I’m nearly finished with the Dark Tower, which I am loving. I love fantasy and adventure stories. I’ve read Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game, and a few other series.
I’m wondering how good Sword of Truth is. I loved the show Legend of the Seeker and I’m aware there are differences in the books.
How are the books? Is there a storyline that continues through them? Are they done or does he continue to publish?
Thoughts? Opinions?
I never read much of it (skimmed one book) because the word of mouth was so bad. Basically from what I’ve heard it’s a Randian hero who kills unarmed peace protesters while fighting Communists. With lots of rape and torture. The Communists and torture I saw.
Awful. I mean, if you like Terry Brooks, go ahead. But it isn’t at all what I’d consider “good”.
I liked the first book. The second was ok, the third not very good, the fourth was ok again, and then the fifth was terrible and it all went downhill from there. Each book has a preachy libertarian/anti-leftist scene, as the series goes on they become more and more prominent. The preachiness really starts to crowd out the story as the series goes on, as Goodkind starts retconning previous events in the series that don’t fit with the political philosophy that he’s building up. This all cumulates in the eighth book, which is entirely devoted to slamming pacifists and vegetarians.
The ending of the series is absolutely awful, by the way. It completely invalidates the clever ending to the first book – it turns out that the characters could have just handed the terrible evil wizard everything that he wanted and things would have turned out just as well as they did after they struggled for an entire book to oppose him.
As Der Trihs mentions, the rape and torture scenes quickly get extremely creepy. Realism is one thing, but when every single book has at least one scene where every female citizen of a city is raped, and you go into excruciating detail in describing it, well…
My verdict: if you’re the type of person who absolutely has to finish things, run, don’t walk away from this series. If you’d be happy enough to just read the first book without getting sucked in, then I’d say that Wizard’s First Rule is an entertaining enough read.
Truly terrible, terrible books. Full of extremely thinly-veiled Objectivist morality.
Don’t bother.
I read “Wizard’s First Rule”. While I found that Goodkind was a fairly skilled writer, there was at least one scene of torture (of a child, at that) which was so graphic and disturbing that I was barely able to finish the book, and decided I had no desire to continue reading the series.
I read Wizard’s First Rule about 2 years ago, and thought it was okay. Not great. And then the thought of having to slog thru another 9 books of 250,000 words of “okay but not great” writing made me stop and begin something else.
Go read some of Diana Wynne Jones’ books instead.
Crap.
I agree with the consensus that the series got ponderous after the first few books.
I gave up on this author after a while, but does this quote mean he actually wrapped up the series? No spoilers please, just a yes or no if you can.
Before you read these books, I need to know if you can understand the concept of “a chicken that was not a chicken, but was evil manifest!!”
(Yes, actual Terry Goodkind quote)
Also just read the first one. I didn’t mind the Randinist preaching, or that the villains were crazy medieval aristocrat communists, even if that concept makes no sense whatsoever. It fact I quite liked the first half.
My problem was with the main character, Richard Cypher. He starts like such a nice, prototypical naive hero, but at some point he becomes a complete asshole, willing to literally just kill in cold blood anybody who is not completely in line with him. I’m not even talking about people who actively oppose him, but people who are not willing to obey him immediately.
And I don’t think that it was plot development by Goodkind’s part, it read like the author really thought that the latter Cypher was the sort of hero he liked.
Yeah, that was the worst part to me. The asshole Richard develops into could have been interesting if the author realized he was an asshole. Instead Goodkind seemed to think Richard was a paragon of virtue and goodness as he cuts down peace protesters “armed only with their hatred of moral clarity”(direct quote from the books.)
Yes. Sort of. He started another series that I’ve been told takes place in the “real” world but has characters that are descendants of the characters from Sword of Truth somehow crossing over into reality or something like that.
To Victorbean yes the series did wrap up. Though I hear there is some kind of weird tie in with his current book that takes place on ‘our’ world.
Sr Siete Richard’s hypocrisy is staggering in its depth. He would give a 5 page speech about how everyone has to be these perfect independent individuals that think for themselves then turn around and call anyone who disagreed with him evil. Apparently it is totally impossible to disagree with Richard and not be hopelessly naive or completely psychotic. Even the Sisters of the Light who had a different worldview but were generally good were forced to admit everything they did was wrong and come around to Ricard’s way of thinking.
I love the irony of Richard talking about how he wanted a world where everyone thought for himself while forcing his people to chant his name and basically worship him.
Spoiler for anyone that wants to know the ending but doesn’t want to actually have to read it.Richard becomes a god and banishes everyone who disagrees with him to Earth. I’m not kidding. He also banishes all the pacifists along with the psycho Empire so you know, screw them. I guess they can just get raped and murdered for awhile until they grow some balls.
Oh.
I need to start a thread needing fantasy recommendations, then.
Hey, some of us didn’t like some aspects, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try. It’s a very popular series, which means that a lot of people enjoys them.
In any case, have you tried “Song of Ice and Fire” yet?
Yes, I’m up to date on Song of Ice and Fire, but also don’t plan to start any series that looks endless.
I have not read Wheel of Time, either, though it seems way too long and drawn out.
I hated it. Boring and seemingly obsessed with bondage and torture. (Although I only read the first two.)
I have read the first 4 and plan to continue because I bought a set of the first 6. They are pretty good but, and this echoes a lot of what other have said:
There is a lot of violence towards women
There is definitely a sense of repetition since the pattern always seems to be (in general, not a spoiler), what ever they do to solve the problem in book X causes an even bigger problem in book x+1.
Richard (the main character) is sometimes a tool.
Going to finish the ones I have (eventually) but not sure I will continue
I liked the first book the torture goes over the top but It wasn’t a main component of the book.
The series quickly falls of a cliff so I’d recommend the first one only if you don’t have to finish series you start. I have a libertarian bent and the series got too preachy even for me and the last book was awful.