Fantasy

The Shadow Rising – Robert Jordan

Fantasy
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Cover of The Shadow Rising


The Shadow Rising
Robert Jordan
1006 pages
published in 1993

The Shadow Rising is the fourth book in Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. In my view it’s the point where the series really started to balloon. For a start it’s some 300 pages longer than the previous installment, but the plot as well gets bigger and more complicated. The most common criticism of the Wheel of Time (apart from those who, perhaps unfairly, reject it out of hand as sub-Tolkien crap) is that the story stopped progressing halfway through the series; the seeds for this are sown here. In many ways this is the watershed in the series, between what Jordan started with, a fairly linear story in the Tolkienesque mold and what it ended up being, perhaps the most complex fantasy series ever written weaving half a dozen separate storylines together into an almost coherent whole. This is the first book in the series in which the various plotlines do not come together neatly at the end of the book, nor are intended to.

But this is not the sole reason as to why this is a watershed in the series. The character of the series also changes, from being largely a quest based story to one of a more political nature. Rand al’Thor has declared himself the Dragon Reborn, drawn the sword that’s not a sword and the unfallen fortress has fallen. From now on he has a nation and a army behind him, he has revealed himself to the world and the stakes have gotten that much higher. From now on he can no longer led himself be lead, he has to lead himself. And while his friends may still be his friends, their interests and his may no longer completely match…

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The Dragon Reborn – Robert Jordan

Fantasy
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Cover of The Dragon Reborn


The Dragon Reborn
Robert Jordan
699 pages
published in 1991

The Dragon Reborn is the third book in the Wheel of Time series and as such it does not quite have the worst artwork in the series. That honour is reserved for either the previous book The Great Hunt, with its depiction of Trollocs as humans with curved helmets or the sixth book, The Lord of Chaos, with its incompetent romance novel cover. No book in the series however has what you can call good art, or even art that bears much resemblence to the books its used on. That’s not unusual for any book of course and normally I don’t care too much about what’s on a cover, but the Darrell Sweet artwork on these is just too embarassing, especially when read in public. But never mind eh? It’s still much, much better than reading Dan Brown where people can see you.

Moving on to what’s between the covers, The Dragon Reborn is the last book in the series to duplicate the quest structure of The Lord of the Rings and also the last book in which the various storylines neatly come together in the end. It’s not the end of the series, as
the series has no end, but it’s a end. From the next book, The Shadow Rising onward, things would be much more complicated. It’s also a sort of beginning, as this is the first book which is not dominated by Rand as the main character; in fact he’s hardly in it, with much of the action focussing on Perrin, Mat and Egwene/Nynaeve/Elayne in three different storylines, which come together at the climax of the book, just as with the previous two books.

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The Great Hunt – Robert Jordan

Fantasy
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Cover of The Great Hunt


The Great Hunt
Robert Jordan
707 pages
published in 1991

I said so, didn’t I, that Robert Jordan hooks you into the story? Here I was determined just to reread The eye of the World to mark his passing, so why did I immediately reach for The Great Hunt? Because I wanted to read more of course. It had been almost a decade since the last time I read through the entire series after all. Not to mention that the weather has turned decidedly autumnal, always the best season to read a great epic fantasy series.

Now as I understand it, The Eye of the World was deliberately written as a standalone novel, in case the series didn’t take off. So all the plot threads resolve neatly at the end, and the plot itself is fairly linear and straightforward. From The Great Hunt onwards this is no longer the case. The plotlines start to unravel, with the various main characters going their own ways having their own adventures only to come together at the end and with some plot threads continuing in the next book. Unlike the later books though, where the plot threads multiply unchecked and drag themselves from book to book, here Jordan still has a tight grip on things. It’s just more clear that this is a part of a series.

Everytime I’ve read The Great Hunt I’ve had difficulty in getting started, with the first 100-150 pages or so being just pure torture to get through. Absurd of course; there’s novels that finish in fewer pages, but that’s the way it is with fat fantasies. As for why this is so hard to get started, it’s because the main character behaves like an idiot and the plot seems to crawl at first. Spoilers follow.

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The Eye of the World – Robert Jordan

Fantasy
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Cover of The Eye of the World


The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
800 pages
published in 1990

I remember the first time I read The Eye of the World, a year or two after it had been published. At the time I knew nothing about it, but the spine had that weird squiggly sign on it that my local library meant to represent fantasy or science fiction, so I took it off the shelves and started reading. By the time I got past the prologue and on to Rand and his father’s ride to Emond’s Field, I was hooked. And I stayed hooked through the rest of the novel, as well as through many of the sequels. Like many others eventually I stopped following the series when it seemed to have become a neverending story; A Path of Daggers was the last novel I bought, A Crown of Swords the last I’d read.

By that time however I must’ve read The Eye of the World at least a dozen times, rereading the complete cycle every time a new book in the series came out. Especially when I was still supposedly a student, there was many a day when I woke up determined to do some work that day, only to grab The Eye of the World and finish it when it had gotten dark again.

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Gate of Ivrel – C. J. Cherryh

Fantasy
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Cover of Gate of Ivrel


Gate of Ivrel
C. J. Cherryh
191 pages
published in 1976

Cherryh has always been a bit hit or miss with me; some books I’ve devoured in one evening, others have taken me weeks to read, while some I’ve tried but never finished or never tried at all because they didn’t seem interesting enough. On the whole I seem to like her science fiction the most, while her fantasy novels have largely disappointed. It helps that she’s so frikking prolific, having written something like a zillion novels since the mid-seventies. There’s always a new series or novel to try if the last one didn’t satisfy. In this case, it’s Gate of Ivrel, actually Cherryh’s first novel, which I had had in my to read pile for years and years and finally decided to try. After having read a few monsters of books, the chance of reading a book with less than 200 pages was quite welcome. It didn’t disappoint either: this was a fast, exciting read, fairly polished for a first novel, not as good as some of Cherryh’s later novels of course, but good enough in its own right.

The story is either science fiction or fantasy, depending on your views, as the central premise is purely science fictional, — a network of teleportation gates that transport you through time and space left behind by a vanished alien race which needs to be destroyed by a team of Union scientists — but the setting is pure fantasy: a backward planet with a semi-medieval tech level, split in warring tribes and afraid of sorcery and witches. Not to mention that the population is human, but not descended from
Earth.

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