# What was this young adult fantasy book I read?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-this-young-adult-fantasy-book-i-read/676834>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [December 20, 2013, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-this-young-adult-fantasy-book-i-read/676834 "2013-12-20T17:53:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![emarkp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3be4f8/32.png) [@emarkp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emarkp)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2014, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-this-young-adult-fantasy-book-i-read/676834/21 "2014-06-30T04:36:48Z")

</div>

Just a quick note: the OP description does not match the first Shannara trilogy, at all–I just plowed through it in the last year. Have no idea about the later books. But in the first trilogy, all of the artifacts are explicitly magical.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [July 1, 2014, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-this-young-adult-fantasy-book-i-read/676834/22 "2014-07-01T02:09:56Z")

</div>

> [@](#):
>
> What I meant is that the reader learns that the world of Sword of Shannara is the distant future from an infodump from the 3rd person narrator, not by interpreting the perceptions of the characters. Without the infodump, there’s no indication that the book takes place in the future at all (rather than in a generic fantasy world).

I seem to recall a description of one of the ruins as matching a high-voltage power line tower. But maybe I’m remembering a different fantasy book, and I’m not about to re-read Shannara to double-check.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-this-young-adult-fantasy-book-i-read/676834.md?page=1)