Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

There will be at least three more books. I say at least because I've known the last scene of the last book for—

Can you tell us?

I certainly will not, I haven't told anybody. Not even my wife and that's very difficult. I could have written that scene more than fifteen years ago. That's how well I know it, exactly how this all ends.

How did you know you were going to take us on this journey?

I didn't know I was gonna take you along. All I knew was I was gonna write some stories and it helps when people would read them. And the rest of it, I don't really think I take any blame for that.

How do you know that you could've written this fifteen years ago, this last scene? What are you going to do for the next, I think, three books? We're up to eight, we'll get these three...

I'm going to do quite a bit, I hope. Don't expect me to give you any details, that's for certain. Details and you'll read the next book and say, "Oh, I know that, I know that one, I knew that one, I knew that one. Damn he's getting boring. I think I'll go out and read somebody else." So no, I'm not going to tell you what's going to happen.

How long will I have to be in love with you before then?

Could you repeat the question?

I think the question that we're most asked as book-sellers is, "when is the next one coming and how many more will there be?" And frustrated fans of yours, Robert, say, "but I'm ready for the next one," and we patiently explain the problems with writing one—

The trifle problems, yes... It takes longer to write it than to read it. As I said, at least three more books. If I can finish it in three, I will. I'm not promising. I simply know it's going to be... I cannot do it in fewer than three. And as for how long till the next book, I hope to finish it by next May and the way as things have been going, well my English publisher and my American publisher have both been having books out within two months after I've handed in the manuscript. They pay a lot of overtime.

No. I'm waiting for some contracts to catch up with me which are an option by NBC to do a mini series based on The Eye of the World with the screen writer who did NBC's Merlin. Now that's an option. It might happen, it might not happen. That's the only movie or TV activity going on. As far as the Age of Legends is concerned and going back to them, when I reach the last scene of this book I would have told the story that I wanted to tell in this world. I would have said what I wanted to say in this world. And my intention at that point is to go onto a different universe, a different world, a different set of rules, different cultures. I've been thinking about it for about five or six years now.

With the same characters?

No, certainly not. If I've done it, why do it again? That's the trap that sometimes you guys push the writer into. You say, "You know, I really liked what you've done before. Do it again." And he does. And pretty soon he's doing the same thing over and over again. Now I'll hope you'll stick with me because I've done this. When I finish it I will have done it and I will try to go on something else that is not exactly the same. I hope you'll like it.

Wouldn't be based around your physics by any chance?

Not in particular. Not to any greater degree than this is.

Yeah. It was fun, in the beginning at least. By the end... Conan is an unusual hero in that he changes. Robert Howard wrote stories in which Conan was a pre-teen boy. He wrote stories in which Conan was a white haired old man. It's not usual for that sort of hero. That's when a hero's supposed to stay the same age and stay unchanged forever. I was able to pick a period that there wasn't much said about him and do a little development, and it was fun. And then after a while it was just working in somebody else's universe and I really wanted to get out of it and go on with my own stuff.

It seems that you have a really good time while you're writing—

Oh yeah.

And we can tell you're having fun.

Look, when I was caught with one of those books in school it was confiscated as trash and I was sent to the principal's office. It was not the sort of thing I was supposed to bring in school. I could've brought softcore pornography and it wouldn't have been any worse. I could've brought hardcore pornography and it would've been much worse. So yeah, I have a lot of fun with those books.

Ahh, yeah. And I admit to making lists. I read fairly widely and...Newspapers, foreign newspapers, foreign to me, to the States. The Economist and other magazines that have stories about other countries' news stories. And I'll see a name that it isn't the name that I want but I realize if I twist it and turn it inside out and tie it into a knot, it's a name that sounds very nice. It's the name I want. The same way names out of myth and legend that in some cases are twisted or turned or changed and others aren't. I figure that most of you are far enough along that you read, that you know Rand al'Thor, al'Thor, yes he is an Arthur analog. He is also a Thor analog. Some of you might not have picked that one up yet. And Artur Hawkwing is also an Arthur analog. Because what I've tried to do is not give you any sort of retelling of myths or legends but to reverse engineer every one of them so that I can give you some version of what might have happened and then have been changed by telling and retelling and retelling and retelling into the myths and legends we have today.

On that point, the cultures from the books, would you say you've used cultures from today's society as a base for the cultures from the books?

Not a great deal from today's society, no. Not really. The Whitecloaks are based on any number of groups who knew the truth, who know the truth and they want you to believe the truth. They want you to know the truth too. And if you don't know the truth, if you don't believe the truth they'll kill ya. There's been a lot of them, all over the world. They're the basis for the Whitecloaks. The Aiel, for instance, bits of the Bedouin, bits of the Yaqui Indians, the Apaches, bits of Zulu, bits of the Northern Cheyenne, a lot of bits of my own. Some pieces out of Japan, some bits out of China. And then structure it together how these things have all...If all these things were true, all of these bits I wanted to have, and that culture lived in the middle of the desert, a very inhospitable desert, what else has to be true about these people. And thus I get the Aiel culture.

All right. The cosmography we're looking at here, is not the cosmography of here and now. The Wheel of Time is in its way a spinning wheel. The fabric of reality is woven by the threads. Those threads are the lines that are formed by people passing through time. Each person has a thread. The thread has its sole dimension in time, its life is in time. Those are the threads that are used to weave the fabric of reality. When balefire strikes a person, a thread here, it doesn't simply stop the thread there. The thread burns backwards a little bit, like you just took a thread and put a match to it and it burns up a little bit before it goes out. It depends on how hot the flame is how far it's going to burn back and what the material is opposed to. It burns up a little bit, it doesn't just catch fire on the end and go out. So that person that was hit here is burned out of the pattern back to here. What that person did between here and here was no longer done. Other people remember seeing it. They may remember the supposed effects of it but what that person did wasn't done. It didn't happen, it's not real. Now that's a little bit of a shiver on the fabric of reality as it is. The reason that there was an unofficial agreement in the War of the Shadow to not use balefire any more, to stop using it, was simply that several cities were destroyed in that way. Hundreds of thousands of threads were burnt out from the Pattern in one go and the fabric of reality began to unravel. And even the guys going for the Dark One knew that there's not a whole lot of point to winning if winning means there's nothing there to rule, nothing there to win. If you burnt out the stakes, forget it. Have I made it a little clearer I hope?

I was really referring to the scene where the wall falls on them and Rand uses balefire and they all come back to life. There's a prophecy about Mat how he was going to die and I'm not sure whether that incident is where he dies or not.

Well you're not supposed to be, are you! Once, Mat was hanging by his neck and Rand wasn't sure whether he caught a heartbeat or not. You see, the thing is Mat doesn't know. Mat thinks he's got a little ace in the hole but maybe he hasn't. Maybe he doesn't have that ace in the hole that he has a death to give yet, and still live, the way he thinks. Maybe. There's an acronym they use on the net, RAFO. Read and find out.

Nope. Not a chance. Can't do it. He can get anyone in the world to dance with him just about but he can't channel worth a darn note.

He's still young enough for it not to show up, right?

No he's not going to be... He can't channel. But if you approach him the right way he will come to your birthday party on a Harley.

Immensely.

And how do you manage the enormous pressure that must be part of your daily life?

I'm a warrior god!

Read and find out. Cheating? It isn't cheating. Remember that the Dark One is called the Lord of the Grave and the part of this whole thing is that the natural order of things is believed to be cyclic. You are born, you die, you are born again. To most of the people in this world the notion of living on forever is at least queasy making and to some considered to be an abomination. They don't want to. It would be doing something unnatural. After all, the next time you might be somebody better, somebody you like better than who you are now. You might be somebody richer or more famous or more skilled, or whatever. If you live forever under this set of beliefs, if you live forever as who you are, that's who you're stuck with. And you will never manage to top it.

Or a different gender?

Well it's possible, yeah.

You've obviously resurrected two of the forsaken as a different gender—

Have I? They send me FAQs. Frequently asked questions—FAQ. Various people will do a print out and send it to me. And I have read a couple of them, not one for several years. I'll tell you, in those FAQs, the last one I saw three or four years ago about a third of what they worked out was right and about a third of what they worked out was not right but not quite wrong, if they work on it some more... They think they've reached the end but they've not, it's like they stopped halfway. And the other third, I don't know what books they were reading.

Well he's not sure exactly how close his relationship to Elayne might be, how close his blood relationship might be. That's what he wanted to find out. He's in love with her and he'd really like to get it on with her but on the other end, he thinks he's gotta stay away from her to keep her safe. And on top of that, if she comes to stay, and god he might be related to her, and you know, how close is he? What is the relationship? He doesn't know. For all he knows there might be some way that he's as good as her brother. He's gotta find out. But he's gotta find out without letting anybody know why he wants to find out or even really that he is trying to find out.

But if he finds, because Galad is his half brother and also Elayne's half brother, won't he find anything wrong with that?

No. The way the mother-father relationship works is different. He has a blood relationship to Galad. He has no blood relationship to Elayne. None. At least not close enough to be counted by anybody except by how many lines of connection you have to the family of Andor.

The reason that Morgase got her throne was because she was the most closely related to Tigraine.

That's part of it. You gotta be closely related to put in a claim. After that it becomes political. In a way almost like... More like a republic than a democracy in that the electorate is limited. And in this case, the electorate is limited to the nobles. How many nobles can you get to support you. And she was able to get enough, finally, after something very close to a civil war to gain the throne.

Unless I think of something, or else I'm hit by lightning and a bolt from heaven and suddenly this wonderful idea forms in my head... Barring that, adios muchacho.

I think that most people probably accept that the best fantasy worlds usually take on a life of their own outside of even the author's control, so that after the author dies so long they live.

There are arrangements in my will for the kneecapping of anybody...

So you certainly wouldn't extend your consent to any other writers writing anything about—

No. No. Ah-ahh. Not a chance. Nope. Nope. Sorry.

Sure. Gavriel Kay, J. V. Jones, Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, as long as he's not writing about animals. C. S. Friedman. I read a great many people and a lot of books that aren't fantasy, I must say. I realize that no more than probably fifteen percent of what I read is fantasy or science fiction. Maybe ten.

You shouldn't do any of that reading yet, just keep writing!

Straight truth here. Straight truth here. I have to, I have to. Because if I don't read somebody else in the evening and get my mind uncoupled from the work, I lay down and spend the night just on the edge of going to sleep, thinking, "All right, a couple more minutes I'll be dozing off, I really feel like hell here." And my mind is worried and buzzing and clicking and working on the story, then it gets light outside and I haven't been to sleep. And the next day if I don't do it, the same thing happens—no sleep. And by three or four days of this I'm beginning to feel a little groggy and I'm beginning to stare at the page and realize I've lost the train of thought in the middle of the sentence. So if you will excuse me, I'm gonna read other people!

You think the male characters have the upper edge? I like this, no, no, I like this one. I've had women come up to me before anyone knew who Robert Jordan was. I've had women come up to me at signings and tell me that until they saw me they thought that Robert Jordan was a pen-name of a woman, because they assumed that no man could write women that well. I thought, okay, that's the best compliment I received on my writing that I was able to get inside the skin of women well enough to fool women. You know, it's pretty good. I have seen feminist critiques, I've seen other sorts of critiques. Some of them made my hair stand on end. I had a woman stand up and point something out to me just down in Melbourne a couple of days ago about how all my women are very eager and ready to take charge, take the adventure, do what has to be done and all of my guys are trying to slide out the back door. You know, I don't want any part of this, and I haven't realized quite that it was that heavy. I don't think that I've had any really bad critiques. There may have, that haven't come to my attention. Just as I say a few that had been supposedly writing things that god knows I didn't intend to write or have any meanings I didn't intend to have. Does that answer your question or come close?

It does answer my question. I think, to me, you certainly stimulate and challenge our imagination in your work. However I don't necessarily think you challenge our concepts of sexuality in the same sense. I believe that in your writing you very much distinctly keep the females in the female roles and the males in the male roles. And I think in our society, in today's society we're starting to get very challenged in the separation between the sexes—

Would you like to tell an Aiel Maiden that she's in a traditional female role? Forget about Aes Sedai, I'd love to see you go up to Nynaeve before she met any of these people and tell her she's in a traditional female role. I don't think I've got anybody in a particular traditional role. And no, I'm not challenging gender stereotypes. I'm doing a lot of things here and there's only so much I can do. There are other threads, other questions, other things that would be great write about, to put into these books. The only trouble is, would you really stick around if it was twenty-two books and they were twice as thick as this? All right, if so... Not only that, I'm not sure you could stand the strain. I have notes on characters, on countries, cultures, customs, all sorts of things. Aes Sedai—I have two files of two megabytes or so on each. One's just lists of individual Aes Sedai and information about them. The other is the founding of the White Tower—the customs, the cultures, the sexual relationships among Aes Sedai in training, the whole nine yards. Everything I could think of that might be useful about them. The story isn't there. None of it is on a file anywhere, there are no charts. One of my cousins asked us, "What are your critical path charts? You gotta have critical path charts for something this complex." And I said, "Yes I do have to have critical path charts," but even putting them on a computer in 3D it looks like a mess of spaghetti. If I pull in close enough to be able to see what's happening, I am so tight on that one particular area that the rest of it becomes meaningless. The only way I can do it is keep it up here. So the charts are all up here, the stories all up here. And I'm not sure how much more complex I can make it and how many more threads I can add and still hang onto it. So if I'm going to go into gender stereotypes I'm going to have to drop some of the things from the prophecies.

Oh, I wanted to add something here because of gender stereotypes and so forth. Somebody asked me why didn't I have any, in another question and answer session, asked me why didn't I have any gay characters in the books. I do, but that's not my bag to bring out the question of gender stereotypes and the whole nine yards. And they're just running around doing the things that they do and you can figure out who some of them are. If you want to help them, I don't care. It's not the point if they're gay or not gay, okay?

The first work I wrote has never been published although it was bought and then rejected over a contract dispute by Dell within the space of two months. That was what convinced me I could write it. It was later sold to... Don Wollheim bought it as a fantasy novel. Later Jim Baen at Ace bought it as a science fiction novel unchanged from what it was before. And then Susan Allison came in and she didn't like it so I got it... got the rights reverted to me. It also resulted in me getting the Conan contracts and in me meeting my wife. So I decided this thing has major mojo going with it. Well it's also the fact that it glows in the dark. It'll never be published because I'm a better writer now than I was twenty odd years ago.

My first published novel, I had walked into a book store and I had been talking to the owner of the book store, the manager, the woman that managed it, about the fact that I wanted to write, that I was beginning to write. I talked to her about books and all sorts of things, just in the book shop, that was all. There was a kind of romance novel called a bodice-ripper by a woman named Mary Robbins, big displays up front. Bodice-ripper is a sort of softcore pornography for women set in historical settings. And the shop owner said, "Do you know she has made three million dollars on her first two books?" In those days three million dollars with two books was Stephen King territory. That was like the forty-five-million-dollar contracts you hear about today. This is the sort of thing made people go, "Oh God!" and made the front of Time magazine. And I said for that kind of money I'd write one of those things. Okay, throwaway line, rimshot, forget it. Except the next time I came into the store the woman said, "You know a woman came in here and she's come to Charleston to set up a major publishing house, set up a publishing house, and she only wants to publish lead titles." That's the big book that the publishing house puts out every month, the one they really push. And that's all she's going to publish. She'd run out of business cards, she didn't have any business cards but here, she wrote her name in pencil on this lined three by five index card. I thought, right, she's come to Charleston to set up a major publishing house? No, no, no, no. That's like going to Death Valley to set up a ski camp. And she's only going to publish leads, that's like saying you're only going to publish best sellers, as it seemed to me, as it seemed to me then. But she managed to do it and no business card. Three by five index card, lined, penciled in. Right. Okay. I stuck it in my pocket to be polite and I went away. A week or so later I found it in my office in the drawer where I kept my pipe and tobacco as I was loading my pipe. Shows how long ago it was. I thought all right, I've got ten minutes I'll give her a call. So I gave her a call and found out that she had been editor or director of Ace Books and had just celebrated being promoted to vice president by resigning. And suddenly with that bit of experience behind her I'd realized she didn't sound so much like a nut anymore. She said, "I understand you're writing a bodice-ripper," and not waiting to lose a thread I said, "Yeah, well it's already been shown." She said, "Well, okay. I understand that, I understand that. Well why don't you come over and read me it and talk to me about it. Show me something, talk to me."

So I made up an outline driving to her house. I talked to the woman in the bookstore about these books enough that I knew the basic format. Heroine loses her virginity in the first chapter. It is a circumstance that is not rape on technicality. That is, he, the guy has arranged for a tavern maid downstairs to come upstairs and snuggle into his bed. And Heroine for some phony boloney reason has decided to sneak into his room to try to steal something at the same time. And she tries to get him drunk so he... you know, it gets very complicated. Anyway on technicality he's not guilty but anyway, she then goes on to have a lot of sexual adventures in North Africa with Sheiks and Sultans, in China with the Mandarins, Bedouin raiders... the court of Napoleon and the court of Medici... And then at the end of it she's in great danger, she's rescued by this guy that turns out to be the guy who done her virginity in the first place and they get married. And everything is thus okay because she married the guy that took her virginity. All right, hooo, yeah. I tried writing this thing for a brief moment, I really did. And I couldn't hack it man. I got the plot right, I got the sex right but I read some of the books and they quivered. They were hysterical in the constant sense, that is every line quivered with emotion. And I couldn't quiver. I tried.

About a year after that she called me up. I quit my job as an engineer and she said, "I'd like to see anything you've written." And being a professional I tried to talk her out of it. Because I knew the things I had written were not what she wanted to publish. She said, "Anything you have written, I want to see it." I took it to her, the book... the first novel I had ever written and when I went to pick it up from her later I got into a discussion about history. The forty-five in England, the American Revolution, the roles of the Scots and the Irish in the American Revolution particularly in the south. The publisher heard this and after the other woman had gone away, she gave me back a manuscript, she said, "You write a book and we'll publish this, but you can write. And what I want you to do is give the outline of a historical saga, a generational saga." And I did. That became The Fallon Blood. And the woman's name was Harriet McDougal and we started dating while we were touring for this book after she published it. I mean we toured for the book and she would give me another contract because we weren't quite sure how it was going to sell. And, ahh, I started missing her. I started coming back, hanging around and asking her out and whatnot. And eventually I asked her to marry me. Then I got really nervous because I thought, 'Hang on...I just asked a woman to marry me, and she is my source of income!' So I very hurriedly sold the book somewhere else so she would not be my sole source of income. That's how my first novel got published and that's how I met my wife and that's only about ten minutes as much as you wanted to know.