choices

Gerry Quinn · 05 Aug 2011, 13:57 · from 2011-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 14:57:10 +0100
Subject: (urth) choices
References: <4E3B08D2.1040504 at irit.fr> <4E3B18A8.1090808 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <92DD8E0F9B754CC680D8A8E1BA5B7E46@jill>

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>

> As a teen, I was revolted by the rape at the beginning of volume 1 and 
> chunked the book for about a year. Then I picked it up and moved on. 
> Ultimately, I liked it pretty well. Enough to buy book 2 with anticipation 
> which I thought was even better. But book 3 just fell off a cliff. Total 
> waste of time for me. I had very specific theories about why the ending 
> failed but I can't remember what they were. However, I knew people who 
> were absolutely crazy about Donaldson in the early 80s. Not so much now 
> I'm afraid, which I have always credited to the dreadful follow-up 
> trilogy. It could be that the book captured some zeitgeist at the time. I 
> hardly ever hear about it now. I wonder how the first trilogy reads for 
> young people who pick it up for the first time now, 35 years later.

I actually started midstream, I think with the Illearth War, and only read 
Lord Foul's Bane later.  Oddly enough, I liked the second trilogy better - I 
think it seemed more of a fantasy adventure.  I know this is a minority 
viewpoint.

Like it or not, its influence on the genre cannot be denied.  It's very 
visible in Wolfe's Wizard Kinght, for example.

Donaldson is working on a third trilogy now - at least one (The Runes of the 
Earth) is out a few years ago.  I found it readable but a bit repetitive. 
But that probably goes with the territory.  [One thing I have never 
understood is the popularity of Donaldson's other fantasy series Mordant's 
Need - I read about one and a half of the two books and then gave up; the 
only thing I know that beats it for repetition and obvious villains is 
Hubbard's Mission Earth!]

- Gerry Quinn

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net