It’s official: Wheel of Time is finally being adapted. More than 27 years after the debut of the series’ first book, The Eye of the World, and four years after the final, A Memory of Light, Robert Jordan’s sprawling fantasy novels have a production studio and a showrunner. That’s not a lot to go on, but we’re already getting excited about the Wheel of Time’s potential.
If you’re among the unfortunate few who haven’t yet read the full series, we’ve got you covered. To be fair, it is incredibly long and the middle books kind of sag, so it’s understandable if you’re not caught up. If that’s the case, or if you just need a refresher since turning the last page in 2013, here’s everything you need to know about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.
The Wheel of Time isn’t some dinky young adult fantasy-light fiction you can read in an afternoon. The series spans 14 dense, meaty thousand-page tomes that delve -- in great, sometimes painful detail -- into every facet of this world.
If you prefer your fantasy gets straight into the action, Wheel of Time might not be for you. But if you appreciate some fantastical fiction that goes deep on the politics, history and power struggles of a world comparable in scale to Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, then strap in and enjoy.
The story of the Wheel of Time spans multiple eras and generations, but focuses around the battle between a great hero known as the Dragon and an evil entity known as the Dark One. They’re fated to face off in a confrontation known as the Last Battle that will determine the fate of the world. It’s an age old cycle that’s been repeated countless times as the Dragon is continuously reborn, age after age. History repeats itself, because time is like a wheel (get it?).
Eons before the main story in the Wheel of Time begins, the last Dragon defeated the Dark One, who as his final act tainted the magical source of the Dragon’s power, causing all male magic-users -- called Aes Sedai -- to be driven mad. Throughout the subsequent millennia any males able to wield magic were hunted down and eliminated, which makes things complicated when the Dragon is Reborn again generations later into a world in which only females are allowed to wield the power.
That’s where series protagonist Rand al’Thor comes in. As a simple farmer’s son he leads an idyllic life until a pair of mysterious and possibly dangerous travelers arrive in his small village. He’ll soon discover that he can wield the power of the Aes Sedai, throwing his life and the lives of his friends into chaos.
In many ways Wheel of Time follows traditional fantasy tropes to the letter, from the country boy-turned-hero to the ancient evil threatening the world for no reason other than: It’s evil. But over the series’ 14 books there’s so much nuance and drama, so many characters and such huge, memorable action scenes and set pieces, that the overarching story becomes just a small part of what Wheel of Time is really about.
It’s a tragic story, and one that all fans of in-progress epics quietly fear: The author of The Wheel of Time died before finishing his magnum opus. Robert Jordan, real name James Oliver Rigney, Jr., passed away in 2007 from a rare disease called amyloidosis while still in the middle of writing the final Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light.
It was a terrible loss that hit the series’ fan community hard. But Jordan’s life work didn’t go unfinished: His wife and editor, Harriet McDougal, and fantasy author Brandon Sanderson took up the gargantuan task of finishing the Wheel of Time, deciding with the series’ publisher to divide the unwieldy remainder of the story (part of the reason the last book had taken so long to finish) into three final books, which came out in 2009, 2010, and 2013, respectively.
If nothing else convinces you that Wheel of Time belongs up there with the greatest fantasy series of all time, maybe the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) author George R.R. Martin is a fan of Jordan’s writing will help. In a blog post following Jordan’s death in 2007, Martin wrote that “his huge, ambitious WHEEL OF TIME series helped to redefine the genre, and opened many doors for the writers who followed. ”
Martin even included multiple tributes to Jordan in his books. In A Storm of Swords, book three of A Song of Ice and Fire, Tyrion Lannister mentions a “Lord Trebor Jordayne of the Tor,” a reference to Robert Jordan and his publisher, Tor; and in book four, A Feast for Crows, another character remarks that “Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again, he said.”
There’s a lot we don’t yet know about the Wheel of Time adaptation, but it has the potential to be truly great. And with the series not even in production yet, you have plenty of time to start catching up.
Mike Rougeau is a freelance writer who lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend and two dogs. Follow him on Twitter at @RogueCheddar.
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