Ok, all this discussion about Jordan made me go dig out my copy of "The Eye of the World" and start reading. Actually, I *would* have grabbed "Neuromancer" off my shelf and started reading that in spite of all this Jordan talk, but for some mysterious reason "Neuromancer" has disappeared from my shelves. So it was Jordan who caught my attention thereafter, taking up as he does a large amount of real estate in my one bookcase.

I haven't gotten far, just through the prologue and into chapter one. Already I've found several things I didn't like--first was The Grand Overuse Of Capital Letters. Everything is so important, it must be capitalized. A little excerpt:

"Once you wore the Ring of Tamyrlin, and sat in the High Seat. Once you summoned the Nine Rods of Dominion. Now look at you! A pitiful, shattered wretch. But it is not enough. You humbled me in the Hall of Servents. You defeated me at the Gates of Paaran Disen." And it goes on from there. I chose this pretty much at random, just opening to a random page in the prologue and looking for capitals. I found them pretty quickly.

Another thing I found that smashed me in the head as dreadfully wrong is the scene in the prologue in which the protagonist (well, presumably he's the progagonist--you never can tell from a prologue, after all) "catches a glimpse of himself" in a mirror, and we are treated to a description of his robes and such. This information may well be important later in the novel, but the little trick of having a character "catch a glimpse of themselves" in a mirror is so cliched it hurts me to read it now. I suppose this could draw more from the fact that I used it twice myself before realising what a cliche it was then from anything else, but still, it strikes me as bad everytime I see it now.

After that we get the great map. I love maps that have the mountain range labled "The Spine of the World." Don't they all have that? Jordan does not dissapoint. He also has the wonderful "walled off land" in which there is an area of the world bordered on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the sea, effectively cutting it off and isolating it from the rest of the world. It's not that this can't happen, its that its been done so often that I almost expect to see this everytime I look at a fantasy map. Again, Jordan does not dissapoint. Also on the map, we get the wonderful "Mountains of Dhoom", with the area beyond it labled "The Blight" and "The Blasted Lands." This is another wonderful staple, and I'd be willing to bet there was some ancient mages war that turned that great savannah into "The Blasted Lands." It's also beginning to remind me uncannily of a map Sam and I drew once:

I was complaining that I couldn't draw a continent that didn't look like Australia. Sam took that as a challenge and drew a map on my white board that was sufficiently unlike Australia to impress me and my poor artistic abilities. Then we got carried away (as we almost always do) and started labeling spots on the map with foolish names, like "The Inlet of Evil" and "The Forest of Futility" and "The Beach of Blasphemy" and the wonderful "Isle of Stink." Oddly enough, we also had our own "Mountains of Doom", and I distincly remember telling Sam we had to have those because every map in every fantasy novel has them or their equivalent.

Does any of this make Jordan a bad writer, or make Eye of the World a bad book? Of course not. I don't presume to actually judge a book based on the prologue and the map. It's quite possible that there is a really good explanation for all the silliness on the map that doesn't have anything to do with all the standard fantasy cliches I've already formed in my head by looking at the map. I'll have to read the book to find out. But it certainly hasn't started off on the right foot with me.