The Wheel of Time

Overview

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend." Every volume of Robert Jordan's saga opens with some version of that line, and every volume begins with the wind. Between January 15, 1990, when Tor Books published The Eye of the World, and January 8, 2013, when A Memory of Light appeared, the series grew to fourteen novels and a prequel, outlived its creator, and became the defining "doorstopper" epic of the 1990s — the series against which every later multi-volume fantasy, from A Song of Ice and Fire to The Stormlight Archive, would be measured.

Origins

Robert Jordan was the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr., a South Carolinian, Vietnam veteran and nuclear engineer who had written historical novels (the first for McDougal's Popham Press) and Conan pastiches for Tor. He conceived The Wheel of Time as an epic that would blend Tolkien's structure with Arthurian legend and ideas drawn from Eastern philosophy, especially the notion of cyclical time. His wife, Harriet McDougal, was his editor at Tor. The early covers by Darrell K. Sweet, crowded with farm youths and cloaked riders, became instantly recognizable in bookstores.

The story

The Eye of the World opens in Emond's Field, an isolated village in the Two Rivers, when monstrous Trollocs attack on Winternight. The Aes Sedai Moiraine and her Warder Lan spirit away three young men — Rand al'Thor, Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara — and two young women, Egwene and Nynaeve. One of the boys, it emerges, is the Dragon Reborn, a reincarnated hero destined to fight the Dark One at the Last Battle and, prophecy says, to break the world again.

The opening echoes the Shire so closely that early readers complained. But the series soon opens into something distinct: a vast political chessboard of nations and factions, a Hard & soft magic systems divided into male and female halves of the One Power, and a male half tainted so that every man who channels goes mad. Rand's struggle with that madness, and the women of the White Tower who fear and try to control him, gave the saga its enduring tension. The middle volumes grew notoriously slow, and fans named the stretch around books eight to ten "the slog."

Reception & impact

The series was a runaway commercial success; books eight through fourteen each reached No. 1 on the New York Times list, and total sales exceeded 90 million copies by 2021. Its scale reshaped publishing expectations: epics were now expected to run to many volumes of 800 pages or more.

The saga crossed into games early. Legend Entertainment's The Wheel of Time (1999) was a first-person shooter built on the Unreal engine, in which players wield ter'angreal as Aes Sedai. In 2001 Wizards of the Coast published the Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game, one of the early licensed settings on the d20 System — a pairing that shows how quickly the new open game engine was used to bring bestselling fiction to the gaming table.

Legacy

Jordan was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis in 2006 and died on September 16, 2007, leaving extensive notes and dictated material for the final book. In December 2007 McDougal chose Brandon Sanderson, a younger novelist whose eulogy for Jordan had moved her, to finish it. The planned single volume became three: The Gathering Storm (2009), Towers of Midnight (2010) and A Memory of Light (2013). In 2014 the entire series was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, an unusual recognition of a completed work as one story.

Amazon's television adaptation, starring Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, premiered in 2021, ran three seasons and was cancelled on May 23, 2025. The books, meanwhile, remain complete and continually in print — a fantasy megaseries that actually finished, which in this genre is itself a kind of legend.