the end of the wheel of time

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 . . .

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in blogging, fiction, history/myth, internet, life. Tags: fantasy, plotters vs pantsters, Robert Jordan, Robert Jordan's writing techniques, the end of the wheel of time, the internet as a resource. Leave a Comment »

Figuring Out the End of The Wheel of Time

January 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday I wrote about parts of the Wheel of Time that should have been edited out or at least shortened considerably.

One of those story lines involved the hero rescuing a nation from an evil king who’d usurped the throne while the daughter heir was off doing other things. In addition, the hero twice conquered another nation. He intended both countries to be ruled by the daughter heir who would have been the rightful heir under normal circumstances. But because he said he was “giving” her those thrones, there was a huge furor since she claimed they were hers by right. Except they weren’t hers by right any longer. He’d conquered both nations. He could have put anyone in charge as he did with other nations where he defeated the evil rulers. But she was angry at him because of that word: give. Sure, she didn’t want people to think she was his puppet and so she needed to gain the crown on her own by having the ladies and lords vote for her. But there they were, on the brink of a cosmic catastrophe, and she worried about them thinking she was a puppet? It seems to me that if all existence were at stake, that would be a minor issue. Certainly not one worth tens of thousands of words.

What makes the whole thing even sillier is that the city, Caemlyn, was a Camelot equivalent. (In the King Arthur Legend, The Battle of Camlaan was the climax to his rule.) So it might have made sense, perhaps, to waste time on a plotline that went nowhere if only to establish the importance of that city, except that the very first casualty of the cosmic battle was Caemlyn. So at that point it mattered not who ruled.

It surprises me that I ever bothered to read these books in the first place, and I probably never would have if I hadn’t been laid up at the time and desperately needed something to read. Then, when I realized what the books were with all their real-world references, not just homages to previous series, like The Lord of the Rings, but a retelling of the King Arthur tale as well as dozens of other myths and legends from around the world, I got interested in finding all the subtext. Then, when I found out how terrible the ending was, I decided to try to figure out the real ending. Which is where I am now. But sheesh. All that verbiage! Luckily, I know how to skim, and I am not at all adverse to skipping huge sections. (The seventh book took me two or three days to read. The eighth took me two or three hours.)

I am finding bits, though, that would have made the ending more interesting. The most obvious would be to have accepted that most of the characters had already reached the end of their arc and were ready for the last battle. In one case, the substitute author repeated an entire character arc. In another case, he simply undid the arc, erased the character’s growth and his acceptance of responsibility, and returned him back to his immature ways with no further development.

Another thing that should have been addressed is that at one point, the kings and queens of the northern nations all decided to head south with their armies. They did not like what the hero was doing to the southern nations, not realizing he was rescuing those nations from the forces of the Dark One, and they didn’t want the same thing to happen to them. So they decided to do something about it. The subtext (and even Robert Jordan alluded to it) was that this displacement was part of the dark side’s plan, and was helping to further disrupt the forces of the light. This coalition was going after the hero, and the whole thing was so hush-hush, that they were ready to kill anyone who found out or who got in their way. Not exactly a peaceful mission. By this time in the books, it’s obvious that nothing happens by coincidence, and yet combined, this northern coalition ended up with thirteen Aes Sedai (the women power wielders, who some called witches). And thirteen Aes Sedai, when linked could destroy the hero, no matter how strong he was against them individually.

And yet, despite this, the rather weak reason given during the substitute ending was that they were there to test the hero to see if it was okay for him to fight the Last Battle. Um, yeah. If this were true, all they’d have to do was send an envoy, asking for an audience. Instead, they took a force of 200,000 as well as all those Aes Sedai to deal with him. And if they found him unworthy and killed him, they would have doomed the entire cosmos to the dark side. Definitely sounds like a plan made by the evil ones.

Even sillier, they were acting on a so-called prophesy that had been handed down by word of mouth for 3,000 years, negating one of Robert Jordan’s themes, which is based on the game of Whisper, or Telephone, or Gossip, whatever it was called in your part of the country. In the game, someone passes a secret to the next person, who passes on what they heard to the next person, and in the end, what results is generally nothing much like what was originally said. His point was that things change over the centuries, that stories change, that names change. So the chance that this prophesy, passed down orally through the millennium, would be the same at the end as at the beginning isn’t that great.

Even worse, though this army that had been manipulated by the dark side to leave their lands could have become a great disrupter at the last battle, instead the substitute author brought in a devil-ex-machina — an entire hitherto unknown army of dark friends.

I’m thinking I’ll eventually give up my idea of figuring out the real ending (for me just to decipher, not to write). Until then, it is rather an interesting puzzle. If I can get through all the scenes that should have been edited out, that is.