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Song of Ice and Fire, however, hasn’t had that pacing problem. Things are happening and the plot moves along quickly. I don’t think that GRRM will have the same issue. Still, the current book is years late, the previous book was also years late… I love ‘em, but wish they’d come out faster. (no pressure to GRRM though… just a fanboy reader’s eager desire to read in one sitting what took him years to write)

All that said, though, it takes a series for a story to be long enough to engross me. I blaze through WoT books in a day or weekend, depending on how thick the book is and how busy I am. The sheer epic length of the story is one of the draws for me. A trilogy is a solid read, like the Mistborn series by Sanderson, or Stackpole’s fantasy series. I’d hate to see them go away or be condensed smaller than they need to be.

I have hopes for the last three books of the Wheel of Time. Brandon Sanderson has proven that he has a better head for story pacing than Jordan did, and his Mistborn series was a great trilogy that moved along and came to a satisfying end. Same with the standalone novel Warbreaker. Great writing, excellent pacing, and he writes FAST.

So even if he says the Wheel of Time will take three books to finish, he’ll have all three done faster than Jordan would have done one (and Jordan was no slouch in the speed department early on) I’m betting he’ll have all three out long before GRRM is finished with the book after Dance with Dragons. (maybe even before Dance is done… we’ll see.) I know he got the entirety of Gathering Storm done while Martin was still working on one Daenarys chapter.

I can understand the frustration, but have some faith. They’ll come out fantastic.

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I also see some solution in between. Dragonlance runs as a long series fro some years now and the books always come out in three parts (helpful for the publisher) but each of them is somewhere closed in it’s story and you don’t need to read everything.

Also, shorter stories are better inspiration for roleplaying and often better fiction.

For comparision, it is interesting to pick up SF/F from the 70s or earlier and how much plot is packed into a small number of pages.

I followed WoT for four books, then stopped buying.

Song of Fire and Ice, bought the first book. Stopped. My friends were baffled. “But it’s such a good series.” It was a good book, for sure, but not good enough to invest the kind of time these series seem to want one to invest.