If you are someone who loves to watch the cable TV Sci-Fi channel, and you loved movies such as the cinematic renditions of Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars epic saga...but, somehow, you don't have the patience or the time to actually do much reading, then there may be a real treat for you waiting in the Robert Jordan audible books.
Robert Jordan has actually written for quite a while, in many different genres and/or subject matters, including dance criticism and history articles. But this writer began striking gold in 1990 when he conjured up his 'Wheel of Time' series of novels with the first of what has now become an immensely long series. That first novel was called 'The Eye of the Word' and Jordan has not stopped since its best-selling publication. Indeed, he said from the start of the series that he intends to keep on writing "until they nail his coffin shut".
Jordan's endless curiosity and wide reading clearly come to light in his 'Wheel of Time' series of fantasy novels. Jordan trods familiar ground--the epic Tolkienesque ground, that is--but he also departs from the grand master in certain significant ways.
For one thing, Jordan brings a gritty realism to the writing of his books that Tolkien (deliberately) did not. With Robert Jordan's books, we feel that even though we are living in a fantasy realm we are also living in our own everyday world. While Tolkien also created his great and enduring fantasy realms from real historical material, he tended more toward the faerie story and the "pure" myth. Jordan gives us no faerie tales, and he does not pretend to be delving too deeply into the human dim and distant past. Jordan gives us books wherein females play out more equally than in Tolkien; it's not so much that Jordan makes Tolkien seem to dislike women, but rather that he dares to believe that he can understand both genders (something more authors of both genders should dare to do). On the one hand he accepts and completely plays with gender stereotypes even to the point of creating a world where there is unbalanced "magick" because the male energy force is tainted by an ancient counterstroke of power from the Dark One in the throes of his (initial) defeat and so only gifted females can be fully trusted (supposedly) to wield the power; on the other hand, he uses deftly described interactions (and a great deal of them) between important, and sometimes not so important, members of each gender to show forth the foibles and prejudice of each gender in a stark and unforgiving light.
So females play a much more prominent in Jordan than they did in Tolkien and so do gender politics and sexuality. But his hero (and de facto Messianic Savior), Rand Al'Thor, is still a male, so Jordan is no sell-out Fantasy feminist. Jordan's fantasy realm is built upon real-world syncretism, in fact. One who listens to these dramatically read audible renditions of his works will find not-so-deeply-disguised embodiments of every major world religion and mythos, allusions to real-world ethnicity, realistically rendered small town vs. cosmopolitan mentality, royalty vs. common man, force vs. knowledge, political intrigue, scientific or at least philosophical attempts at understanding of "magic", and all-too-human mundane confusion in the greatest of the heroes. The Robert Jordan audible books are a great addition to an avid non-reader's Fantasy library.
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