Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
"Poisoned oasis in the desert" is closer to it. Brooks may have been the first writer claimed by his publisher to write "in the tradition of" Tolkien. But most Tolkien fans I knew found Brooks sadly lacking at best. If Tolkien was cane sugar, Brooks was artificial sweetener with a nasty chemical aftertaste and no nutritional value whatever.
The folks I've encountered who loved Brooks tended to be teenage kids. They had mediocre vocabularies and had read too little else to have any meaningful standard of comparison.
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Dennis
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I don't care much about that comment about teenager's reading appreciations :P
I wasn't a teenager when Shanarra first came out. I was a night shift comp operator at a nuclear plant who had just finished LotR for the first time, in horrible need for something else like it. I'd read more classic literature by 15 than most anyone has that I know now. And I liked it very much though I've never read it again in the last 25 years. The only fantasy I knew about then was Tolkien, and Brooks, and Conan which I didn't really like much, and ER Burroughs and Lieber which I did. And some 4 books by somebody about a wizard and a lesser wizard and an otter and somebody else, fighting some great evil. I remember the lesser wizard's name was something like Faringay and the wizard was something Grey something. And that's all there was.. So yes, I really liked SoS very much when it came out and didn't give a rip for the Tolkien purists who fussed. I certainly could tell Tolkien was a far better writer but ya know, english beer is still water to a man dying of thirst.
