Fantasy Author Robert Jordan Passes Away

Slashdot:

“James Oliver Rigney Jr, author of the long-running fantasy series The Wheel of Time and better known to millions of fans by the pen name Robert Jordan, died on 16 Sept 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with the disease in March 2006 and vowed to beat the odds, but determination and gumption sometimes just aren’t enough in the face of a disease with a median survival time of just over two years. Jordan was in the process of writing the twelfth and final book in the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, but the book was not slated for release until 2009 and is still incomplete. While there is hope that the book will still be finished from Jordan’s notes, this is devastating news to all of us who have been reading the series since 1990.“

And from Robert Jordan’s Official Blog

It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain. In the years he had fought this, he taught me much about living and about facing death. He never waivered in his faith, nor questioned our God’s timing. I could not possibly be more proud of anyone. I am eternally grateful for the time that I had with him on this earth and look forward to our reunion, though as I told him this afternoon, not yet. I love you bubba.

Our beloved Harriet was at his side through the entire fight and to the end. The last words from his mouth were to tell her that he loved her.

Great
Now my wife thinks I can tell the future
Just Saturday we were talking about how
glad we were when we stopped reading his
books when we did

And I made the comment ‘Suppose he were to die suddenly,
everyone would be left in the air as to where his books were going.‘

Sharruma - 17 September 2007 11:44 PM

And I made the comment ‘Suppose he were to die suddenly,
everyone would be left in the air as to where his books were going.‘

Don’t you hate it when an author does that?  It’s so thoughtless of them.  They need to wrap up their books, and then die.

Oh, I’m sorry to hear he died.

Wasn’t this book 13, not 12?  Or even 14?  Whatever, I gave up on it since it seemed unlikely he was going to ever finish the series anyway.  It started out great and seriously stalled after book 2, though I did make it to 10 or 11.

George MacDonald Fraser is going to do the same thing to me, damnit.  I’ll never get to read about Flashy’s adventures during the American Civil War.

Charybdis - 18 September 2007 08:43 AM

Wasn’t this book 13, not 12?  Or even 14?  Whatever, I gave up on it since it seemed unlikely he was going to ever finish the series anyway.  It started out great and seriously stalled after book 2, though I did make it to 10 or 11.

George MacDonald Fraser is going to do the same thing to me, damnit.  I’ll never get to read about Flashy’s adventures during the American Civil War.

Thats my point though, he seemed to be just milking the story.
I got to about book 8 before I got fed up with the books going nowhere.
By then the plots had got so convuluted it was unlikely he’d be able to fix it.

I could handle the 5000 characters, it was the two books in which nothing whatsoever actually happened.  And when something did finally happen it was quickly forgotten and we went back to more drivel.  He seriously needed to edit it down to probably 1/3 the original size.

And the wheel of time gets more like a soap opera every day.  Just with less explicit sex.  Like all the best American soaps it will never end. oh joy.  Why can’t we be more like the Mexican soaps and end it while we still can?