It's always the trouble with a certain amount of intricate plotting on those epic scales... how much detail you can spend on the characters developing in certain ways and moving around the "chessboard" in preperation for those end sequences and big finishes..

 

The first couple of books were introduction, then I'd say 4-6 were the "big ball starting to move" areas and the world really starting to notice and be affected.. then 7-10 was the orchestration, the laying out of gambits and the moving into place. Starting with book 11, and now with 12 it's the final phase and the big sweeping finish.

 

Some people enjoy that sort of pace, some don't. But that's the way it's felt to my mind.. (now I'm prepared for the scorn to be heaped on my head...)

No scorn at all!

 

There's a lot to be said for seeing it that way, and perhaps once the series is complete it will be easier to look back on books 7-11 more favourably than I do at the moment. It's possible that the much quicker pace of The Gathering Storm is due to Robert Jordan's design as kirottu says, but I also suspect that Brandon Sanderson, because he doesn't 'own' this story, is less prone to getting sidetracked on minor characters and storylines than Robert Jordan would have been. I really enjoyed The Gathering Storm, and perhaps it was more to my tastes than it would have been if Robert Jordan had completed it alone, though of course we can never know that for sure.

No scorn at all!

 

There's a lot to be said for seeing it that way, and perhaps once the series is complete it will be easier to look back on books 7-11 more favourably than I do at the moment. It's possible that the much quicker pace of The Gathering Storm is due to Robert Jordan's design as kirottu says, but I also suspect that Brandon Sanderson, because he doesn't 'own' this story, is less prone to getting sidetracked on minor characters and storylines than Robert Jordan would have been. I really enjoyed The Gathering Storm, and perhaps it was more to my tastes than it would have been if Robert Jordan had completed it alone, though of course we can never know that for sure.

 

The thing that I do wonder on (sort of , in that occasional way fanboys of any subject can) is that if you look back at it, people started to say the pacing slowed down and too many "meandering" lines appeared when the authors illness first kicked in and the first delay in publishing occured...

 

Looking at it from the sidelines.. (and maybe with a certain squint) makes you wonder if the "one a year" schedule kept going would people have found the books to be as "slow" as they did when you had the various pauses and hitches in their delivery?

The other thing is, an author laid up in bed, is probably going to end up looking at his stories, and tweaking them, and having cool ideas (at least in their own mind) and just naturally... adding bits and pieces. Of course, when there's hordes of "little" tweaks and addendums added to your central plotline and assorted subplots... Which might be what you call getting "sidetracked".

 

Sort of random thoughts, but there you go..

I'm currently struggling through Dawnthief, by James Barclay.

 

Now, it's a very popular series, but I simply can't see why. Basically so far it's a medium fantasy setting, with dragons and elves, but no dwarves or orcs yet. There's magic but - and here's just one bafling thing - it's described in the most mundane terms. Spells have names like 'fireorb' which neither give nor leave anything to imagination.

 

In addition, the nature of the storytelling introduces charcters and kills them at equal speed, which could be awesome, but with all the made up names it's impossible to keep track.

 

Finally, the plot is - so far - unbelievably vanilla. Find widgets, stop bad guy.

 

I was hoping someone might have enjoyed teh book and could hjelp me see it in another light.

The magic in Wheel of Time is also pretty uniform, if not mundane eg. everything works the same way and is pretty understandable. Which is apparently why a lot of engineers and science nerds like it.