Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

As I’ve read several excellent obituaries for author Robert Jordan, I’ve learned a lot about him. I didn’t realize it was a pen name, and that James Oliver Rigney Jr. was the man behind that name, the man behind the epic WHEEL OF TIME series. He published the first one the year I moved to Los Angeles, and I read it that year. I bailed out of the series a while ago, though, way before KNIFE OF DREAMS, which was the eleventh book, published in 2005.

The announcement was made on his website yesterday, and although I wasn’t still reading his work, it’s hard to deny the presence of a guy like this in the publishing world. He wrote his way into being a small industry, and you’ve got to respect that. He created a world that an army of readers has fallen faithfully in love with, and that’s a hell of a legacy.

I find it both sad and oddly inspirational that he was planning a new series of books after the conclusion of the WHEEL OF TIME saga. Reading the Wikipedia page about Jordan, it talks about the proposed series a bit, with a proposed title of INFINITY OF HEAVEN. For a guy whose work on a series was so famously expansive, that's a great wink of a title.

There’s still one more book coming out evidently, and I have no doubt that his world will continue to expand with the participation of other authors. Too many readers are too invested for it to simply end, and isn’t that probably the best thing you can say about any writer?

All of us at AICN wish all of Jordan’s family, friends, and fans our sincere condolences.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles