This is not the right crowd and you know it

[sovay]

Okay, so my physical health has imploded along with my plans for the day and I am in a terrible mood, but I think I would still be disagreeing with David Eddings.

skygiants recently re-read The Belgariad. The comments section is appropriate-ironically epic. In the course of pursuing a theory proposed by pedanther—who seems to have been totally right—I found an interview with Eddings. I am not sure when exactly it was conducted; his remarks about prequels suggest sometime between 1991 and 1995, but honestly I don't feel that knowing the year would make much difference to how impressively I disagree with almost everything he says that is not a fact of his personal history and maybe even a couple of those (you cannot cite your intellectual differences with a female parakeet as reasonable scaffolding for your difficulties in writing human women, my dude, or at least you cannot do it without sounding like a dick). For whatever reason, though, this particular glaring ignorance is sticking with me:

"You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in a contemporary story and everybody will know what they're talking about. But in fantasy you have to invent the entire banking system. You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else. And when you begin as I did, by dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender—when you throw in peoples who are essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanish noblemen, Vikings and Muslims—when you put all that together and press the 'on' button you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and Arabs living next to each other, for instance."

DUDE IT WOULD LOOK LIKE OUR ACTUAL HISTORY. SO WOULD THE INTERACTION OF VIKINGS AND MUSLIMS. ALSO PLEASE TELL ME THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAS NOT YOUR MODEL FOR THE ANGARAKS BECAUSE IF SO THE ORIENTALISM IN THESE BOOKS JUST WENT SO FAR PAST ELEVEN IT EXCEEDED ESCAPE VELOCITY AND BLASTED OFF INTO THE STARS AND THE STARS REALLY DID NOT DESERVE THAT.

I am sure someone yelled at Eddings in his lifetime about his conceptions of history and anachronism. I don't see how you could not. But I just found them and I am beginning to feel that Santayana should be revised: those who cannot remember the past are not only condemned to repeat it, they are condemned to reinvent it and believe they have created something totally unprecedented—strange enough for high fantasy—when in fact it was just people's lives. Even in high-gloss extruded fantasy product, that annoys me. The end, no moral. Just, seriously, don't do that.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

I have begun to wonder whether there is only space in a developing reader's head for either David Eddings or Terry Brooks-- I have never met anyone who read both of them.

I read Terry Brooks in the early nineties, seriously for the first few sentences and then for the next like five books incredulously, trying to figure out exactly how derivative you can be and get published without charges of plagiarism. Possibly as a result, I have never read David Eddings, because it looked so much like more of the same.

[sovay]

I read Terry Brooks in the early nineties, seriously for the first few sentences and then for the next like five books incredulously, trying to figure out exactly how derivative you can be and get published without charges of plagiarism.

Just now I went to the Wikipedia page for The Elf Queen of Shannara and saw that a major elven character is named "Elessedil," so I have no idea.

Possibly as a result, I have never read David Eddings, because it looked so much like more of the same.

It would have been a slightly different same, in that it hasn't got elves and dwarves (I am reminded strangely of my similarly abortive attempt to read Tad Williams) alongside humans, but otherwise I think your avoidance served you well.

[sheliak]

I never read Terry Brooks, but I remember being quietly appalled that Raymond Feist named his evil precursors using Tolkien's conlangs. To the point of spelling out that their name meant the same thing it did in said conlang.

[sovay]

I remember being quietly appalled that Raymond Feist named his evil precursors using Tolkien's conlangs. To the point of spelling out that their name meant the same thing it did in said conlang.

That is appalling!

[sheliak]

I was so mad about it as a kid! ... although not enough to stop reading Feist. I think that I quit when the intriguing lizard people who got a prologue in one of his later books proved to be the scary POV-less invaders for the rest of the series. Such were my priorities as a child.

[ethelmay]

I have not read either one, yay me. Way too much Heinlein, though.

[sovay]

I have not read either one, yay me.

Bullets dodged!

Way too much Heinlein, though.

I did not actually read a ton of Heinlein despite his books being all over the house when I was growing up. My strongest memories are of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Podkayne of Mars (1963), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).

[sporky_rat]

I have begun to wonder whether there is only space in a developing reader's head for either David Eddings or Terry Brooks-- I have never met anyone who read both of them.

I've read both of them. Unfortunately after a few series Terry Brooks runs together whereas David Eddings at least ended his series. You got twelve books with the Stone (could have been six, jeez) and six with the Blue Rose. And then it's over, he didn't keep going and going.

I keep losing track of where Terry Brooks is going now.

[skygiants]

I read the both! But I didn't read Robert Jordan, so possibly there's some sort of a rule of three going on there?

I also reread a bunch of Shannara as recently as 2010, which I suppose is actually not all that recently now, and was appalled to find that I was still really fond of the books despite Terry Brooks' unfortunate habit of turning his female leads into sad self-sacrificial trees.

[sovay]

Terry Brooks' unfortunate habit of turning his female leads into sad self-sacrificial trees.

I just imagined Shel Silverstein's Metamorphoses. Send help.