Volume 13 of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time

With only a few more weeks to go before the release of Jordan/Sanderson's The Gathering Storm (Canada, USA, Europe), Brandon Sanderson just announced the title of the next WoT installment.

This from the author's LiveJournal:

As for that book . . . well, it's time for it to have a title. We've been calling it Shifting Winds up until this point, but that was never intended to be the final title. After a long round of conversations with Tor and Harriet, we settled on TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT as the title. There are various reasons for this, which I'll go into more once the book is out next year. I'm pleased, however, as this was the title I suggested. It's actually appropriate in an interesting way. Harriet was the one who came up with the name for the first of the three, and the second one gets the title I proposed. And so, we will (as I've been saying for a while) use Mr. Jordan's title for the final of the three, A MEMORY OF LIGHT.

I thought for a while on that last choice. If you've been following along these last couple of years, you know that my original intention was for this to be one book. When it was split, I still wanted it to be one book in name, in an attempt to honor Mr. Jordan's wishes that it be one book. (I still plan to suggest an omnibus edition at a later point, but the three books together will probably be too long for that to be an option.) Anyway, I was going to have A MEMORY OF LIGHT be the title (along with a subtitle) for each of the three books. When that fell through, I was left thinking on my next step.

Mr. Jordan named the final book A MEMORY OF LIGHT. It's one of the things we have from him, and I wanted very badly to use it. But at the same time, he named the three books AMOL, and I wondered if it wouldn't be better to let fans think of them as AMOL together, never using the title itself in case we managed to get that omnibus done. In the end, however, I decided that the title was simply too good not to use. I can't count on that omnibus, and I feel that using the title on the last third of the book is the best way to honor Mr. Jordan's wishes. It wasn't an easy decision, and some will disagree with it. But it is what we're going to do. So, the three books are:

THE GATHERING STORM
TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT
A MEMORY OF LIGHT

You guys all know how pissed I am that A Memory of Light has been split into three volumes. Still, Towers of Midnight is a cool title, especially since it appears that there should be a certain focus on the Seanchan.

And unless you are living in a cave somewhere, you should be aware that you can now purchase the prologue from The Gathering Storm here.

9 commentaires:

Anonymous said...

How cheezy. Like I'm going to pay money for a prologue. They're just milking this cash cow as much as they can.

Adam Whitehead said...

I think the practice is decidedly dubious, but they've done it for every book from PATH OF DAGGERS onwards, so at least it's consistently dubious.

Dave said...

I agree with you about selling the prologue, Ive never bought one in advance before but It's been so long since ive read WOT I thought what the hell its only 3 bucks. The prologue was only about 32 pages and not much interesting stuff really happens ... I'm never doing that again.

Unknown said...

3 bucks? Nutty. Thats almost half a mass market. Weak.

Anonymous said...

By no means am I a fantasy book expert. However, I've tried to read a wide spectrum of authors to fully appreciate the genre which I enjoy so much. Robert Jordan is by far the worst author I've read, past or present. What is the deal with all the hyperbole about him? The covers of his books are also profoundly gay.

Unknown said...

@ Anonymous:
Well, its all about what you like. Me, I find RJ prose nice. I enjoy his detours and lengthy blar, blar. It might not move the plot forward, but helps in sustaining the world he's created.
In contrast find Eriksson, who is a fan fav, rather messy. I struggle to follow his books -- not due to complicated plotlines -- and loose interest rather quickly as he continuously has to create even more and more powerful characters to keep his telling going (or to ascend old ones before they get minced to pieces by pretty much anybody that passes by). But I will not call him a bad author, never that, few good authors could accomplish what he has, I just not enjoy his stile.

Anonymous said...

Same person who posted @ 11:34PM.

The main thing I don't like is how he spend 20 pages building a specific dilemma, then resolve it in 3 sentences like it is worthless. It's like reading gibberish. Not to mention the critics' quotes on the cover of vl. #1. "Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal." NY Times. Biggest load of BS I have ever heard. Almost derails the NY Times of any validity they have ever established.

CyndiF said...

Jordan wasn't bad (if not particularly good) in the first few books until it was clear that he had allowed the story to spin completely out of his control. Jordan must bear responsibility for creating the endless series as cash cow model that caused me to drop G.R.R. Martin (a better author) after 3 books once it was clear that he too was unwilling to engage in actual plotting.

Anonymous said...

Cindi

Agreed about Martian. It's been over a year now. I know that he is really cool about responding to fans' e-mail and all. But the way he is milking this set is utterly redic. Pat shouldn t incourage him to watch football more. I think he is a bigger fan of the NY Giants then his is of books. Lol

11:34PM Guy