Roger, No, the author who took over from Robert Jordan didn't introduce any SF elements into the Wheel of Time series. He simply finished the story based on notes and outlines provided by Jordan before he died. Dornetta was simply saying that she didn't like either Science Fiction or Fantasy. As for the Shannara series, he really didn't change it from Fantasy to Science Fiction arbitrarily. At the very beginning of the series, in the first book, The Sword of Shannara, one of the characters gives a brief historical review that basically said there was a great war in our current world and that magic emerged subsequent to most of humanity being destroyed and that elves, dwarves, and the other races are simply different kinds of mutated humans. So he started out with our current scientific world from the beginning, and the later Fantasy novels are set in our future when magic has taken the place of science. The books he wrote later simply fill in that "history" as it is viewed from the books he wrote earlier. Evan ----- Original Message ----- From: Roger Loran Bailey To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2013 12:18 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: A Memory of Light I am not sure that I understand. I have read books that mix science fiction and fantasy. That irritates me. Stephen King's The Stand is an example. It was a really good science fiction novel that was, as far as I am concerned, messed up by the fantasy elements that were added. The Wheel of Time series seems to be a different matter though. I read some of the first volumes and kind of fell away from it before other authors took over from Robert Jordan and they seemed pretty solidly fantasy to me. I would suppose that when other authors took over there would be differences, differences in style at the very least, but I did not see much room for science fiction elements to be introduced. The entire world building that went into the setting seemed to exclude it. Are you saying that the subsequent authors introduced science fiction elements into it? I suppose I did see that in the Sword of Shannara series. It was a solid fantasy and then Terry Brooks decided that he wanted it to be science fiction, so he started writing prequels to force it to be science fiction. The trouble is that the other novels had already been written as fantasy and he was trying to drive square pegs into a round hole. The prequels had a flavor of fantasy to them too. I didn't feel like it worked at all. I certainly hope that something like that was not done to the Wheel of Time series. On 1/12/2013 2:15 AM, Dornetta wrote: You are right Roger, it is fantasy but still science fiction and/or fantasy...I do neither...thanks to the Never-ending Story and a few others...those talking trees scared the Hades outta me! Netta "Just because you are blind does not mean you lack vision"-Stevie Wonder