Conversation

Jen Miller and Phil Ilten have been reading The Sword of Shannara together and sharing their thoughts by writing back and forth.  Find earlier installments of our discussion here; we'd encourage you to add to our conversation in the comments!

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Dear Phil--

Hey, we have a girl! Last time I was just complaining about the complete dearth of female characters, and now we have one. Sure, she’s a princess who needed to be rescued, but she has a name and says things, so we’re moving in the right direction, right? I am interested to learn how exactly Palance came to think that Balinor stole her from him, since that seems like it will do a lot to begin to bring some of the narrative threads developed in this section together into one glorious climax.

Speaking of multiple narrative threads: in our last set of letters, you had commented about how you got more interested in the story during those chapters--that happened for me during these chapters. One big reason was that I really enjoyed the multiple storylines that were developed here, and I agree that this has helped a lot to move the novel away from Tolkien’s influence and into a creative space of its own.

Several of us here at Fantasy Matters have read N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and really enjoyed it, and after reading Matt Rasmusson's review of the novel last week, two of our editors were inspired to write down their own thoughts about the novel.  Reading these reviews in conversation with each other is particularly intriguing, as it highlights how a novel can speak to different people in vastly different ways.  If you have read Jemisin's work, we'd love for you to become part of the conversation as well--post your thoughts in the comments!

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Adam Miller:

Well, I did it again: I read a novel, then afterwards learned that it was part of an unfinished trilogy. This is my personal hangup, and it’s the reason that I was unwilling to start reading the Harry Potter series until The Deathly Hallows was released and remain unwilling to start the Kingkiller Chronicles. For high-profile novels, it's a relatively easy thing to do, but for newer novels that I’m unfamiliar with it seems to happens from time to time. The issue is that my memory for plots and characters is not stellar, so I generally feel like I have to re-read any prior novels when new installments come out. In this particular situation, it was an especially painful realization because I loved this novel and don’t look forward to waiting for another novel to be released. The good news in this case is that book two (The Broken Kingdoms) has already been released, and I only have a few months to wait for the trilogy to be complete.

This past weekend, several of us here at Fantasy Matters got together and went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II.  We sat in the second row from the front (not recommended) next to this hilarious little kid who chuckled when Voldemort died.  Afterwards, we sat down and talked about the movie, the book, and the Harry Potter series in general.  Here are some of our thoughts...

We started off our conversation with Neville Longbottom:

[note: this conversation contains spoilers]

Jen Miller and Phil Ilten have been reading The Sword of Shannara together and sharing their thoughts by writing back and forth.  If you're just joining us, get your own copy of the book, and read our discussions of chapters 1-5 here, chapters 6-10 here, and chapters 11-15 here.  Then join our conversation and let us know what you think!

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Dear Jen--

I’m not entirely certain why, but I enjoyed these chapters more than the previous chapters. Many of the issues that we have been discussing in these letters were still present, but for some reason I felt the story just flowed better. Maybe it’s because I totally called that the Sword of Shannara was in the gnome’s sack of loot, which made me feel good about myself. But I think this was the first set of chapters where I felt the book was significantly different from LotR, and creative in its own right.

Jen Miller and Phil Ilten have been reading The Sword of Shannara together and sharing their thoughts by writing back and forth.  If you're just joining us, get your own copy of the book, read the first two installments here and here, and join our conversation!

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Dear Phil--

So, the plot thickens....One thing that struck me as I was reading this section was the difference in the “bad guys” between this and LotR. While you have Orcs and Uruk-Hai in Tolkien’s work, the only group of “bad guys” we’ve seen so far is the Gnomes, who are really just misguided--not truly evil. Certainly both texts have a solitary evil figure with a group of hunters, but it seems that Brooks is much more hesitant to label an entire race as evil.

Last Friday, Jen Miller posted her thoughts about The Time Traveler's Wife and how it relates to the fantasy genre.  Here, Ken Schneyer responds to that post with his own thoughts about the validity of genre.

Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare showed us the fluidity of genre boundaries by writing plays that deliberately messed with Aristotle's definitions of tragedy and comedy. Compare Othello to Much Ado About Nothing, or take different scenes from Measure for Measure out of context, and you'll see what I mean.

Nonetheless, people persist in believing in genres, and in assigning different characteristics to them as if they were natural and even immutable. Sometimes it's something as silly as blanket attributions of quality (e.g., the ones we've seen over and over again, "It can't be science fiction; it's too good", or "Nobody ever wrote a romance as serious literature except Jane Austen", etc.). Sometimes it's an attempt to define different subgenres (e.g., Are time travel stories science fiction because they involve the logical consequences of a particular theory, or are they fantasy because they're impossible?). Sometimes it's a fight over which shelf the book will occupy in the bookstore (hence Margaret Atwood's insistence that her novels aren't SF, and people's perplexity as to whether The Time Traveler's Wife belongs with romance, literature or SF).

Two weeks ago, we posted the first installment of Jen Miller and Phil Ilten's conversation about The Sword of Shannara as they read it together.  If you're just joining us, we invite you to find your own copy of the book and read along with us!

Dear Jen--

As I started to write this letter, I realized that last week both our letters were somewhat negative (maybe you disagree with me on this), and so this week I am going to try to conclude with a slightly more positive tone. That being said, there are some issues that I would like to get out of the way. The first issue, of course, is Lord of the Rings related. As I started Chapter 6, and finished up with Chapter 7, my impression of Shannara as a pale imitation of LotR only became worse.