The Shannara Chronicles

I'd been hearing for a few years about The Shannara Chronicles, a fantasy adaptation of Terry Brooks clearly trying to take advantage of the Game of Thrones buzz. I've always been drastically curious about it. Brooks's first Shannara novel is, infamously, an almost point-by-point copy of The Lord of the Rings, and I knew that the series (which premiered on MTV) began with Brooks's equal, The Elfstones of Shannara. But the success of the adaptation has been always something that's aroused my curiosity.

 Well, no more. Last night the wife and I watched the first episode, and . . . . well, egads. Bad bad bad bad bad. Imagine a show full of ridiculously beautiful teenagers who can't act, put horrible plastic fake-looking Elf ears on them, and then insert a whole bunch of genre cliches and banalities. The Shannara Chronicles ends up being the result. Skipping the rest of the series seems like a pretty safe decision, methinks. Even for a teenaged target audience with low expectations, I'm surprised it managed to last two full season.

 Interestingly enough, I loved The Elfstones of Shannara when I was 12 or 13 or so. I read a ton of Terry Brooks as a young'un, way before I'd ever read LotR, and thought it was wonderful. A few years back I tried re-reating The Sword of Shannara, though, and stopped 50 pages in. It's hard to imagine how jarring the phrase "mutually assured destruction" can be in a fantasy novel.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall
Read more

A Good Week For Publication

So, wow. The Journal of Tolkien Research has just published my article, " Harken Not to Wild Beasts: Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus ." What astounds me is that I finished the piece only two weeks ago and already got back the peer reviews. Of course, no real reason WHY the review process has to take months, but it just usually does. Kudos to the anonymous reviewers, great praise upon them, for working so quickly. I might even more appreciative of their promptness than of their kind remarks; I barely had to do any revisions to the article. The process went so fast, in fact, that the publication barely feels real. One of the great advantages of an online open-access journal, too, is instantaneous publication. As I'm learning with the several other articles I have in circulation, the publication process generally takes even longer than the review process. Anyway, this has been a good week. I finished my review of Harry Potter essays, and the edito
Read more