With Amazon now in the thick of of an adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, people are more interested than ever in the original books. They run 14 strong, starting with The Eye of the World in 1990 all the way to A Memory of Light, which was published in 2013, several years after Jordan’s death in 2007.
After Jordan died, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson took over for him and finished the final three books in the series. But now that the saga is nearly a decade complete, are we sure it’s fully over, or might Sanderson or someone else ever return to write more?
Well, to start, there technically already is a fifteenth Wheel of Time book: New Spring is a prequel story that follows Moiraine Damodred during her time as a student at the White Tower. It came out in 2004, between publication of the tenth and eleventh books.
Is The Wheel of Time book series over?
Beyond that, there are some other ancillary Wheel of Time books out there. For instance, The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time — put together by Jordan and Teresa Patterson — is a companion book that includes maps, portraits of central characters, flags, and information about Jordan’s far-flung world. But so far as actual novels set in that world, the pickings are slim.
But that doesn’t mean nothing was ever planning. According to what Sanderson reportedly said at a WorldCon convention not long after Jordan’s death, Jordan at one point was planning two more prequel books, but they never came to pass. He was also considering something called The Outriggers, which would have followed certain characters after the end of the book series.
But Jordan’s death put a stop to those plans, and while Sanderson was willing to come in and complete the original story, he isn’t comfortable with creating spinoffs. “Robert Jordan was very uncomfortable with people writing in his world,” he reportedly said. “If we were to turn this into ‘Book of the Month, McWheel of Time,’ I think it would be dishonoring his memory.
That said, the spinoff rights to the series still reside with Robert Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal, so anything is possible.
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