Last week’s post looked at the big-picture worldbuilding in the Wheel of Time: the magic system, the language, and how Robert Jordan established the physical and temporal reality. But every good worldbuilder knows reality is a product of specificity. You need to have rules for your world (and follow them), but the details you include are what bring the world to life.
Of course, in a world this size, there are a lot of details. In this post, I’ll focus on the ones that I see as the most distinctively Wheel of Time and the most interesting from a worldbuilding perspective.
(As with part 1, this post contains some spoilers for Wheel of Time books 1-7, so if you want to avoid those it’s best to stop reading now).
The Wheel of Time series was my introduction to epic fantasy as a child, and the first invented world I really sunk my teeth into when I decided to start building my own. Coming back to it as an adult always feels a bit like returning home.
Of course, re-reading it as an adult, I can also understand the common critiques about the series. Regardless of whether you enjoy the story or not, though, there is no arguing that Robert Jordan was a master worldbuilder, in my opinion on the same level as Tolkien. The bulk of this worldbuilding happens in the first half of the series (books 1-7), and if you’re thinking “how the hell can it take someone 7 books to build a world?”—well, that’s the scope of the lands and history that serve as the foundation for the story.
(Note: Thar be spoilers up ahead. If you haven’t read the first 7 books of Wheel of Time and care about such things, probably best to skip this post).
You can think of speculative fiction as a kind of super-genre. Stories that live under this broad umbrella all deviate in some way from the laws and rules of everyday reality. That could mean they’re set in an entirely invented reality or in a world mostly like our own with a few minor tweaks, or anywhere in between.
The term speculative fiction was first coined by Robert Heinlein in the late 1940s, so it’s hardly a new concept. Its associations have shifted over the decades, though, from a term mostly syonymous with sci-fi to one that’s more fluid. In today’s parlance, speculative also includes fantasy and most horror, as well as stories that exist between the borders of these genres. It’s become an especially popular term among those who write settings or tropes from fantasy and sci-fi in a literary style.
Read this if you like: Unique magic systems, religious dystopias
tl;dr summary: Young Acolyte living on a floating city is caught up in the intrigue of her cannibalistic magic sisterhood.
