terry goodkind!?!

[kid_prufrock]

The New Yorker's fantasy recommendations: My faith in that magazine about anything of importance just went down about 40%. Sorry, Seymour Hersh! 'Till next time, David Remnick! Rest in peace, William Shawn

Comments

[pallasathene82]

Umm, the only one I would agree with is the Guy Gavriel Kay stuff...and even then, there's a lot of other fantasy that is a lot better.

[lula_vampiro]

In fairness, he did shit on all the Sword of Truth books after the first one. That should count for something, right …?

[mumbly_joe]

But the first one was basically just a warmed over ripoff of Wheel of Time, by most accounts, so we're really just back to square one when it comes to the question of why it's on the list at all.

[lula_vampiro]

I liked Wizard's First Rule a lot more than Wheel of Time #1 (I forget the name), though, so the ripoff was to my profit. I also couldn't detect the ripoff because, in spite of having read it shortly beforehand, I couldn't remember anything that happened in WoT1 ….

there are few authors i start reading then am forced to stop

[dukhat]

but TG was one.

I read books 1-4 and they weren't too bad (although the objectivism kept getting worse and worse). But then 5 .... and then ... i don't even remember. Fuck Ayn Rand. And Terry Goodkind is such a dick as a person too. He shrilly denies that he writes fantasy or sci-fi books and got really pissed off when he heard that some poor fan was playing an RPG based on his books with his friends because it meant they weren't taking his shit seriously enough.

A lot of people like Tad Williams. I read the book mentioned there and its sequels and it wasn't bad. I don't quite see all the hype with Tad Williams however.

I almost always only ever read books a single time, but I remember liking Robin Hobb's stuff when I read it sometime in middle school.

Re: there are few authors i start reading then am forced to stop

[sildra]

Robin Hobb's stuff varies some in quality. Some of her books are really some of my favorites in the genre; others aren't terribly interesting.

They're always much more about the characters than the plot, though. For example, her newest trilogy is about the interface between technology and magic, which are incompatible and cannot coexist, and so are at war (a theme done to death by other writers), but mostly it's about what happens when the young hero (nobleman's son, in training to be a soldier, all the normal tropes) suddenly finds himself becoming obese. It's somewhat too long and gets a bit tedious, though.

ahem

[think_too_much]

of importance

Let me repeat that.

of importance

...

My faith remains serenely unshaken.

Re: ahem

[mumbly_joe]

But Goodkind's books are full of "important human themes"!

So much so that they supplant everything else, including story and sympathetic characters!

[alexpshenichkin]

Illustrative examples, categorized to make a point...

There was a typo somewhere. "Yeard" for "beard". Goodkind decided he liked the word and made it a term for the protagonist's beard+ponytail look. IIRC, there's a recurring comic-relief goat. There's a scary demon-possessed evil chicken.

The books get progressively more full of "important human themes", which means Objectivism. At one point in book five or something, the main character mows down some protesters "armed only with their hatred for moral clarity". Book six is a slow, plodding rewrite of The Fountainhead.

So, he's got all the maturity of Piers Anthony and the moral opinions of Ayn Rand.

-- Alex

[mumbly_joe]

It's the eighth book. And you forgot to mention that the protesters that get mowed down are from a country populated entirely by Evil Pacifists, and were explicitly depicted in such a manner because Goodkind wanted to make A Statement about the rightness of the Iraq war.

The FIFTH book is the one that features two evil politicians that are thinly veiled references to Bill and Hillary Clinton. They get an STD and die. No, really.

[kid_prufrock]

This will pretty much get you what you need to know.