The Death of Jordan!

Robert Jordan is dead.

A whole lot of you will not have a clue who he was or what he was famous for. Any fantasy fan will however know and react with shock at the news. Any aspiring fantasy author will feel the loss particularly hard and it becomes doubly worse if you are a fan of his very popular 11-book Wheel Of Time Fantasy Series.

And the funny thing is that he died almost a month ago and I only just knew of it today. SO much for being a 'real' fan of his work.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (Robert Jordan was his pen name) was a collossus of the fantasy genre. Eight of his WoT eleven books made into onto the New York times best-seller list and one of the riders on the books was, "Jordan has come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal..." or something to that effect.

Since 1990 when the first book in the WoT series was published, Jordan has been praised and villified in equal measure. I was one of those who thought that he had dragged out the story for too long trying to milk the rave reviews the series was getting. I had complained on this very blog that it seemed like he eventually lost the plot as Book 11 was to put it midly, "a lot of verbal diarrhoea..." Imagine an 800 page book covering the events of only one day!!! And advancing the whole plot by maybe... or actually barely advancing the plot at all!

And now he has gone and died on us. I am ashamed to admit that when he announced in 2006 that he had cardiac amyloidosis (an extremely rare disease), I sincerely thought it was part of the hype to try and ensure sales of the twelfth and final book would be high!

I have all 11 books in the series AND the prequel as well. And it has been announced that his wife who is also his editor and his publishers have enough notes and audio prompts to finish the twelfth book just the way Jordan would have wanted. Without him being there... Gosh!

Adieu, Mr Jordan. Perhaps someday when I get my page on wikipedia... it will be able to state that you were one of the big influences on my work.

"May you shelter in the palm of the Creator's hand, and may the last embrace of the mother welcome you home."