I’m not sure how this is going to turn out, it isn’t something I’d consider for a TV series, but Wizard’s First Rule, the first book in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, is coming to TV, produced by Sam Raimi.
Man, that series has 11 books now? I stopped reading around the fifth one I believe. Isn’t the huge bondage theme in the first one? That’d be pretty hard to gloss over to get it on ABC.
I tell ya, that whole S&M thing that Goodkind plays up in the first few books was very enlightening to my 12-year old mind. Not something I would expect on ABC without heavy editing, though.
The BDSM is rather graphic and at times central to the plot…no, don’t know how they’re going to cut it out either. I gave up after 4 books, but I was also in my early teens, so my interest was rather more prurient than literary.
Even if the relentless celebration and glorification of rape, torture, murder, dismemberment, child abuse, pedophilia, incest, and bestiality were removed along with the relentless sexism, racism, and homophobia, the Sword of Truth would only be a particularly blatant Tolkien ripoff with extra helpings of plot holes and cliches.
And no, I won’t be watching this series. Why do you ask?
Wow. I don’t remember any of that!
I kept up with the series as far as the one where Dick sculpts the awe-inspiring statue and then smashes it. I’d stuck with them just to see if each new book could actually be worse than its appalling predecessor. When Goodkind completely stopped jerking off over S&M and started into jerking off full time over Ayn Rand he lost me, though. He went from being hilariously bad to being just plain bad. Unless they somehow manage to translate his earlier badness to the screen in some kind of Ed Wood-ish way, I can’t see how even a moment of this series could be worth watching.
Well I guess the stream of violent pornography was easy to miss, seeing as it lasted only a hundred pages.
While we’re on this topic, one of Goodkind’s many weaknesses was that he never managed to bring Dick Rahl to life for me. For example, the titular Sword of Truth is supposed to feed from Dick’s rage. Yet I never remember reading a single passage from any of the books where Dick is believably enraged, righteously or otherwise. In the early books, he’s kind of a candy-ass drip who’s better suited to unicorns and rainbows than he is to bearing the SOT. As the series wore on (or wore on me, at least) he transformed into a sanctimonious, self-righteous prick. In neither guise, though, did I ever get an image of him as someone who became consumed with rage.
I won’t even go into Goodkind pulling heretofore unknown powers out of Dick’s ass every time he wrote himself into a corner.
What the fuck is Sam Raimi thinking? The only hope for this project is if the TV series relates to the SOT books as the James Bond movies relate to Flemming’s novels.
Where did you get that from? I can buy the rest of your complaints but the second strongest character in the series is female the only sexist characters are the evil doers as far as I saw. Racism? I don’t even remember any race being really brought up? (were the Mud People black or something? Baka whatis? Even if they were it was never implied that they were any less or weirder because of their skin color). Homophobia? Well there was a man who molests boys in the first book (which obviously doesn’t mean he’s gay only a pedophile) but the only other gay character I remember was a lesbian and a good friend of Richard who is shocked at first at her feelings for another woman but admits almost instantly that it’s equal to his love and realizes he’s being an ass about it…
I stopped reading the series when one of the books started out with the heroine whats-er-name being chase by an evil…chicken. That was the only book I’ve ever make a conscious choice to stop reading.
And the whole bondage thing was kind of freaky to my teenaged brain when I was reading it.
Oh, man.
You done gone and mentioned the chicken that is not a chicken.
We’re all right fucked now.
[sub]My GOODNESS, that guy took one of the best first books ever and used it as the springboard to write CRAP.[/sub]
Every book – every single one – contains a scene in which a female character is raped, and another one in which an entire city is invaded and every woman is raped. The scenes are quite graphic, too. Goodkind seems to revel in them, and frankly it creeps me the hell out. The second-to-last book devoted two chapters to a character narrating how every woman in a city was forced into being sex slaves, just for the purpose of convincing Dick that maybe defeating the Order would be a good idea. You know, the same Order he’s been fighting since Book Three.
I have no idea where the homophobia accusation came from. And maybe I’m just a moron, but I don’t see how it’s a Tolkien rip-off, either. Are you sure that you’re not conflating Terry Brooks with Terry Goodkind?
Hmm. After ABC cleans up all the naughty stuff mentioned above, what are you left with? Speeches, speeches, and more speeches. Speeches about how Life is Good, how not Liking Life is Evil, and speeches about some magic rigamarole that no one, not even Mr. Goodkind, could possibly care about.
Sounds perfect for CSPAN, if you ask me.
P.S. I think what I hate most is how REDUNDANT the books got! How many times does Richard, and his cohorts, say, “Life is good”?? I was curious, so I poked around on the Internets, and I found an electronic version of Faith of the Fallen, book 6. He uses the word “life” 412 times [and I know it would be more had I been able to find Book 10+] out of a total of ~286,000 words (Microsoft word count, so take it the total with a grain of salt, but it’s ballpark). Contrast to Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan, chosen because I had an electronic version 
62 uses of the word “life” out of a total of ~240,000 words. Goodkind uses “life” 5.6 times more often than Jordan.
Dunno if that proves my point, but the books are RE-DUN-DANT.
I only got through the first book by sheer willpower. My God it was awful!
Now I kinda want to read it again, except I’m not sure if I still have it or threw it away… and I NEVER throw books away.
Sorry for piling on GuanoLad, but I have to go with the crowd that hates it. I tried the first book on the advice of a friend. The whole thing with the collar put me off. But worse, it was just a dull book. I am stunned that it has 11 books in the series now.
Doesn’t bother me. I mostly liked the first book, though I was a little mystified by it. I read a few more, hoping it would gel into something compelling, but it never did. I only got a few chapters into book five before I gave up, realising how terrible it was, and haven’t revisited him since.
I am curious as to how a fantasy novel series can be translated to an ongoing TV series in the first place, but of all the possible fantasy novels, this would not ever be in my top ten to choose from.
Oh, but don’t you know, his books aren’t fantasy.
I can think of a dozen book series I’d rather see in visual form than this, and I honestly hope if this show gets made that it flops. Where’s our GRR Martin TV show, damn it? I want to see The Song of Ice and Fire brought to life.
I’m honestly wondering if the TV executives know what they signed up for here. Maybe the Tolkien comparison would be worthwhile, because they’re much more likely to be familiar with that story, from Peter Jackson’s movies, than with the printed source.
Perhaps the pitch should have been something like this:
Producer: “It’s just like Lord of the Rings, except that in the first movie, the Ringwraiths catch Arwen during the horse chase, and rape her, before she manages to get away again. Also, at the end, after the orcs fill Boromir with arrows, they rape his dead body. Then, in the second movie, Frodo and Samwise capture Gollum because when he sneaks up for the ring, he can’t resist trying to rape Frodo. Also, after the orcs take Pippin and Merry captive, they rape the pair constantly while carrying them away. Plus the mind-controlled Theoden orders his daughter Eowyn to allow Wormtongue to rape her whenever he wants.”
Studio: “Uh…”
Producer: “Then, when the orcs breach the wall at Helm’s Deep, they capture a bunch of the Rohan defenders, and there’s like a ten-minute scene where they get raped a lot.”
Studio: “How, uh, how much more of this is there?”
Producer: “I’ll summarize quickly. In the third movie, Shelob paralyzes Frodo so she can rape him. When the ghost army shows up, they fly in and rape all the orcs. And at the very end, when Eowyn confronts the Witch King, and reveals herself to be a woman…”
Studio: “Let me guess. He rapes her before she kills him.”
Producer: “Nope! She beats him down and then she rapes him.”
Studio: “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Producer: “Well, anyway, other than that, it’s exactly the same.”
Studio: “Right. Okay. Well, uh, let us get back to you…”
Granted, but it’s not as if the men of the city are taken off for beer and pizza, they all get brutally killed. Don’t get me wrong, I think the books are crap too, and I stuck it out till the end Og help me, but I didn’t find them inherently sexist, everyone got victimised.