Wheel of Time may not finish :(

B

Blitzkrieg

Veteran XV
http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Features/03JordanLetter.html

Dear Locus,

I have been diagnosed with amyloidosis. That is a rare blood disease which affects only 8 people out of a million each year, and those 8 per million are divided among 22 distinct forms of amyloidosis. They are distinct enough that while some have no treatment at all, for the others, the treatment that works on one will have no effect whatsoever on any of the rest. An amyloid is a misshapen or misfolded protein that can be produced by various parts of the body and which may deposit in other parts of the body (nerves or organs) with varying effects. (As a small oddity, amyloids are associated with a wide list of diseases ranging from carpal tunnel syndrome to Alzheimer's. There's no current evidence of cause and effect, and none of these is considered any form of amyloidosis, but the amyloids are always there. So it is entirely possible that research on amyloids may one day lead to cures for Alzheimer's and the Lord knows what else. I've offered to be a literary poster boy for the Mayo Amyloidosis Program, and the May PR Department, at least, seems very interested. Plus, I've discovered a number of fans in various positions at the clinic, so maybe they'll help out.)

Now in my case, what I have is primary amyloidosis with cardiomyapathy. That means that some (only about 5% at present) of my bone marrow is producing amyloids which are depositing in the wall of my heart, causing it to thicken and stiffen. Untreated, it would eventually make my heart unable to function any longer and I would have a median life expectancy of one year from diagnosis. Fortunately, I am set up for treatment, which expands my median life expectancy to four years. This does NOT mean I have four years to live. For those who've forgotten their freshman or pre-freshman (high school or junior high) math, a median means half the numbers fall above that value and half fall below. It is NOT an average.

In any case, I intend to live considerably longer than that. Everybody knows or has heard of someone who was told they had five years to live, only that was twenty years ago and here they guy is, still around and kicking. I mean to beat him. I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I'm fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don't care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

My treatment starts in about 2 weeks at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where they have seen and treated more cases like mine than anywhere else in the US. Basically, it boils down to this. They will harvest a good quantity of my bone marrow stem cells from my blood. These aren't the stem cells that have Bush and Cheney in a swivet; they can only grow into bone marrow, and only into my bone marrow at that. Then will follow two days of intense chemotherapy to kill off all of my bone marrow, since there is no way at present to target just the misbehaving 5%. Once this is done, they will re-implant my bmsc to begin rebuilding my bone marrow and immune system, which will of course go south with the bone marrow. Depending on how long it takes me to recuperate sufficiently, 6 to 8 weeks after checking in, I can come home. I will have a fifty-fifty chance of some good result (25% chance of remission; 25% chance of some reduction in amyloid production), a 35-40% chance of no result, and a 10-15% chance of fatality. Believe me, that's a Hell of a lot better than staring down the barrel of a one-year median. If I get less than full remission, my doctor already, she says, has several therapies in mind, though I suspect we will heading into experimental territory. If that is where this takes me, however, so be it. I have thirty more years worth of books to write even if I can keep from thinking of any more, and I don't intend to let this thing get in my way.

Jim Rigney/Robert Jordan

Update 3 April: Information about donations for Amyloidosis research is posted here.


Cliffs:
author of Wheel of Time series is diagnosed with rare blood disease, affect only 8 out of a million on average.
Life expectancy for untreated patient is only 1 year.
Author intend to get treatment, which has median life expectancy fo 4 years.
Author's planned treatment has 10-15% chance of fatality :(

I hope he will recover and live longer than 4 years, WoT has been going downhill but I would like to see the serie finished if possible.
 
Fuck it.

Fans could probably write a better ending than he could.
 
Reprisal said:
Fuck it.

Fans could probably write a better ending than he could.
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Perhaps. It's just frustrating that he's slowing the pace down. I've bought all the books except the latest one. I'm waiting for it to be on paperback. I got hardback from Path of Daggers to Crossroad of Twilight and I felt the story did not justify another hardback purchase.

Is Knife of Dreams good enough to justify another hardback purchase?
 
hey, someone gimme cliffs on these books - i've heard a lot about them... worth getting into? why?
 
I fucking called this when I finished the 4th goddamn book. I knew that fucker was going to die, and I'd be left holding the bag, wondering what the fuck he had planned for Rand and everyone else.

He better not die...that asshat!
 
http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/jordan.crossroads.shtml

That is hilarious. It gets to the point :)

Wheel of Time is a decent serie, although the quality has definitely gone down after the first couple books (how many is subject to debate, some argued first 3, 4, 5, 6 were good while the rest going down hill, some think even later ones were good)

My personal opinion, author created a lot of characters, lots of stories meshed together so you have a lot of names to keep track of. However, the author is extremenly annoying in that he drags the story out unnecessarily long.

I like Raymond Feist's books better by comparison. Rift war, Krondor, Conclave of Shadows are good series. Good character development, plot, best of all, no story dragging so to speak :)
 
(XN)Wraith said:
I fucking called this when I finished the 4th goddamn book. I knew that fucker was going to die, and I'd be left holding the bag, wondering what the fuck he had planned for Rand and everyone else.

He better not die...that asshat!
Click to expand...

Well, in a way, we already know, right? The author dropped a lot foreshadowing hints.

Rand's gonna die, it's just a matter of time, yet that did not stop 3 pretty girls from loving him....

Egewene is going be a powerful Aes Sedai.

Matt is going to give up 1/2 of the world in order to save the world (or the other half, forgot the exact world now).

Perrin is gonna have both 2 wives.

Heck, we even know who are helping Rand to die..that Seachan woman is just the beginning.

I just wish Robert Jordan stop dragging out the story and giving us hints how the story's gonna go in the end...
 
http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/03Jordan.html

Interesting, the final volume name is "A Memory of Light". Robert Jordan already know how it starts and end when he wrote Wheel of Time Series.

Excerpts from the interviews:

“Before I start a book I always sit down and try to think how much of the story I can put into it. The outline is in my head until I sit down and start doing what I call a ramble, which is figuring how to put in the bits and pieces. In the beginning, I thought The Wheel of Time was six books and I'd be finished in six years.

“I started The Wheel of Time knowing how it began and how it all ended. I could have written the last scene of the last book 20 years ago -- the wording would be different, but what happened would be the same. When I was asked to describe the series in six words, I said, 'Cultures clash, worlds change -- cope. I know it's only five, but I hate to be wordy.' What I intended to do was a reverse-engineered mythology to change the characters in the first set of scenes into the characters in the last set of scenes, a bunch of innocent country folk changed into people who are not innocent at all. I wanted these boys to be Candides as much as possible, to be full of 'Golly, gee whiz!' at everything they saw once they got out of their home village. Later they could never go back as the same person to the same place they'd known.”

*

“In fantasy you're allowed to have at least some dividing line between good and evil, right and wrong. I really believe people want that. In so much of literature there's total moral ambiguity: good is not merely the flip side of evil, it's on the same side of the coin. Quite often you can't tell the difference between the two. If you want to talk about good and evil in mainstream literature, you do it with a nudge and a wink to show that you're really joking, but in fantasy you can say, 'This is right, this is wrong; this is good, this is evil.' OK, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, but it's worth the effort to try.

“Nobody has ever gotten up one morning and said, 'I am a villain' or 'I will be a villain.' What they say is 'I want power.' Serial killers want power, and so do rapists and a lot of other villains, but let’s stick with one sort as an example. You want power and you convince yourself that your being in power will be the best for everyone. That is the way most politicians work. But then there are the guys who say, 'I want power, and if I can convince them that it's the best for everyone, all to the good. I don't give a good goddam whether it is or not, as long as it's good for me.' He doesn't think he's a villain; he's just trying to do the best he can for himself. But he's on the road to villainy. Unfortunately, so are some of the guys who said, 'This is going to be for the best for all the people involved.' If you do what you believe is the best thing in the world and the result is you deliver millions of people into slavery, as Lenin did in Russia, are you a villain? Yes, you are.”

*

“After Knife of Dreams, there's going to be one more main-sequence Wheel of Time novel, working title A Memory of Light. It may be a 2,000-page hardcover that you'll need a luggage cart and a back brace to get out of the store. (I think I could get Tor to issue them with a shoulder strap embossed with the Tor logo, since I've already forced them to expand the edges of paperback technology to nearly a thousand pages!) Well, it probably won't be that long, but if I'm going to make it a coherent novel it's all got to be in one volume. The major storylines will all be tied up, along with some of the secondary, and even some of the tertiary, but others will be left hanging. I'm doing that deliberately, because I believe it will give the feel of a world that's still out there alive and kicking, with things still going on. I've always hated reaching the end of a trilogy and finding all of the characters', all the country's, all the world's, problems are solved. It's this neat resolution of everything, and that never happens in real life.”

*

“I've already signed contracts for an unrelated trilogy called Infinity of Heaven, which I'm very excited about. I've been poking that idea around in my head for 10 or 12 years.”

Clfifs:
Wheel of Time was originally planned to be 6 books, no wonder we all feel he is dragging the story out.
Last volume of Wheel of Time Series might be 2000 pages.
 
It is a shame that he contracted the disease but I will be very pissed if he doesn't live to finish the series because I need closure for this obsession.
 
i read the first threee...probably THE 3 worst books i've read in awhile

other than the great gasby lol of course
 
-Kapion- said:
i read the first threee...probably THE 3 worst books i've read in awhile

other than the great gasby lol of course
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uhhh

those are the only really good books in the whole series

too bad for him and his readers though. i know a lot of people that will be very sad as well as enraged if the series doesnt end.
 
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