How many The Wheel of Time books are there?

Amazon is making a full television series based on The Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan. Just how much material do they have to work with?

The short answer is: a lot. There are 14 books in The Wheel of Time series, 11 of which were written by Jordan and three of which were written by Brandon Sanderson, who stepped in to complete the series after Jordan died. And not only that, but each of these books averages out to about 826 pages a piece, so not only are there a ton of books, but they’re huge. Amazon will be busy for a long while.

And on top of that, there’s also a Wheel of Time prequel book called New Spring, which gets into the early life of Moiraine Damodred, who will be played by Rosamund Pike on the show. So that’s a total of 15 books to draw from.

How many books will Amazon adapt of The Wheel of Time?

It will be very tricky to adapt everything in this series on a TV show, because if they did, some of the cast would literally start dying, and the younger cast members would be far too old to convincingly play their characters by the time the series ended. Amazon will definitely be making some cuts, but which ones?

There’s a section of The Wheel of Time known as “the slog” among fans; it describes a period that starts around the seventh book and ends near the tenth, a long slow chunk where not much seems to happen in the plot. That’s probably where a lot of the cuts will come.

Now, not all fans think the slog is a slog, and there will certainly be ideas drawn from it. But that’s where we should expect most of the cuts to fall, although it won’t be limited to that. For instance, it looks like the first season of the show will skip over the section where our heroes go to the city of Caemlyn, instead introducing some of those elements later. Again, this is a huge series, so expect it get whittled down to a reasonable size for TV.

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