The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass...

It is presumably safe to say that most people's formal introduction to the Fantasy genre is through J.R.R. Tolkien's magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings. Certainly, in own particular circumstances, it was that book, at the age of 16, that reeled me into a lifetime of reading fiction. Almost 20 years later, I can still remember quite vividly the very first time I read it. I had previously found a copy of The Hobbit in the School Library, quickly devoured and enjoyed it, and then was told by a classmate about a sequel which shared some of the same characters. Eager for more, I took a chance and bought a battered copy of The Lord of the Rings with my then sparse pocket money, and proceeded to, ignoring schoolwork and almost all other distractions, read it practically night and day for about four solid days, hands trembling as the pages were turned one by one by one. As I recall, I almost physically couldn't actually put the book down.

I was hooked. It opened up something new, something unknown to me, at the time. I now know it was what the lure of what Professor Tolkien called his "unexplored vistas". It was a not so subtle trap and I fell straight into it.

Once I had finished LOTR, and with no sequel to occupy my time, I resorted to reading and rereading the Appendices, looking for more information, trying to squeeze every last drop of information out of them. The appendices were diced and dissected and possible futures and alternate avenues were dreamed up. Mysteries were probed and caressed until nothing more could be known. This was in the days before the Internet, when computers were still powered by microprocessors whose numbers of bits could still be counted on the fingers and toes of one's hands and feet. It was a futile effort really. At least back in 1990.

Yet there were always other roads to travel down. A year later, the Simarillion followed, and in my thirst for all things Middle-Earthen, I started on Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle-Earth, which although important in their own right, weren't particularly gripping to an 18 year old. The realisation that the Aragorn character was originally envisioned as a hobbit called Trotter was quite a blow.

So apart from a ceremonial reading now and again of LOTR, purely out of fondness, I spread my wings to other authors (and indeed other genres). In Fantasy, I was recommended Raymond E. Feist's masterly Magician, indeed it and its follow ups (all the way up to and including the Serpentwar Saga) in particular sustained me through University, and in the years after graduation I branched out heavily into fantasy RPGs. To this day, my favourite gaming world is the Forgotten Realms, and I am comfortable with gaming in many other fantasy settings.

Yet, after Feist, there was no where obvious to go. This was still in the mid-90s, when the Internet was all personal pages and the Really Big Red Button That Doesn't Do Anything. All the other fantasy books I could see were all one-offs or were Tolkien rip-offs, and I didn't read Pratchett because they were "spoofs". So I read and reread vast amounts of horror and sci-fi.

One series of books I was only vaguely aware of was of course, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I had actually formed an extremely negative opinion of them even though I hadn't ever read them, or even opened up the cover of them in a bookshop. "Its never-ending", I told myself. "He'll never finish it", I said (rather prophetically, as it turns out). "I'll read it when he does finish it" was typical of what I consoled myself with.

Things change, over time of course. Recently, coming off a rather heavy addiction to World of Warcraft, and whilst waiting eternally for the next installment of George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, I was looking for something to do, something to keep my hands occupied, rather like the way a smoker does when he gives up cigarettes, and something to keep me entertained whilst visiting the in-laws over Yule. So I cracked. Or finally relented, depending on how you look at it. I now have the paperback edition of Wheel of Time sitting, fresh and ready to read.

This blog will be my attempt to chart my progress through the Wheel of Time. I want those "unexplored vistas" back. I am not kidding you in any way. I have not read the Wheel of Time. What I will read in these books is a complete mystery to me. The title of this post comes from the back cover of the paperback, and I believe has some significance to the series as a whole.

Much like the way the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 did to that splendid Sci-Fi series, I will, as soon as possible after reading each chapter, compose some thoughts on that chapter and post it here. Your comments will be most welcome, of course, whither you have read all or none of the Wheel of Time. But I ask you not to post anything that could be construed as, or is, a spoiler. It is hard enough as is to resist the temptation to use the modern day Oracle at Google to find out what happens in the end. I want to finish it in my own time. If I ever do finish it, of course.

Onward, to those "unexplored vistas" then...