Never-Ending Story

I think it was in 1995. I worked with this guy, name of Gerry, who was the world's most ultimate nerd. For my birthday, he gave me a training manual for Ham Radios - he wanted me to get my operator's license so we could talk on the radio. Now, we worked together, so we talked every day in person, but that apparently wasn't cool enough for him. He was very excited for me. I got about three pages into the book before my geek-alarm went off and I abandoned the concept.

This guy had been in the Air Force for 11 years at that time. I'd been in for two. He still wore his military-issued BCGs, those clunky-framed, plastic-lensed glasses that you expect to see held together with white tape. He always carried around this rather large book, some fantasy novel that he had his nose stuck in at every spare moment. He talked incessantly about his books and his Ham Radios... but this book was part of a series, and he chattered at me to read it. Did I like works of fantasy? Yes, of course - well, I couldn't continue living and breathing unless I read this series, and he pestered me until I took the damn thing to shut him up.

I was instantly hooked. It was a big book, but as a rabid fan of Stephen King, big books were certainly no deterrent for me. I started the first book rather reluctantly, but in a matter of days had stormed my way through it and was clamoring for the second. At this time, I believe fans of this series were anxiously awaiting the release of the fourth novel in the series, the biggest yet in a chain of books that would get progressively larger and more expansive as the years passed.

The series is known as the Wheel of Time, and "Eye of the World", Book One, was my portal into a realm as instantly addictive and breathtaking as anything I'd read since Tolkien. Of course, to any real fan of this series, that catapulting excitement tended to simmer down a bit by, say, Book Six, and I think it was Book Eight that I actually tossed angrily across the room when the plot-line looped back upon itself yet again, but after we fans slogged our dedicated ways through Book Eleven (not counting the damned prequel that reared its unexpected head at us a couple years ago), it looked like the end was FINALLY in sight. The Man Himself, Creator of the Wheel, Robert Jordan, promised that Book Twelve, halle-fuckin-lujah, was the last one. He said, in fact, that if it had to be 2,000 pages long, that was IT. We held our collective breaths, we crossed our collective fingers, we marked our calendars for 2009. It will have taken 19 years, thirteen books and about 12,000 pages, but we shall have our conclusion, our Final Battle on the slopes of Mountain, and the Wheel will be triumphant, dammit.

So, then, yesterday, Robert Jordan died.

Shit.

Book Twelve is in that lovely novel stage known as "notes." The wails of geekdom can be heard echoing across the internet worldwide. Someone will probably pick up those notes and finish the story, but geez. To be so close. He knew he was dying, too. A little rush would have been in order, methinks - lord knows he dragged everything else out, so we would have been okay with a bit of hurry.

But, what can ya do? My condolences to his family, of course - he was an incredibly talented guy despite his falling prey to the lures of mass-market payoffs, hence the horrendously long saga that could have been tidily wrapped up in maybe six books total. He'll be missed in the mainly nerdish world of Fantasy/Sci-Fi. For all of that, I'll probably never think of him again without thinking, callously or not, "Damn... he was SO CLOSE!!!"