The Wheel of Time novel rerelease points toward 2021 TV premiere

Orbit Books is rereleasing the first book in The Wheel of Time series in November of this year. That’s an indication that the show won’t be far behind.

It’s been eight years since A Memory of Light came out on store shelves and ended The Wheel of Time series, and a whopping 31 years since the first novel in the 14-book cycle — The Eye of the World — came out. Fans have been waiting a loooong time for a (proper) adaptation of this story, and Amazon is finally ready to give it to them with its Wheel of Time TV show.

And it may be coming sooner than we think. The show just wrapped filming on its first season the other week. Ordinarily, that might not be enough time for the crew to do everything necessary to get a show like this ready to air — The Wheel of Time is a fantasy epic, which means there will be a lot of special effects, a lot of editing, a lot of touching up, etc. However, they managed to get a lot of that done during a long lull in filming brought on by the pandemic, so they’re in better shape than you’d think at first glance.

Now, evidence is piling up that the show will premiere by the end of this year! The Wertzone reports that Orbit Books is releasing a new version of The Eye of the World on November 4, 2021, the better to drive interest in the series. The description on the Amazon entry for the book straight-up says, “SOON TO BE A MAJOR AMAZON PRIME TV SERIES,” so they’re pushing the TV connection. And generally speaking, these kinds of tie-in books are released alongside their adaptations, or right beforehand. For instance, a TV tie-in edition of A Game of Thrones was released just one week before the HBO premiered in April of 2011. Years before that, there was a new edition of The Lord of the Rings published a month before Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters in December of 2001.

Does this guarantee that the first season of The Wheel of Time will premiere in 2021? No, but the signs are good. And the wait between seasons likely won’t be very long, since production on season 2 is already about to start up:

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