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, I guarantee you'll 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 dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more