By the mid-90's every publishing house had a giant work of high fantasy on its release schedule, all hoping to cash in on Jordan's success. His sales were through the roof, and publishers began scrambling to find the next Robert Jordan. For whatever reason, and believe me there has been some controversy surrounding it, Jordan's books took off like wildfire. In the early 90's, we had the "fat fantasy boom", which was kicked off by Robert Jordan and his novel The Eye of the World, the first volume in his massive series The Wheel of Time.įantasy had never seen a renaissance like the one Jordan kicked off. Terry Brooks started one in the late 70's with The Sword of Shannara, a novel even more blatantly plagiaristic than anything Goodkind wrote, and this gave rise to several of the giants of modern fantasy lit, including Steven R. But for fantasy, he was Robert Jordan, and that is how the world remembers him.įantasy has had at least two major "booms" where a novel or novels becomes a hit and sets off a wave of new authors being published and old authors being rediscovered (or having their latest works become hits). He published a western under the name Jackson O'Reilly and a historical fiction series under the name Reagan O'Neal. If you're reading this blog at all you've likely at least heard of Robert Jordan, who is actually just the pen name for James Oliver Rigney, a writer who wrote in several genres and used a different alias each time. And as we'll see in this post, he's too aware of some pretty major elements in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. He's too consciously aware that he's writing fantasy and thus must include certain tropes. I mean there is simply no way that he had not. I'm not suggesting that I think Goodkind had read fantasy and then denied reading it. But it was during the time he was speaking the most ill of it that he also insisted he had never read any of it. He kinda, sorta walked that statement back a couple of years ago where he admitted fantasy was his "beloved genre", that somehow wasn't beloved enough for him to stop trashing it left and right for over a decade. Terry Goodkind has made the claim many times that he does not read fantasy, never has, never will. Before I go on, I want to address the elephant in the room.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |