While I've Been..

Drinking Sailor Jerry, smoking cigars and my usual cloves I and reading I have determined one thing....

ROBERT JORDAN IS A FUCKING GENIUS

was

not

uhhhh, no.

But maybe if you try and explain..?

T

Not certain to whom you were referring, oh he who no longer attends Events.  However, my reasoning is based on the very biased Charlie Spiegel Chart.  If the dialogue and general writing does not make me look forward to the next book, or in the case of a writer with a corpus of work, run out and obtain more, then genius is a word I do not apply.  Perhaps workmanlike, but not genius.

Some writers whose works I have read in their entirety:

Ross Thomas
Roger Zelazney
Robert Heinlein
Isaac Asimov (all sci fi, some hard science as well)
WEB Griffin
Robert Ludlum
William Shakespeare
Harlan Ellison, including several screenplays
Robert Silverberg
Ray Bradberry
Gordon Dickson
Lois McMaster Bujold
P. K. Dick
David Drake

There are others, but Jordon is not one

I love Robert Jordan, but I have to agree with Charlie. Just a cursory glance at his list and there are several masters there that are above compare.

Now when I say genius there is a difference between being a literary master and a genius with creativity...and then there's what I meant with Jordan.

For  those who don't know, the entire thing was in his head. He had no notes, wrote nothing but the books, and has more central characters then almost any other author. I am re-reading the series and seeing things in book two that become relevant in like book nine, one instance in book eleven*(prequel).

To be able to keep the entire thing, it may still be the biggest book series page wide ever, in his head, with that many characters and plot lines not dropped, is a work of genius.

Robert Jordan, and his Wheel of Time series is/are great!  Very KR-ish.  I've been listening to the series (in audiobooks) while setting up and breaking down at events for many months.  I find it really helps get/keep me in an "IG mindstate," even when I'm dressed in civvies.

Highly recommended.  Thanks for the thread!

--Paul

Asimov NEVER wrote more than one draft, and in the early 80's, IIRC, won a wager with a major feminist (and ex-playboy bunny - a free dessert to whomever tells me her name first) that in a week he could write a book that would sell 50.000 copies.  Check out the Sensuous Dirty Old Man.

Charlie I was asking the OP to explain exactly HOW Jordan was a genius.

I find his writing to be very basic at it's best, and downright terrible at it;s worst.  His ideas, while occasionally interesting and original, often fail to live up to their own potential, sort of wandering this way and that, until they finally die the long, slow death of neglect.  His female characters are flat out terrible.  If the world was filled with Jordan females we would be extinct, cuz the men would have killed them all by now.

All around the WOT was very ambitious, somewhat derivitive, and ultimately mediocre.

Perhaps keeping notes and such might have helped him get his plot points across sooner, then maybe we would have had an interesting five-book series, instead of the meandering ten+ book mess that was his legacy.

Sean Bean is playing Eddard Stark.  All is right with the world.

T

I like Bean.