Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Possibly because (as Brooks himself acknowledges) it's a blatant rip-off of LOTR, from which it lifts the entire plot and many of the characters. It was really only with "Elfstones" that Brooks started writing his own books.
As Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sw...d_of_the_Rings |
Blatant rip-off is somewhat extreme. Did he use certain plot conventions from LOTR? Sure, so have most of the high fantasy books since the 70's. It became a whole sub-genre for a while. The word Tolkienesque entered the vocabulary for a reason.
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Tolkienesque - resembling J.R.R. Tolkien or his writings, particularly the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A common theme in tolkienesque literature is a company of heroes embarking on a quest to defeat an evil dark lord. Other features are the presence of humanoid races found in Tolkien's fictional Middle-Earth, such as Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Trolls and/or Hobbits (Halflings)
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To a great extent, that's the whole point of putting books in public domain,- using the public domain book (or music or movie) as the basis for a whole new work. One could write hours about the books that were inspired (i.e. blatant rip-offs) by Xenophon's The Anabasis (i.e. the March of the Ten Thousand) and there are some very good books out there that use the Anabasis plot line. The point is what an author does with the new work. Sometimes it's drek, sometimes it turns out quite well.
LOTR's itself was inspired by other works. There truly is little new under the sun.
btw, I will point out that it's extremely rich that Lin Carter, who was best know for writing pastiches, would criticize anyone for using another work as an inspiration. I also note that in the wiki article, Brooks acknowledges that Tolkien was a major influence, not that it was a rip-off. I think that Frank Herbert is correct in his defense of Brooks.