Recent Terry Goodkind books

[danzibr]

First let me say I'm a fan of the SoT series. I read all of them up to Confessor, skipped out on Law of Nines or whatever it's called, then read The Omen Machine, and haven't (yet?) read the First Confessor book.

I did, however, read reviews of his most recent book, and it sounds like it stinks. Has anyone read it? What are your thoughts?

I'm worried I too think it will stink. Honestly I thought The Omen Machine was pretty bad. He used chapter breaks way too often and wrote in a few hundred pages what he could've written in fifty, among other things. It feels like he's just trying to get money.

[pita]

I say this as a goodkind hater: Don't trust any review, because it might be written by the wrong side. There are people like me, who will bash every work of his with relentless glee, and there are people who will praise every effort of his to the sky. Don't trust reviews. Read a few chapters at the bookstore (or Amazon), and decide.

[warty goblin]

My feelings, independent of my distaste for Goodkind, is that if an author hasn't actually reached a conclusion after...checks Wikipedia...13 main books and some spinoffs/prequels, he or she is either incompetent or milking it. With a strong probability of both.

[Chen]

My feelings, independent of my distaste for Goodkind, is that if an author hasn't actually reached a conclusion after...checks Wikipedia...13 main books and some spinoffs/prequels, he or she is either incompetent or milking it. With a strong probability of both.

I kinda felt this way about, say The Wheel of Time series, but I don't really feel that way about the Dresden Files for example. So I'm not sure its necessarily a good metric to use.

[Kitten Champion]

I don't think the next book in he Sword of Truth series has been released yet.

I'll admit my substantial dislike of the author and willingness to dismiss his opus completely - but even so - The Law of Nines and The Omen Machine were pretty copy & paste lazy writing with none of the obvious passion of the earlier books. I wasn't even really offended or particularly annoyed by them, they were simply boring and listless.

If the next is an improvement (relatively) I'd be very much surprised, I've seen this happen enough to know when they've gone turn their pen mercenary and are clearly padding for a word count.

[Tyndmyr]

I kinda felt this way about, say The Wheel of Time series, but I don't really feel that way about the Dresden Files for example. So I'm not sure its necessarily a good metric to use.

Oh, Butcher probably is milking Dresden Files, he's just a good enough author to get away with it. I feel relatively confident saying that he broadened his storyline considerably over what he planned with the first couple of books.

Sadly, Goodkind is not Butcher

[WalkingTarget]

The thing about Butcher's Dresden books (or Brust's Dragaera books) is that while there might be some kind of ongoing metaplot and/or continuity between books (i.e. the end of Changes serves as the setup for Ghost Story which sets up Cold Days, etc.), each individual book pretty much has its own plot. Harry's dropped into a new situation, he works out what's going on, then plot is resolved. Sure, that resolution has consequences for the characters moving forward, but it's not like latter-day Wheel of Time books that just seemed to be moving all existing plotlines forward at their own paces without necessarily resolving any of them in a given book.

That is, Dresden has a big arc in the series as a whole if you step back and look at it. That big arc isn't the impetus for what makes an individual book entertaining.

edit - just pointing out that I didn't mention Goodkind's work because I haven't actually read any of it. I don't know if it suffers from Wheel of Time's overabundance of plot or not at this point.

[warty goblin]

edit - just pointing out that I didn't mention Goodkind's work because I haven't actually read any of it. I don't know if it suffers from Wheel of Time's overabundance of plot or not at this point.

Well there's the first book, which does its own thing. Then the next six or so kinda just repeat the same magical crisis followed by six hundred pages of nothing important happening, then a fifty page resolution at the end, and everything resets to essentially the state at the beginning of the book. All of which sort of serves to advance something of a metaplot, but the damn thing moves so slowly, it's kinda hard to tell. There's a book that shifts protagonists, which is very unfortunate because the replacement protagonist may be the single most annoying viewpoint character ever devised. The last three are supposed to form a trilogy or something, but I gave up after the first of them, since it looked like the same magic crisis plot concept was just being smeared out across even more verbage.

Also it had erased one of the main characters from existence, so I figured that was as close to a happy ending as I was going to get.

As I said upthread, if the story takes ten plus very long books to tell, the odds are very strong that the author either doesn't understand the word 'editing' or does understand the word 'paycheck.' Nothing actually needs that much prose to get across.

[danzibr]

Thanks for the responses all.

Like Chen I don't think you can put a maximum number of books on a good story. I haven't read any for which it actually seems necessary (and I've read some long series), but in theory I can see a series having *so much stuff* going on to have twenty meaningful books. Maybe one that spans generations. Or millennia.

[warty goblin]

Like Chen I don't think you can put a maximum number of books on a good story. I haven't read any for which it actually seems necessary (and I've read some long series), but in theory I can see a series having *so much stuff* going on to have twenty meaningful books. Maybe one that spans generations. Or millennia.

In theory I agree it's possible. In practice, given that the individual volumes are written and released sequentially, I don't see is as terribly likely to ever actually happen. Under this model if book 18 ends up not following the outline set down at the time of book 3, odds are very good some stuff in book 3 or 4 ends up being a pointless waste of space. Maybe all of book 3 or 4 for that matter. It could still be a good story mind, just not, at that point, particularly well told.

Also, pretty much nobody, even in academia, writes twenty volume texts. And they're writing about things that actually exist for the most part. If they can pull off a thesis driven narrative approach to history in under that, I don't see why Mr. Fantasy Guy can't either. Even if it means he has to stop obsessively narrating everybody's clothing and dining choices.

[Tyndmyr]

There's really no hard limits...most rules of fiction are breakable in specific cases. For instance, I wouldn't recommend that someone make up multiple fictional languages entirely for a single book, but I'm not gonna tell you to avoid LoTR because of it. Sometimes a master of a genre can get away with creatively violating one of the rules.

Goodkind is, sadly, not a master of fantasy, or likely, any other fiction genre. Before one can learn how to supersede the rules, you have to learn the basics. Like, maybe you shouldn't spend twenty pages describing something that isn't ever relevant. Or maybe you shouldn't include tediously repetitive political rants over and over again. Or maybe there's such a thing as too much rape.

[warty goblin]

Or maybe there's such a thing as too much rape.

For most of us, this is any positive number.

[Kitten Champion]

The problem is, Goodkind has three themes he's maddeningly dedicated to.

First, monogamy - or Goodkind's interpretation of it. This leads to melodrama the likes of which Twilight is comparable, both in histrionics and sexism. Of course, Saint Richard is constantly let down by his disappointingly fallible spouse.

Secondly, Objectivism - or Goodkind's interpretation of it. Socialism/religion are bad. This leads to hundreds of pages of dialogue and lecturing on why socialism/religion are bad - in case the fictional allegories were too subtle for you. Outside of my dislike of his philosophy, he doesn't let you ignore it. Sure, the Chronicles of Narnia are fables with an obvious Christian subtext, but you can still enjoy them as simplistic adventure tales if you want. Sword of Truth doesn't do the basic work of world-building and imagination to accomplish that. However, it's the anti-religious aspect which is just goofy in this particular high fantasy genre text. Orpheus Rahl, super-wizard, is the last person I want to tell me there's no heaven or hell - he's met the literal devil, talked to the dead, and visited the underworld. It would like be if Jordan decided to have Rand dismiss reincarnation and the Dark One in Knife of Dreams.

The last theme is sexual abuse. Goodkind has stated he believes the worst thing a person can do to another is to molest them, which would be fine if his ethics weren't so warped. It gets to the point where the only thing objectively distinguishing our good Richard from the evil overlord is direct sexual violence. So it's no wonder he feels the need to include a lot of it. Someone who could care less about assault, torture, murder, and slaughtering innocent civilians needs something, anything, to point at to say "at least I'm not Jeffery Dahmer" and for Richard rape is it. That moral event horizon he shall not pass. Otherwise you've got a hero whose sole condition for being a moral paragon is that he believes in the ideology of the writer, regardless of what means he employs in the defence of those beliefs.

Sexual violence can be done effectively in a narrative, but the writer in question has to have a realistic understanding of the subject matter and the impact it has on a character. It also needs a damned good reason to be there, better than a kick the dog moment for a villain or as a motivator for a hero to act.