and write, and write, and write…
Yep. I’m of the same mind. He created a world that was great. But the world can’t really drive the book for me. I need people to pull me in, and he didn’t give me that.
I believe there is a semi-gritty gummibear I could chisel off the carpet in the back seat of my car. Can anyone do better?
Cervaise - I’d rather have the semi-gritty gummibear from the floor than a copy of anything Shanara.
I liked Eddings’ first series, the Belgariad. All the rest were just rehashes.
I liked Sword of Shannara when I first read it at age 20 (I particularly liked the opening chapter) but they rapidly went downhill. Same with his Magic Kingdom series, the first is better than the rest.
Same can be said of Raymond Feist, Terry Goodkind, and Robert Jordan. It seems to be a curse.
You serious? My daughter’s birthday is coming up.
Email me, please. She would love that. Her name being Shannara and all.
I read them when I was much younger (middle school-elementary school for me.) THEN I loved them, but now I view them as Tolkein-lite. I suppose I could read them again and compare the two, but there are too many Prachett books I still don’t own.
Long time lurker, first time poster. Be gentle, please.
I read Brooks long before I read Tolkien and of the two, I prefer Brooks. That’s probably considered blasphemy by the Tolkien fans and that’s all right. To me, writing is an art and art is subjective. When I read, I want to be drawn into the story, lose myself in the fantasy and care about the characters. Tolkien doesn’t do that for me, Brooks does. I’ll admit there seems to be some similarities but like another poster said, just about every fantasy novel follows similar themes. Add a dwarf, an elf and a few humans and comparisons will inevitably be raised.
That being said, I started reading his latest series, The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, several months ago but have been unable to finish. I just haven’t found it nearly as enjoyable as his other series.
Not blasphemy so much as confusion.
To me, saying one loves fantasy with elves and dwarves and wizards and dragons yet dislikes JRRT is like saying one loves the principles on which the USA was founded, but dislikes the constitution.
For better or for worse, Tolkien is the grandfather of most modern fantasy. Tolkien did not invent the genre, but he drew on many, many disparate sources and showed what could be done with the fantasy sub-creation genre, and fired the public’s imagination. Much the same way that the founding fathers drew upon many older sources to cobble together the US Constitution, and fired our young nation’s collective imagination about what might be!
Now one doesn’t need to enjoy reading the Constitution to appreciate the principles underpinning our society. After all, the language is a bit stilted and archaic, and not easily accesible to everyone. But one shoud acknowledge the key role the Constitution played and still plays in our ever-evolving society. Same for JRRT’s work.
Hmmmm…
Did I just put JRRT on par with Franklin, Jefferson, Madison et. al.?
Some analogies can only be stretched so far.
And I still don’t care for TBrooks, so Arden and I have entered negotiations! 
Interestingly enough I am in somewhat the same boat.
I too read The Sword of Shannara before Tolkein. Waaay back in time my mother had just re-married and along with her new husband I got two new, much older (than me) brothers. Till this time I despised reading. I just wouldn’t do it. My first Christmas with my new family sucked big time. Instead of getting matchbox cars and a racetrack I got about four feet of books if they were piled up. Blech!!
A few weeks later I was sitting in my room with nothign to do. Mind you this was before video games, before we had a VCR, before MTV when all we had was five broadcast TV stations that went off the air around 1 a.m… I was bored out of my skull…I had to be to attempt what I did next.
I decided to pick up a book and read it if it killed me. Given my contrary nature I decided if I was going to do this it would have to be a ‘serious’ book so I went to look over what I had gotten for Christmas. The only criteria I used to select The Sword of Shannara was that it was the fattest book on the shelf. I cracked it open and started reading. Three days later I was done with the whole thing. After that I voraciously gobbled up the rest of the books on my shelf and then discovered the joys of bookstores which till that time I likewise despised being in. The really cool part at that time was I had all the good books still ahead of me and it took several years for me to get through them all. Now I visit a bookstore and have a hard time finding something I want to read and often endup with some dreck just to have something to read.
Of course I got around to reading LOTR and while wonderful The Sword of Shannara beats it out in my heart. Intellectually I can say that LOTR is a clearly superior piece of work but it isn’t what opened up the world of reading to me and thus takes a back seat in my mind to Terry Brook’s book and I don’t care how derivative it is.
Anyway, the bottom line is if you had fun reading the thing. If you spent the whole time reading it thinking this is a ripoff of Tolkein then it is no surprise you didn’t like it. If you set that aside (or didn’t know better as in my case) then it is a fun read. Maybe not great literature and a first rate classic but still good. Excellent even if you’re sitting on a beach sipping margaritas and want a quick, easy read to enjoy on vacation.
GuanoLad, did we read the same books or do we just have wildly different definitions of good-natured and matronly? I’m thinking you must have put Polgara and Sephrenia into that slot, and I can’t imagine two phrases that could describe them any worse. Also, there’s a sixth main character type, short-tempered old man with mysterious powers (Belgarath), although that one doesn’t show up in the Sparhawk books. Unless that’s Sparhawk.
I like both Tolkien and Eddings, for different reasons and depending on my mood. Tolkien seems to affect me on a more primal level; Eddings is amusing.
I read Sword of Shannara and was interested enough to finish it but not enough to re-read it–and that’s unusual for me.
I disagree with picunurse that there isn’t any great literature to be found in the fantasy genre. Cherryh’s The Dreamstone and The Tree of Swords and Jewels, for instance, are eerily lovely. And the books Patricia McKillip has written in the last few years have been stunning in their complexity, characterisations, and language, and they are far, far from escapist.
I don’t think you have read enough of the genre. While I think precious few fantasy novels rise to great literature except Tolkein there is plenty out there that is not formula. I think you can lay ‘formula’ on nearly any genre you like and find plenty of examples. Originality is difficult and many authors are out to make a buck simply being derivative but there is PLENTY of originality nonetheless.
-
Piers Anthony: Magic of Xanth novels (although talk about beating a dead horse…will he EVER stop with these?), Incarnations of Immortality series, Apprentice Adept series, Tarot series
-
C.S. Lewis: Chronicles of Narnia
-
Roger Zelazny: Amber series
-
Ursula K. LeGuin: Earthsea series
-
Stephen R. Donaldson: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series
-
Robert Jordan: Wheel of Time series (he really needs to finish this thing)
-
Terry Pratchett: Discworld series
-
Michael Moorcock: Elric of Melnibone series
Those are just some. I can probably come up with more. I am not saying that all of the above are excellent or necessarily good (actually I think they all are good to at least some extent but in many cases what started out a good thing became a poor thing for various reasons…at the very least the first book is worth a read to see if you want to continue). I am, however, suggesting that all of the above are original and not derivative of anything else I can think of…either by being wholly unique ideas or very original spins on old, pat ideas.
Can we place Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz in the fantasy genre? If so I think they rise to great fantasy literature. To be honest I never considered what genre those two fit in. I never see them in the sci-fi/fantasy section of bookstores but they certainly seem to fit the bill.
Oddly enough, I agree that Wheel of Time does have original elements to it, esp. in the sheer complexity of the plot and in the magic system and in the political intrigue (one thing I love is that everyone is working with a different set of incomplete or even incorrect information). However, the complexity seems to have sidetracked Jordan such that we’re plodding along so slowly in later books that I have a hard time seeing him finish it before he dies! And don’t get me started about the writing…
Let’s just say that I would consider Terry Brooks a prose genius by comparison…
My theory on Wheel of Time: He’s already written the final book. He was worried about dying before finishing, so he wrote the climactic volume and set it aside. Now he’s just working toward it. The longer he goes without dying, though, the more he has to pad out the story so he doesn’t get into the final book. If he lives for thirty more years, he’ll be publishing a volume that contains a two hundred thousand word description of the shape of a bowl.
I was using Matronly in the Mother-figure sense. Maybe that was the wrong word to use… And good-natured in the “they put on a front of being irritating busybodies, but deep down they have a heart of gold” sense. Oh, and in that other one-off book he wrote called The Redemption of Althalus, the cat/goddess/whatever she was, was another Polgara clone. (Awful book, btw)
Sparhawk was the innocent who was dragged along on a quest he didn’t want, a la Garion. Though he also was an excessively violent barbarian. I gave up on this series after the fifth or so beheading he made and laughed at the bouncing head with salacious joy. I also, at about that time, realised they were killing people who hadn’t done anything wrong yet, but were just associated with their perceived enemy. It made me sick.
Belgarath I didn’t include in my standard character list because his type of character really hasn’t appeared in their other books. I think you could call him “a good-natured source of knowledge who avoids telling anybobody anything useful”.
I’d still have to disagree, I think. I’ve never seen Polgara or Sephrenia as being much of a Mother figure, but I’m willing to chalk that up as a difference in perception. I do disagree that either was “put[ting] on a front”, though. Polgara was short-tempered and sharp-tongued and Sephrenia was fairly even natured, but I don’t think either bothered to hide how much they cared for their friends. Except for the relationship between Polgara and Belgarath.
**
Sparhawk innocent? He might not have known about the Anakha bit for quite some time, but he knew what he was doing, where he was going and why, and he knew what to do when he got there. Also, Sparhawk is at least in his 30s when we first meet him–hardly a youth.
**
I only remember Baron Halprin being beheaded, but it’s not like I was keeping track of it. And with the exception of the duped serfs in the second series (and there wasn’t a lot of choice about killing them), I don’t recall all that many innocents being killed, with or without salacious joy. Maybe I’d better read it again.
**
Sort of an ambulatory Oracle of Delphi? 
You might want to try Regina’s Song. No magic, a limited cast of characters, and it’s a fairly decent ghost/detective story.