(03-17-2019, 10:17 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: I've only ever read the first Shannara book. I don't remember much of what happened in it, but I do remember thinking it was garbage.
I talk smack, but really I have some very fond memories of the first eleven or so Shannara books. When I was a kid I was a big Shannara enthusiast and it never fully went away. I have a budget copy of the first book that I got signed by Brooks when I was eleven. He was very nice and encouraging to a then aspiring fantasy author. The books have their strengths, but I think after a time, as your palate develops, you notice some things you can't help but comment on. I could get around some of the obvious lack of originality in names and events, but by around 2004 it just felt like he was aimlessly adding to his world just to keep it going and the sense of cohesion was lost.
The background story established early on that the Shannara universe came about after the apocalyptic end of our own civilization felt like a throw-away plot device at best. He fleshed it out reasonably well in the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara series, in part because he didn't make it explicit that the past to which he was referring was necessarily our own time. Except for the fact that on his map the mysterious land in which many discoveries are made, Parkasia, looks like Florida, there's a sense the the world opening up to discovery is still a fantasy world.
As I understand it, he's been hammering home the fact that his universe came after the fall of our own civilization in subsequent series ever since. Frankly, if the typical fantasy races that inhabit his world are supposed to be the result of mutations and evolution, he didn't do a very good job with making it believable, because they still resemble the stock fantasy tropes they are. As such, they aren't bad, but the more he fleshes out the back story the more one begins to see it as a lost opportunity for something really imaginative and different. If your Dwarves came to be because they hid underground from a calamitous nuclear holocaust, why are they just the standard old Nordic short people? Does hiding underground from certain death turn you into a stereotypical Celt-Nord who likes ale and fighting?
Despite its flaws, I wanted to keep reading back in the early 2000s, but the last series I started was just so boring. It felt, as I said, that Brooks was arbitrarily tacking things onto his world and that he had no grasp of the idea that one can completely ruin something by revealing too much of it. In the second book of the original trilogy The Elfstones of Shannara he introduces the concept of the Forbidding, which is a sort of nightmare "Upside-down" where the very originally named Demons live. I remember it all being executed pretty well and enjoying the book enough that I'd like to re-read it as an adult. The last book I finished, though, Jarka Ruus, tore the veil off of the Forbidding and exposed it for what it was: a boring, "mirror" of the Four Lands, complete with stereotypical dead, withered, flora and darkness and all that jazz. It was a hard book to get through.
The next book, Tanequil did two things I didn't like. Again, it started to introduce seemingly arbitrary developments of the world that, apart from feeling thrown-together, completely screwed up the worldview developed by the first thirteen or fourteen books, and without any noticeable benefit to the reader, namely, the social structure of the Rock Trolls. Sure, it's nice when you realize the bad guys are people, too; but I was just bewildered. On top of that, Brooks had established a curiously formulaic beginning to every new adventure: they all seemed to start in more or less the same place and take the same route through the same geographical locations and the same amounts of time, and by book number X any nostalgic effect had just been bludgeoned to death.
Anyway, I defend my lengthy digression with the fact that this is a thread about writing fantasy, and we should discuss what we think works and what doesn't