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I spent a year catching up on the landmark fantasy series that defined my teen years, and accidentally wrote my autobiography. Hop in for book reviews and cringey reveries as I resume a dozen or so series that filled the warlock hours of my adolescence.  On mapsEvery epic fantasy novel begins with a map. This is the baroque visual reference authors use to keep readers oriented in their imagined world. It’s also the drawing board where the author turns to sketch and daydream and procrastinate, envisioning the sprawling landscapes their characters will travel, the nebulous destinations they’ll seek, and the treacherous bogs, cliffs, and caves that will beset their journey along the way. PrologueIn the late 1900s, the Dawn of the Millenials, the idyllic time before the war, I was about ten years old and sketching the roads of my own life’s map. Ten, of course, was the age when all millennial children began to choose from the paths of life, gaining autonomy and ambition, expecting to explore strange worlds and do great things and fight evil. At ten we collected our starter Pokemon, awaited our Hogwarts letters, and double-checked closets and wardrobes for hidden portals. My own inciting incident was a little more mundane — my parents split up, my mom re-married, and she, my stepdad, my brother and I moved through a series of low-income apartments around town. While I waited for those other magical inevitabilities to manifest, I spent the meantime exploring strange neighborhoods, meeting odd characters, and tapping out Goosebumps knockoffs on my electric typewriter. I was also getting to know my stepdad. He’d moved to town from Seattle, and before that, the east coast. He’d been many places, lived many lives, and collected many things. One of these things he brought to me one day, noticing, I’m sure, how much time I spent in my room reading. It was a wooden box full of cassette tapes. On the top, engraved as though crafted by elf hands, was “The Hobbit.” I didn’t know much about fantasy, but I knew the Hobbit was a classic, ageless and revered. Sealed in such a treasure box, how could it be anything less? This was deep lore, a chest of secrets, an artifact of the illuminated. And so, one night, closed up in my room, I laid on the floor and put the first tape in my stereo. Over hiss and grain the narrator intoned like a wizened minstrel. Hobbiton took form in my mind, a pastoral setting that moved much more slowly than the stories I was used to. In fact, Bilbo and Gandalf’s “good morning” banter struck me as tedious and annoying. As the dwarves arrived and Bilbo puttered and fussed, I struggled to find anything to latch on to. Bilbo wasn’t ten. Bilbo was like, 45. Dudes were singing songs about dishes. It all felt old and antiquated, like one of those crumbling cart rides with the forgotten IPs at Disneyland. I don’t think I made it past the first tape. I wasn’t ready for Tolkien, but the allure of his books endured. It was a traveled and orphic mind what pondered these orbs, and I wanted to ponder them also. Without knowing it, a road had chosen me. And now I step back from my orb. I’m 35 and reading the Silmarillion for the first time. The road goes ever on. I hadn’t thought about that Hobbit box set, or my moody, unmoored preteen years for several ages of men, but returning to Tolkien brought it all back. Picking up a new book in a series always sends me back in time, to the early books, and the time and place I read them. They’re the dorky history that explains one’s dorky present. Movies and games, too, but we generally spend a lot more time in books. They’re parallel worlds we travel in as we write our own stories, travelogues of who we were and where we were going. On the fantasy map of life, I can trace the roads they paved from there to here. In the years that followed I churned through the major fantasy releases, chasing the dragon from one series to the next. Some I finished; others I lost time for along the way. Often I’ve wondered how I ever had time to read them at all. It struck me that doorstopper fantasy series are probably most often read in long stretches of solitude. They’re a weeks- or months-long preoccupation, an alternate reality that the reader steps into when they need a break from all this. To read eight to ten brick-sized tomes in a row probably means you have a lot of time you’d prefer to spend alone, or circumstances you want to escape; stretches of introspection and loneliness and low points. Looking at the books on my shelf, recalling my solitudes as though they were blazoned on the spines, I decided it was time to resume the old quest: to revisit those old worlds and those old selves, and finish the dozen or so fantasy series I’d left languishing over the years. Do they hold up? Is the magic still there? And what cringe-soaked chapters of my own life would I find recorded inside? Where was I going, what was I feeling, and what responsibilities was I ignoring while I holed up in their pages? Was fantasy a salve for the wounds of adolescence? Inspiration for a meaningful career? Or just a meandering, isolating distraction? Would I have been better off picking up a football? Looking at the books on my shelf, recalling my solitudes as though they were blazoned on the spines, I wondered what cringe-soaked chapters of my own life might I find recorded inside. Where was I going, what was I feeling, and what responsibilities was I ignoring while I holed up in their pages? Was fantasy a salve for the wounds of adolescence? Inspiration for a meaningful career? Or just a meandering, isolating distraction? Would I have been better off picking up a football? A memory stirs across the surface of the orb...  The Lord of the Rings |
| Then, as the school year ended and summer came, my dad and stepmom decided to split. I wasn’t let in on the details. I don’t even remember saying goodbye. I just knew that one day, the three invaders went back to Oklahoma. Suddenly the good bed was mine again. The after-school hours were mine again. The house was quiet. One of those spans of solitude opened like a lonely mountain road, and that elegant Lord of the Rings, thicker than a bible, glowing with potential, waited in the passage. |  Actual crack |
This time it got me. I fell in love with The Journey — the immense story, the infinite world, the classical language. I could cocoon into it, comfortable in languid Middle-Earth and a bedroom that didn’t have a stranger in it. It was a revelation — Anytime I wanted I could throw on a cloak and grab a walking stick and follow the wizard away from whatever mundane Hobbit business was imposing on my attention. It stoked a passion for escapism that had been smoldering since Harry Potter, then buried by proverbial dung. After months in a miasma of darkness, I had a new road to follow and an open world to explore. It reminded me of the cozy comforts of Potter and Goosebumps that I used to dream of emulating, and I thought again how fine a thing it would be to create worlds of my own for people to escape into. Because now I knew what it was like to need somewhere to go.
Review: JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion
I’m sure there’s little I can say about the Silmarillion that hasn’t been said before. It’s a beautiful, scholarly history of Middle Earth, written like a biblical canon of Tolkien myth and lore, an Old Testament of the elder races and the gods of Middle Earth. It’s essential reading if Bilbo and Frodo weren’t enough for you, but it’s not for everyone. I can fully understand why even some fantasy heads don’t get drawn into Tolkien’s ornate, philological style, but it’s gospel for those that do.
For me, it’d been a long time coming. Once the Ring had my ear I reread the trilogy every few years, but somehow I never got around to cracking the grand diegesis. I don’t think I had the wisdom for it until after college, anyway. Now an accomplished nerd, I reveled in the foundational tales of Morgoth, Númenor, the Silmarils. I finally connected histories from the movies and shows to their runic lore, and caught passages that I now realize were lifted directly into the lyrics of Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth, the album that sealed my fate as an epic nerd of music as well as everything else. Though very different from The Hobbit and The Rings, it still felt like coming home for the holidays, looking at old photos of great grandsires and sitting with elders to hear how the dollar store used to be a Prancing Pony and why mortal Beren wasn’t good enough for Elf maiden Lúthien, and how everything was better back in the second age. You’ve got to know your history.
Crichtonverse
And the sophomore death spiral
The long summer between middle and high school was a Bradbury-esque snapshot of free-wheeling adolescence — late mornings playing Wind Waker, afternoons running amok with friends, long nights in Hogwarts and Middle Earth. Ideal conditions for incubating the fantasy disease. But all idyllic childhood chapters must come to an end. High school came knocking like the king’s conscriptor, and books went on the shelf again as I found myself stranded in reality.
The bit of clout and confidence I’d leveled up in middle school didn’t seem to carry over to the new campaign. I aspired to join my new school’s famed robotics team, but didn’t make the cut. I signed up for a computer animation program, but it turned out to be a tedious photoshop tutorial. I joined the film production club, but mostly held up reflectors and took naps. It seemed all those fantastic Millenial expectations would remain the stuff of fiction.
Disappointed, disillusioned, I felt an urge for escape within me grow. Academic work was easy, and consequently I struggled to pay attention to it. I goofed off with the other free spirits but didn’t make many close friends. When I got bored, I retreated into my headphones or the margins of my papers. Eventually, I just walked out the door. Literally out the front door of the school. Once I realized I could get away with it, I did this a lot. Sometimes I’d get an ‘excused absence’ through the nurse, just to mix things up. I went home to play video games and sort Yu-Gi-Oh cards while my parents were at work. This, of course, was not a prosperous academic trajectory. The trough of a long, dark fissure was opening up. You know those nightmares where you’re in class and realize you have to take an important test, and you didn’t study or do any homework all semester? I lived it. Repeatedly. By the end of my sophomore year, I was being kicked out with innumerable absences, a record-setting low GPA, and pending disciplinary action for various misdemeanors.
Though dead, I was forced to linger like a ghost through the summer, making up credits in a remedial science class. The class was a zoo, a glorified detention, the last chance for the kids who couldn’t hack it during the semester to reflect on the foreboding of their choices. Most declined the opportunity, but I could sense a personal desolation encroaching, the dawning of a dark age. My instinct to escape strained at its leash, but escape is what had got me there. So, I did the work and endured the rabble. I put my head down. I disassociated. I doodled. Then one day, I found something on a classroom shelf — a crisp copy of Jurassic Park. I hadn’t read in ages, but that cool black paperback stirred a tiny ember that had been long burning beneath my mental dung. I started reading, mostly to transcend the tedious clown show going on around me — but them dinos got me back. I remembered books. I remembered disappearing into them. I had an exit again. The portal reopened. There are other worlds than these.
Of course, a few life science credits weren’t enough to save me from excommunication. I spent my junior year at a continuation school for delinquent students still clinging to the axles of the education system. The little campus was tucked inside a low-income neighborhood. The hours were something like 10-3, so I had to ride my bike a couple miles and hope it was still locked up at the end of the day. Instead of a robotics lab, there was a rusting truck that you learned to work on. Instead of sports, there was a small track you walked around, avoiding the far corner of the fence where the gangs in the school met with the gangs in the neighborhood to exchange recipes. Vicious fights between students and faculty were common, and the teachers had a dull-eyed weariness like battlefield surgeons. In class, the task was to complete work packets containing all the condensed curricula you were missing to earn credits. There were lectures, but I found I could go ahead at my own pace and ask the teachers for the next packets, so for two semesters I put my head down and my headphones in and mined credits.
This became The Grind. There was no escaping The Grind, but I did have one refuge to preserve my sanity. I found the library behind a door that looked like a janitor’s closet. There were five or six tall shelves of books, a few study nooks, and one inattentive librarian. I don’t recall ever seeing another student in there, but I do remember discovering the humble sci-fi section, with its small collection of Michael Crichtons. Next to him, naturally, was Arthur C Clarke, and above and below them, other hits from Asimov to Zahn. In that lonely closet I read them all, emerging only to crush packets and bike home. This became my self-directed education — silver age science fiction, de facto training in analytical thinking, problem solving, philosophy, sociology, politics. Lectures from long-dead luminaries about life and language and possibilities beyond the dull and desperate classrooms I found myself in. Reading Clarke and Crichton today bring me back to that tiny library, not just to their stories but to the feeling that I was pursuing my own quest, rather than filtering through a system. That’s not a knock at public education, but an observation of my own lack of engagement up to that point. Educators can provide the kindling, but every kid needs that spark to burn. These weren’t doorstopper fantasy series, but in that dark and lonely cave beneath the Misty Mountains, they were fire, and they lit the map enough that I could just make out a path to graduation.
The bit of clout and confidence I’d leveled up in middle school didn’t seem to carry over to the new campaign. I aspired to join my new school’s famed robotics team, but didn’t make the cut. I signed up for a computer animation program, but it turned out to be a tedious photoshop tutorial. I joined the film production club, but mostly held up reflectors and took naps. It seemed all those fantastic Millenial expectations would remain the stuff of fiction.
Disappointed, disillusioned, I felt an urge for escape within me grow. Academic work was easy, and consequently I struggled to pay attention to it. I goofed off with the other free spirits but didn’t make many close friends. When I got bored, I retreated into my headphones or the margins of my papers. Eventually, I just walked out the door. Literally out the front door of the school. Once I realized I could get away with it, I did this a lot. Sometimes I’d get an ‘excused absence’ through the nurse, just to mix things up. I went home to play video games and sort Yu-Gi-Oh cards while my parents were at work. This, of course, was not a prosperous academic trajectory. The trough of a long, dark fissure was opening up. You know those nightmares where you’re in class and realize you have to take an important test, and you didn’t study or do any homework all semester? I lived it. Repeatedly. By the end of my sophomore year, I was being kicked out with innumerable absences, a record-setting low GPA, and pending disciplinary action for various misdemeanors.
Though dead, I was forced to linger like a ghost through the summer, making up credits in a remedial science class. The class was a zoo, a glorified detention, the last chance for the kids who couldn’t hack it during the semester to reflect on the foreboding of their choices. Most declined the opportunity, but I could sense a personal desolation encroaching, the dawning of a dark age. My instinct to escape strained at its leash, but escape is what had got me there. So, I did the work and endured the rabble. I put my head down. I disassociated. I doodled. Then one day, I found something on a classroom shelf — a crisp copy of Jurassic Park. I hadn’t read in ages, but that cool black paperback stirred a tiny ember that had been long burning beneath my mental dung. I started reading, mostly to transcend the tedious clown show going on around me — but them dinos got me back. I remembered books. I remembered disappearing into them. I had an exit again. The portal reopened. There are other worlds than these.
Of course, a few life science credits weren’t enough to save me from excommunication. I spent my junior year at a continuation school for delinquent students still clinging to the axles of the education system. The little campus was tucked inside a low-income neighborhood. The hours were something like 10-3, so I had to ride my bike a couple miles and hope it was still locked up at the end of the day. Instead of a robotics lab, there was a rusting truck that you learned to work on. Instead of sports, there was a small track you walked around, avoiding the far corner of the fence where the gangs in the school met with the gangs in the neighborhood to exchange recipes. Vicious fights between students and faculty were common, and the teachers had a dull-eyed weariness like battlefield surgeons. In class, the task was to complete work packets containing all the condensed curricula you were missing to earn credits. There were lectures, but I found I could go ahead at my own pace and ask the teachers for the next packets, so for two semesters I put my head down and my headphones in and mined credits.
This became The Grind. There was no escaping The Grind, but I did have one refuge to preserve my sanity. I found the library behind a door that looked like a janitor’s closet. There were five or six tall shelves of books, a few study nooks, and one inattentive librarian. I don’t recall ever seeing another student in there, but I do remember discovering the humble sci-fi section, with its small collection of Michael Crichtons. Next to him, naturally, was Arthur C Clarke, and above and below them, other hits from Asimov to Zahn. In that lonely closet I read them all, emerging only to crush packets and bike home. This became my self-directed education — silver age science fiction, de facto training in analytical thinking, problem solving, philosophy, sociology, politics. Lectures from long-dead luminaries about life and language and possibilities beyond the dull and desperate classrooms I found myself in. Reading Clarke and Crichton today bring me back to that tiny library, not just to their stories but to the feeling that I was pursuing my own quest, rather than filtering through a system. That’s not a knock at public education, but an observation of my own lack of engagement up to that point. Educators can provide the kindling, but every kid needs that spark to burn. These weren’t doorstopper fantasy series, but in that dark and lonely cave beneath the Misty Mountains, they were fire, and they lit the map enough that I could just make out a path to graduation.
Review: Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead
| Eaters is the reincarnation of a rare first-hand travelogue written by the pious 10th century Arab Ahman ibn Fadlab, who was conscripted by a band of Vikings to a harrowing quest to save a northern village from a tribe of savage Wendol. Fadlab chronicles the group’s travels, their battles with leviathans and hoards of mist-monsters, and at some point the story becomes Beowulf. Annotated with Crichton’s observations on translations and interpretations of fantastical accounts (the sea monster was probably a whale), it’s a succinct and scholarly work, but also an early flex of his proto-science-thriller style. |  Bonerwulf |
After Eaters, Crichton spent the next ten years writing Congo, Sphere, and Jurassic Park, AKA my high school syllabus. I read them one after another while kids in class brawled or made beats with pencils or threw muffins at the teacher. From those novels I absorbed more intellectual curiosity and academic interest than any textbook, and I don’t think I’m alone. Crichton’s application of scientific ferment to whatever topic fascinated him helped mainstream half a dozen realms of learning and inspired the careers of a generation of archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, and historians. To me, these books proved that anybody could contribute to whatever field interested them, without spending their life ascending the high tower of a PhD program. There are no rules or gatekeepers. Just do the reading. Become an expert of cryptozoology. Wear black leather and do math. Analyze an ancient manuscript and make it a story. Forget academia — just do things. Every scientific field has its cutting edge, and maybe even a few conspiracies and buried bodies. Even the most mundane science can run amok if you try hard enough.
Eaters doesn’t have the techno-pizazz of the 80’s and 90’s, but it gives Beowulf a modern shine. In Crichton’s oeuvre it’s a deep cut, specialized for history buffs and Viking lorists and people who spent high school reading pop science thrillers instead of doing their work. It’s not a new book in a series, but it was a nostalgic trip back to the spirited classrooms of my youth. I could almost feel a muffin fly past my ear.
Eaters doesn’t have the techno-pizazz of the 80’s and 90’s, but it gives Beowulf a modern shine. In Crichton’s oeuvre it’s a deep cut, specialized for history buffs and Viking lorists and people who spent high school reading pop science thrillers instead of doing their work. It’s not a new book in a series, but it was a nostalgic trip back to the spirited classrooms of my youth. I could almost feel a muffin fly past my ear.
The Wheel of Time
And the most tedious redemption arc
A few months later, I stood shivering in the pre-dawn cold at my original high school, waiting for the Senior Supplemental Instruction office to open. There I would spend the godless hours before first period every other morning, repairing my devastated GPA by completing the ritual penance of the public school system: fucking packets. It was a slog that made the boring classes I couldn’t hack in my sophomore year look like a day at Disneyland. But I was back at real school, filled with redemptive purpose and whatnot.
For the most part, my solitude stretched on. I came back and found I didn’t know nobody no more. All the hoodlums I used to goof off with were lost to dark fates. All my acquaintances had friend groups that I couldn’t quite find my way into. So I hung on the periphery, leaned against various walls, and grinded packets. I also spent time in the school library, which was the Library of Alexandria compared to the broom closet that I read the sci-fi masters in.
For the most part, my solitude stretched on. I came back and found I didn’t know nobody no more. All the hoodlums I used to goof off with were lost to dark fates. All my acquaintances had friend groups that I couldn’t quite find my way into. So I hung on the periphery, leaned against various walls, and grinded packets. I also spent time in the school library, which was the Library of Alexandria compared to the broom closet that I read the sci-fi masters in.
| One day, browsing randomly, a thick crimson-and-gold tome called to me: Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind. It had a sword guy, a dragon, and a damsel on the cover. Why not? I cracked it and got hooked. I read in class like a nerd supreme. When I got to the scene where the wizard makes a mob of angry villagers think their dicks had fallen off, I had to put it down and tell my friend about it. When I finished it, I checked out the second volume and started collecting the next nine. I caught up to the end just before the final book came out, which was about the time when online SFF fandom, author blogs, and message boards were starting to proliferate. From those I discovered the pantheon of acclaimed and arcane many-volumed fantasy series. |  Wizard's First Redpill |
The next in line was obvious: The Wheel of Time. 11 bricks and still going. This was the grind that my sick mind now craved. Through my long hours of academic penance, I’d scraped together the credits I needed to graduate, but I’d become twisted by the process. I was so used to doing solitary work that I forgot how to do anything else. Grinding — packets, novels — became life. This isn’t unique to books — it’s the same disease that MMORPG players are pustulant with. I can’t even imagine how many hours I put into Elder Scrolls: Oblivion during this time. But maybe endless fantasy worlds are just the right refuge for quest-addled minds. Now vast book series rolled forever in parallel with my life, and The Wheel turned with me as I graduated high school and made my way into the overland.
The next in line was obvious: The Wheel of Time. 11 bricks and still going. This was the grind that my sick mind now craved. Through my long hours of academic penance, I’d scraped together the credits I needed to graduate, but I’d become twisted by the process. I was so used to doing solitary work that I forgot how to do anything else. Grinding — packets, novels — became life. This isn’t unique to books — it’s the same disease that MMORPG players are pustulant with. I can’t even imagine how many hours I put into Elder Scrolls: Oblivion during this time. But maybe endless fantasy worlds are just the right refuge for quest-addled minds. Now vast book series rolled forever in parallel with my life, and The Wheel turned with me as I graduated high school and made my way into the overland.
Review: Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson, The Gathering Storm
| When I decided to catch up on the fantasy series I’d never finished, the final three books of the Wheel of Time were 3,000 page gorillas I knew I’d have to take on. I’d left off after Knife of Dreams, the last that Jordan wrote before he passed away. When his widow chose Brandon Sanderson to take up the sword, I followed the saga on Sanderson’s blog. I loved Mistborn and I loved the meta-story of Sanderson rising to his sacred task, but as the years slipped by, life’s travails made these final doorstoppers seem ever more daunting. Now, deep in my fantasy revival, the madness had me again. Massive books were dopamine dispensers again. I’d been using The Gathering Storm to prop up my car for repairs, but I switched it with a cinder block and returned to Randland. |  When Rand did a kool-aid man wall bust and emerged with some tots |
I went in raw without a wiki recap, 15 years estranged — but the Wheel wove me right in. The 50-page prologue set the familiar drawling pace. The early chapters unspooled with generous rehash. The politics and subterfuges remained mercifully straightforward, and the magic system grounded and intuitive. I may not have remembered quite where I left each character, but most of the major events and dramas came back when I reached their threads.
Sanderson did a great job emulating Jordan’s style and vision, and the same qualities and criticisms you hear about the rest of the series apply — well-defined characters, strong relationships, immersive world, but thickly wrought and largely plot-driven. It’s the same cadre that started the journey in 1990, and while they’ve certainly changed and grown, they’ve mostly evolved in a linear direction and rehashed similar conflicts and character points in every book. I don’t know if a chapter goes by in the whole series that one of the female characters doesn’t remark on how hard and grim Rand is becoming. But familiar is comfortable. I’m pretty sure Sanderson took care to honor even the hair-tugging foibles of Jordan’s work. He also elevated it, contributing some of the best action scenes of the series.
I wondered if it would feel different, all these years on, with the experience of the early books relegated to another time and another me. I’ve grown since our paths diverged, traveled far, been down many a winding road. Reading Storm, I found the story was always waiting at the next crossing. It doesn’t have the same adolescent wonder that the early books had — no more young friends leaving their shire, exploring the world, gaining powers, discovering macguffins — but we’re late in the game here. The map’s been filled, the goals are set, the threads are coming back together. Sure, tone-wise, it’s a little sanitized, maybe a little more YA than I was aware of back then. It’s got that weird Christian moralism where characters are more bothered by fake curse words and cleavage than by horrific acts of violence (mostly done off-screen, but good guys literally immolate human bad guys with fire spells and never think twice about it.) Even so, the aesthetics and ontology don’t feel like products of the bygone 90s or a Jordan era or a Sanderson era. In the way of myth, they still describe the gathering storms of our own age. A dark lord ascending, the foundations of wisdom crumbling, the world’s institutions and very reality unraveling, you say? And when was there not an Adventist death cult amassing in the shadows? How can epic fantasy miss when a majority of people are still anticipating their own Tarmon Gaiden? There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time.
Sanderson did a great job emulating Jordan’s style and vision, and the same qualities and criticisms you hear about the rest of the series apply — well-defined characters, strong relationships, immersive world, but thickly wrought and largely plot-driven. It’s the same cadre that started the journey in 1990, and while they’ve certainly changed and grown, they’ve mostly evolved in a linear direction and rehashed similar conflicts and character points in every book. I don’t know if a chapter goes by in the whole series that one of the female characters doesn’t remark on how hard and grim Rand is becoming. But familiar is comfortable. I’m pretty sure Sanderson took care to honor even the hair-tugging foibles of Jordan’s work. He also elevated it, contributing some of the best action scenes of the series.
I wondered if it would feel different, all these years on, with the experience of the early books relegated to another time and another me. I’ve grown since our paths diverged, traveled far, been down many a winding road. Reading Storm, I found the story was always waiting at the next crossing. It doesn’t have the same adolescent wonder that the early books had — no more young friends leaving their shire, exploring the world, gaining powers, discovering macguffins — but we’re late in the game here. The map’s been filled, the goals are set, the threads are coming back together. Sure, tone-wise, it’s a little sanitized, maybe a little more YA than I was aware of back then. It’s got that weird Christian moralism where characters are more bothered by fake curse words and cleavage than by horrific acts of violence (mostly done off-screen, but good guys literally immolate human bad guys with fire spells and never think twice about it.) Even so, the aesthetics and ontology don’t feel like products of the bygone 90s or a Jordan era or a Sanderson era. In the way of myth, they still describe the gathering storms of our own age. A dark lord ascending, the foundations of wisdom crumbling, the world’s institutions and very reality unraveling, you say? And when was there not an Adventist death cult amassing in the shadows? How can epic fantasy miss when a majority of people are still anticipating their own Tarmon Gaiden? There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time.
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