I picked up the new Wheel of Time book, The Gathering Storm, today. It's been fifteen years -- over half my life -- since I first started reading this series. Although my opinion of these novels has changed dramatically in that time -- particularly now that I can see the appalling misogyny and gender essentialism that underpins the premise of the series -- when I saw it in the bookshop, I couldn't help but feel that old thrill of excitement that I used to get whenever I had a new installment of the series in my hands.

It could be argued that the Wheel of Time was one of my first online fandoms, although it doesn't really feel fandom-ish to me, not compared to my experiences with Harry Potter and Doctor Who/Torchwood. I was just a member of a discussion forum where we sometimes debated theories about the books ("Who killed Asmodean?" "Is Min a *finn?" "Is Verin really the Dark One?" "Will the series end with Padan Fain biting off Rand's and falling into Shayol Ghul?"), we would more often end up having long political discussions in which the Australians on the forum (who were mostly left-wing democratic socialist types) would shock the Americans (who were mostly right-wing libertarian types) with our insistence that stuff like universal health cover was a Good Thing, and that taxing people to cover things like welfare and building roads was not, in fact, theft, but rather the marker of a functional society. Good times.

( Cut for length -- no spoilers )