The Background of the book series

James Oliver Rigney Jr was born in October 1947, studied as a nucleair engineer and joined the navy for two tours, before picking up his career as a writer. He used different pen names, and one of them was: Robert Jordan. Under this pseudonymn he wrote the much acclaimed The Wheel of Time-series. Because of this series he was often called Tolkien's successor. In my opinion a much earned title.

Teresa Patterson is an artist and an author. She wanted to write since grade school. She wrote short science fiction stories and worked as a ghost writer. After she wrote The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, she did another The World of-Book for the Shannara-series by Terry Brooks.

She did the work based on talks with and notes from Robert Jordan. The book covers a lot of the background story that Robert Jordan used in the narrative of the first seven books of The Wheel of Time. It covers backgrounds of The Wheel, The Power and the histories of the different nations found in The Wheel of Time. Besides that it uncovers a lot of background not found in the series, it also has a lot of spoilers for the books 1 through 7.

The book has been written as if written by a scholar of that time, which works very well. It also gives the reader sometimes false information, as happens with historians nowadays too. Think about that: until for a short period ago, we thought that dinosaurs were cold blooded, while now there are also clues that they might be warm blooded. Sometimes Robert Jordan deliberatly made Teresa Patterson make a guess to questions she had; just as our scholars do.

Teresa Patterson has already stated that she would be inclined to update the book to include all 15 books of The Wheel of Time, but she hasn't received that request yet.

This book is best left to the die hard fans of The Wheel of Time, and if you do want to read it I suggest you read it after you have read the entire series, just to make sure nothing is spoiled for you.