Thoughts on writers

I finished the fourth book of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and I was thoroughly impressed. There are only four books to the series thus far, unfortunately, so now I’m forced to chomp at the bit waiting for the next one. In the interim, I’m stuck with Terry Goodkind.

Here’s the deal with Terry Goodkind. Actually, there are several “deals” with T.G., and I’ll probably rant about it for a while. Heh. I started reading this series when I was in college. It wasn’t the first epic fantasy series that I’d ever read, but it was my favorite at the time. The books were fantastic, engaging, and interesting. That changed drastically, unfortunately.

I’ve stuck with the series, because I feel like I’ve invested a good portion of my life to finding out how this saga ends. The series has become something terrible, though. There are little things that annoy me about it, and big things that annoy me about it. For example, he tends to write tons and tons of one-sentence paragraphs in a feeble attempt at suspense. This is a relatively “little thing” in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still annoying.

The result looks like this.

See how dumb that was? There was no reason for that sentence to hang there like that. It’s stupid. Oh well. I recognize the difference between being a critical guy that writes a blog and being a huge bestselling author. It’s not going to stop me from making fun of the guy.

One BIG problem with what these books have become is that he keeps rehashing all of the same old crap. He has multi-page sections of people giving a speech about how life is your own and about how evil the “Imperial Order” (giant antagonist army) is and blah blah blah. The problem is that we’re now at the eleventh book in the series, and these rants have taken place before, almost verbatim, at least 7 times. YEAH DUDE! WE’VE READ THAT ALREADY. Another big problem is that the plot of every one of his books is the same: The main characters get separated from each other, something horrible happens, Richard has to find out some new way to use his magic to make everything better. AGAIN, ALREADY READ THAT ELEVEN TIMES.

At this point he spends a full third of the books talking about the crap that happened in the last books. I understand the necessity of doing that, just in case someone is stupid enough to have started on book eleven. T.G. could do it more concisely. Robert Jordan packs all of that into a prologue. Granted, R.J.’s prologues became enormous monstrosities by his last book of the Wheel of Time. Time will tell if the surrogate author chosen to finish that series continues that crap. R.I.P., Mr. Jordan. You were my favorite. ANYWAY…

I guess the point of this is that if you like epic fantasy and haven’t read any George R.R. Martin, you owe it to yourself to pick up A Game Of Thrones and prepare yourself for a whole lot of awesome. It is hands down the best fantasy series I’ve ever read, so far.