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Books / Re: Wheel of Time
« on: April 19, 2004, 03:22:09 AM »
well, there's no rule that says you have to write your books in order.
I was going to say Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books are written in an order that's not very chronological, but the best example is probably CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Apparently he preferred them to be ordered chronologically (I saw some recent edition that says "in the author's preferred order") but they were written in a very different order.
It's easier to get away with when you have a loosely-connected universe you're writing in (like Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe novels, which are in all sorts of places along the timeline), but with a series like WoT, if there's a story you feel should be told before the series is over, and it happens to be set before the other books so far, why not write it?
I was going to say Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books are written in an order that's not very chronological, but the best example is probably CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Apparently he preferred them to be ordered chronologically (I saw some recent edition that says "in the author's preferred order") but they were written in a very different order.
It's easier to get away with when you have a loosely-connected universe you're writing in (like Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe novels, which are in all sorts of places along the timeline), but with a series like WoT, if there's a story you feel should be told before the series is over, and it happens to be set before the other books so far, why not write it?