which resulted in a gain of almost 12 pounds in three days. At the Mayo, he went back on the Lasix and dropped 5 pounds in 2 days. Then the Lasix was stopped for the trip back home and a gain of 7 pounds was achieved. Through it all, RJ figures he has about 20 to 25 pounds of excess water on him at the moment. The extra weight was causing the difficulty in sleeping he described to you before. Result: the docs have him back on the Lasix to get rid of the water weight and have enforced strict rest. Sorry, no writing, not even on the blog at the moment. He is reading your posts however.

He hit me with something on the phone today that I never knew about. Like many soldiers, he had a nickname while serving in Vietnam. RJ overheard a group discussing something and one said they should ask Ganesh what to do. He walked into the discussion and asked who this Ganesh was. "You.", they told him. You see, RJ was considered a good luck charm by those he served with. He and the crews he served with always made it back. It got to where pilots would ask for him by name for their crew. Ganesh is the Hindu Lord of Good Fortune. RJ referred to Ganesh as the Remover of Obstacles. To this day, he has no idea who gave him the name. I still consider him my good luck charm. Heck, he brought Harriet into my life. A man can't get any luckier than that. Truth be known, both of us married above our station. Bitter truth guys, we all do.

To Sue fighting the same menace, prayers go both ways. Stay the course.

To Johannes in Sweden, when RJ recovers and revisits your beautiful country, hopefully you'll get the chance to chat with him about both his worlds.

To Jennifer Sedai, Harriet is all you said and more. Elegant, intelligent, a worker not a watcher, interesting and interested, a friend to all, a hell of a cook, a gardener extraordinaire, unpretentious, the defender and provider of those in need, tough, tender and above all, REAL. My life is better for having her in it. Know I'm not speaking out of turn, RJ's is too.

To all of you who've asked me to pass on your love to them both, done and will continue. Please don't stop. Long live the Dragon and his Queen!

Wilson
Brother-Cousin, 4th of 3

What about this notion of time as a wheel? Is that your idea?

No. It's not mine. It is from Hindu mythology that time is a wheel. But actually, most eastern cultures believed that time was circular. The Greeks gave us the great gift of believing that time was linear. And that's a great gift because if time is circular, if everything repeats in cycles, then change is impossible. No matter what you do, it's always going to come back to what is here. But if time is linear, then change is possible. But I wanted the circularity because I wanted, again, to go into the changes by distance. So, the myths and legends and a few of the stories that these people tell, well, some of them are based on our own current events, on the present. What they are doing is based on our myths and legends. So they are the source of our myths and legends, and we are the source of theirs.

Magic Sword ex Machina

Let me tackle the question about deus ex machinas. (Dei ex machinae? Dang, I've taken either too much or too little Latin.) Could such a thing work in modern fantasy, and how?

Yes, I think it could. But you're running into the middle of the intersection of fiction and reality. And you know what can happen when you run into an intersection.

To answer the question requires context (which you probably know, Brandon, but is relevant for those who haven't studied this).

One paragraph infodump: The Greeks of the fifth century BC believed in many gods, and they believed those gods intervened in real life (especially with the heroes who were so often the gods' own kids). The original plays happened during a religious festival. So part of the point of the drama (as my Classics prof explained it) was that humans make a huge mess—and need the gods to come straighten things out. Thus, the Athenians get rid of the endless cycle of personal retributive justice (you-killed-my-family-member-so-I-must-kill-you-so-your-family-must-kill-me) in the Oresteia only through Athena's intervention and establishment of the rule of law. (She sticks the Furies into the ground beneath Athens, if I remember correctly.) Intractable problem solved.

We don't believe in Athena (sorry, neo-pagans, but generally...), so reading that ending is interesting metaphorically and sociologically and historically. But it is much less interesting to us dramatically. And it doesn't fill us with religious awe. We're just not going to express a heartfelt, "Thank you Athena for sparing me!" (Stop me before I talk catharsis and Aristotle's Poetics here. No really, stop me!)

A deus ex machina written now runs into entirely different audience expectations. It just looks like the author cheating. "Hmm, the way I've set things up, the good guy will die, but I don't want that. So... magic sword!"

I think there are only a couple routes you could use if you really wanted to write a modern day deus ex machina that worked. First, you could set up a fantasy world in which the gods do regularly intervene and play favorites, and where mortals need them. It could be done well. However, at the end of that book, you're still not going to get religious awe from your audience. I think you can get everything else.

So I think the only way to have the full effect that Aeschylus got would be to write your epic fantasy specifically for a particular religious audience: set up your deus as a Hindu goddess for a Hindu audience and then have her act in ways consistent with what they believe is her character. Or a Christian God for a Christian audience, or what have you. I guess the limiter here would be that you'd have to choose a religion which believes in an intervenient God. Deists, you're hosed.

Is that success?

We have a strong rationalist thread in fantasy right now, a demand that the magic system be explained and consistent so that the author doesn't cheat at the end. If magic figures importantly to the plot, we want it stitched in there like a good mystery: all the hints were there for us to figure it out for ourselves, we just didn't put it together. There's an intellectual pleasure to it: Well played, Mr. Sanderson! Compare that to the magic of Tolkien's Gandalf. The guy is treated like he can pull mountains down on your head, but mostly he just uses the Magic Staff Flashlight. Come on, Tolkien, how about a chart of what the Rings of Power do? The people demand a graph!

(Tomorrow, I'll hit your second post regarding short chapters and what is clearly your tragically flawed view of cliffhangers.)

Most of the questions during the Q&A centered on the writing process in one way or another, either of these last three Wheel of Time books or of his other works. I had never before had a grasp on the sheer size of what Mr. Jordan had thought about and committed to (digital) paper about this series, all the details that will probably never see the light of day, until Brandon commented that his attempt to put Jordan's massive document onto his own computer resulted in it crashing after 32,000 pages. If we ever need a metric to relate how real the world Jordan created was, that is as good as it gets.

Brandon also shared the funny and idiosyncratic way Mr. Jordan would get his inspiration for names; it wasn't all just Norse and Hindu myth all the time, but apparently also everyday objects—streets in his home town (Ogier Street!), his washing machine, and random strolls through the phone book. If you've lived in Charleston in the past 23 years, who knows, you may have made an appearance as an Andoran Noble or the Old Tongue name for an Aiel warrior society!

Hi Brandon! Love your work!

Quick question: I had a hard time "hearing" the Parshendi's singing in my head while reading The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. Are there any real world examples you drew from you could give me so we have a better idea of what they sound like to you?