So Turns the Wheel

March 10, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So here’s something I don’t understand about the publishing decisions for the end of the Wheel of Time.

They chose an author based on a memorial he wrote for Robert Jordan, but that piece was more about how Jordan had been a big influence on him in his own writing career rather than about Jordan’s books. Admittedly, the memorial was a paean to Jordan’s writing and to the saga as a whole, but though he called himself a big fan, he barely knew the books. And he certainly didn’t seem to comprehend the characters or where they were going.

I do understand they wanted a proven author yet one who wasn’t so big that he couldn’t take the time to work on the ending of Jordan’s books, but even so, the writer they chose didn’t have the time to spend rereading the books or going through the notes that had been gathered for him because he had his other deadlines to meet.

Still, a major factor with the Wheel of Time, is that the books and the internet were more or less born at the same time and attracted the same age group. So there were many thousands of people who’d lived with the books their whole lives. While waiting for a new book to be published, they spent millions of words on hundreds of sites discussing the books and their theories of what they thought would happen. Some of these people gave brilliant analyses of the characters and the culture. One fellow in particular, a college student who was majoring in comparative religions, wrote reams of essays and had insights that gave him a major following.

So getting to what I don’t understand — with that amazing resource at their fingertips (literally at their fingertips since they’d be typing on a keyboard), why didn’t they use it?

They could have started discussions asking what loose ends there were in the myriad plots, asking about where they thought the characters should go and what they should do, asking what they’d most like to see at the end, asking about what needed clarification, asking what things that were foreshadowed still needed to happen, asking . . . well, asking just about anything. With all those thousands of people ready to discuss everything to do with the Wheel of Time, there’d be no need for the substitute to reread the books or go through notes that made sense only to Jordan himself. If nothing else, it would have been a good starting place. And the books would actually have been a continuation of Jordan’s story instead of filled with new characters and revamped long-standing characters because the substitute wanted to . . . actually, I don’t know what he wanted to do. Make the books his own, perhaps.

It’s funny that almost no one will criticize any of those last three books. I have no idea why they are so sacrosanct except that maybe people were glad to have any ending. Oddly, the bits of criticism that are let through the barrier of protection are blamed on Jordan, even though the points in question were completely the creation of the substitute author. Also, in one book of Jordan’s, the timeline wasn’t kept straight (the story for each POV character started at the same place, giving the book a feeling of repetition), which he later said he regretted. And so did his fans. They sure dumped on him for that! Yet when the substitute skewed his own timeline in one book so badly that he had a character in two places at once and another who was in a different timeline than the characters he met up with, no one said a single word.

I suppose, in the end it doesn’t matter. No one else cares, obviously. Nor will I once I forget those books completely. As it is now, I feel an itch every time I see something in Jordan’s work that was mangled by the substitute. For example, Jordan explained how one magical machine worked on its own to project a character into scenarios based on the character’s fears, and yet the substitute had people working the machine to create horrific scenarios for the one being tested in the machine. Nothing major. Just itchable.

It’s possible no one could have finished the series properly. The more I see all the foreshadowing that appears in Jordan’s work several books before the foreshadowed event, or find hints of wry humor and ironies that won’t be understood until later, or see minor characters that are threaded throughout the saga, or marvel at the subtleties as well as all that goes on beneath the surface, or understand that something that seemed to be a win for the side of Light was actually a win for the Dark, the more I am astounded by what Jordan was able to keep in his head. I had a hard enough time keeping the 100,000 words in each of my own books straight. (In one case, I had to use a bulletin board and hundreds of tiny pieces of paper each containing a bit of information to figure out the timeline.) I can’t imagine keeping millions of words and thousands of characters and hundreds of plotlines in my head. Nor can I imagine doing all this in a world of my own creation. (Long before I’d ever heard of the Wheel of Time, I considered creating my own fantasy world for a book or series of books, but I gave it up since I have a hard enough time imagining the real world, let alone a fake one.)

His writing technique probably precluded any other author, too, since he was both what is known as a pantster (one who writes by the seat of his pants, who creates and discovers the story as he is writing) and a plotter (one who outlines, who knows the story before he writes).

It amuses me to think we had that in common — that we both had major points we wanted to hit as well as an end to aim for, but the journey to get there wasn’t plotted out. But the rest of it? Keeping all those words and characters and worlds in one’s head? That’s not me, for sure!

Just one more thing for me to puzzle out when it comes to these books — not just what he wrote, but how he wrote.

None of this, of course, helps me with my own writing because I’m pretty sure I don’t have another book in me, nor does it help me to understand . . . much of anything, actually.

Which brings me full circle to the beginning of this article where I mention that there’s something I don’t understand.

And so turns the wheel . . .