You’ve probably heard already, but I wanted to take a moment and offer up a small memoriam for James Rigney, aka Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series.

Others far more knowledgeable of the man himself have posted or published moving tributes and obituaries across the net. Some of the most touching are from those that knew James Rigney best over at his official blog which remained updated throughout his battle with the rare blood disease amyloidosis.

Though my thoughts go out to his family and friends, the few, inconsequential words I will say will focus on Robert Jordan the storyteller, for that is how I knew him.

I came to The Wheel of Time saga long after it began. In fact, I read each and every book during the summer of 2004 after I was laid off from Jaleco Entertainment. Quite simply, I couldn’t put the books down. Oh, be sure, there were things I took issue with, but the story is… well… wonderfully and immensely convoluted. It struck me as more than just a single story, but a detailed history of a world in peril. And somehow I knew without realizing it that this saga, at the time some 10 or 11 volumes deep, changed the way people and publishers alike looked at fantasy.

George RR Martin said in his tribute that his “ICE & FIRE series might never have found its audience without the cover quote that Jim was so kind as to provide.” I’ll go a step further and say that his Ice and Fire series, one of my absolute favorites, is a stunning evolution of what I refer to as the Historical Fantasy genre that Jordan pioneered with his WoT series.

Though I discovered his WoT series long after it began (1990 with The Eye of the World), I saw immediately the influence the series had on those books I had read in the intervening years (when, obviously, I should have been reading WoT). Not only that, I saw the influence his intricately detailed plotlines and wonderfully flawed characters had on my own writings.

So thank you, Robert Jordan, storyteller, for hours well spent in a world of your creation. If only I could read your work for the first time all over again.

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(originally posted 17 June 2005)

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