What's the difference between gutrock and regular rock?
So I'm most of halfway into Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson, which is Book Three of Four in "The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" (amusing trivia: the Second Chronicles were conceived as four books as well, but Lester del Rey put his foot down; this may help explain why so many authors left Del Rey books after Judy Lynn died), and I think I've finally figured out why I keep reading the books even though the characters are usually either incomprehensible, interchangeable, or just loathsome. It's that the world Donaldson inhabits just has such cool and intriguing stuff in it.
In the first series we enter the Land, hear about Earthpower, and meet the Lords, the Old Lords, the Bloodguard, the Giants and caamora, the Waynhin, and the Ranyhyn, among other things. Almost makes up for the rape scene and calling the bad guy Lord Foul and putting his demesne in the middle of a lava lake called Hotash Slay. In the second series, he thrashes the Land and introduces a character more annoying than Thomas Covenant, but gives us the elohim, Vain, the One Tree, the Haruchai and the battle with the Guardian of the One Three, the Sandgorgon, more Giants, and the unconventional final battle. The Third Chronicles feature the main characters disappearing even further up their own asses, but we have the Viles and their incredible lore, the Insequent, caesures, which are rips in time that allow Linden to have a cool scene with a living Berek Halfhand, and the Worm at the World's End. So even though the books need a good-bits version almost as much as "Crown of Stars" does, I'm in until the end.
I also noted something about Donaldson that feeds into what makes the books unsatisfying. The Covenant books are miserable books. Let's face it. The main character is a leper and goes downhill from there. When he gets redeemed, we need someone else to suck. Now, The Lord of the Rings is an unutterably sad book, because Tolkien was writing from a sad place, the devastation of World War I (and II) and the passing away of the England he'd known growing up. Hence, Saruman's actions in the book, and the sense of things dying and passing away. Donaldson grew up the child of missionaries wo0rking at a leper colony in India, a place full of misery, which is likely why the underlying condition of the books is misery. The Land isn't miserable, but the people in it and the framework in which it works are miserable. (I'm not saying Donaldson is miserable, BTW, just that he has experience of misery.) So maybe understanding that will help me be a little more satisfied with the books, since I'm not going to give up.
In the first series we enter the Land, hear about Earthpower, and meet the Lords, the Old Lords, the Bloodguard, the Giants and caamora, the Waynhin, and the Ranyhyn, among other things. Almost makes up for the rape scene and calling the bad guy Lord Foul and putting his demesne in the middle of a lava lake called Hotash Slay. In the second series, he thrashes the Land and introduces a character more annoying than Thomas Covenant, but gives us the elohim, Vain, the One Tree, the Haruchai and the battle with the Guardian of the One Three, the Sandgorgon, more Giants, and the unconventional final battle. The Third Chronicles feature the main characters disappearing even further up their own asses, but we have the Viles and their incredible lore, the Insequent, caesures, which are rips in time that allow Linden to have a cool scene with a living Berek Halfhand, and the Worm at the World's End. So even though the books need a good-bits version almost as much as "Crown of Stars" does, I'm in until the end.
I also noted something about Donaldson that feeds into what makes the books unsatisfying. The Covenant books are miserable books. Let's face it. The main character is a leper and goes downhill from there. When he gets redeemed, we need someone else to suck. Now, The Lord of the Rings is an unutterably sad book, because Tolkien was writing from a sad place, the devastation of World War I (and II) and the passing away of the England he'd known growing up. Hence, Saruman's actions in the book, and the sense of things dying and passing away. Donaldson grew up the child of missionaries wo0rking at a leper colony in India, a place full of misery, which is likely why the underlying condition of the books is misery. The Land isn't miserable, but the people in it and the framework in which it works are miserable. (I'm not saying Donaldson is miserable, BTW, just that he has experience of misery.) So maybe understanding that will help me be a little more satisfied with the books, since I'm not going to give up.