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| Goodkind would never stoop to this sort of cliche'd...oh wait, it's a scene from his book. |
But after you've driven away, and dug into your bag, instead of a burger, you find a succulent filet mignon. Many people would be initially put out by this. ‘What is this? This isn't what I ordered (expected....)’ The routine is broken, and a foreign element, surprise, has been introduced.
The natural response is negative. People are creatures of habit, after all. But then you stop and think. ‘Wow. I just got a filet mignon for $2.99! Cool!’
This, in a nutshell, is much the same reaction some might experience after reading the Sword of Truth.”
Sigh.
The above quote apparently was another of Goodkind's, and the reason I didn't talk about it in the post about his more controversial statements is that I can't find direct proof that it definitely came from him. The only site that lists it is IANXFALCON's spork that I already linked to, but I can definitely believe he said that, or something akin to that. It's entirely typical of what he says about his own works.
I have to reprint my response to it from the spork, mainly because I'm proud of it:
I would liken my Goodkind experience, keeping up with his metaphor, the following way:
I walk into my favorite restaurant, a steakhouse that I try to frequent at least once a month. I've tried nearly everything on the menu, but today I'm in the mood for a juicy ribeye steak with mashed potatoes, green peas and coleslaw.
This time, my usual waiter isn't there and the man who seats me tells me that he will be my waiter and also my chef. I relay my order to him. "I've got just the thing," he says, and disappears into the back.
A short time later, he comes out and places a plate before me on which a little fast food box rests. He opens it, and inside is the saddest, most hapless McDonald's hamburger I have ever seen. It somehow is both just like all other McDonald's hamburgers and also looks less appetizing at the same time.
"Viola!" exclaims the waiter/chef. "Filet mignon!"
I look at him incredulously. After all, not only is this NOT what I ordered, but it's not even what he's declaring it to be. However, I'm getting pretty hungry, and he's looking at me expectantly, so mainly to humor him I take a bite. It's more or less exactly as I expected; a bland cardboard-burger that McDonald's is famous for. Except somehow even LESS satisfying. There's something off about it...something I can't place.
"Go on," says the waiter/chef. "Isn't it wonderful? Pretty refreshing to taste something so different, eh? I make an awesome filet mignon."
"Actually," I counter. "This isn't filet mignon. In fact, it's not even the steak I ordered. It's a hamburger. A routine, uninspired burger with the same slivered onion, mustard, ketchup and pickles that I got the last time I found myself with only four bucks and had to eat at McDonald's. There's not even any cheese on it. I would say that not only is this very similar to every McDonald's burger I've ever eaten, it's actually on the low side of those."
"No, no," says the waiter/chef. "That's nonsense. Of course it's filet mignon. It's much better than that steak you ordered. Most steak is one-dimensional. It's all about sizzle and tang. I don't do either."
"You sure as hell don't," I say. "There's no sizzle OR tang to this burger. In fact there's nothing to recommend it at all."
"Take a few more bites," he says. "You might be surprised."
Again, I kinda feel like I have to. He won't go away until I do. So, I take a couple of more bites and finally, that feeling that something is wrong assails my mouth like an invading host.
"What the fuck?!" I shout, spitting out my mouthful and staring in horror as brown sludge leaks from the burger.
"See? I told you you'd be surprised! What you are seeing with my burgers is something unique. They are not like all the other hamburgers. The final third of this burger is made with pure, 100% organic FERTILIZER, taken straight from the leavings of a fine male hereford."
"Okay, first of all," I stammer. "You started off telling me this was filet mignon. Now you just admitted that it's a burger. Second of all, are you telling me that one third of this burger is BULL SHIT?!"
"Aren't I original? Aren't I inspiring?" The waiter/chef is practically masturbating over his own alleged brilliance.
"I'm not paying for this," I say. "In fact, you get nothing out of me until you bring me what I ordered."
"Oh, you steak-eaters," says the waiter/chef, suddenly hostile. “Rather than simply eating and enjoying the many types of steak available that they like, they spend their time railing against the one chef who is different. What I have done with my work has irrevocably changed the face of cooking. In so doing I’ve raised the standards. I have not only injected thought into a tired empty method of food preparation, but, more importantly, I’ve transcended it showing what more it can be-and in so doing spread my patronage to completely new groups who don’t like and won’t eat typical steak. Restaurants are screaming for more steaks like mine."
In the last post we established that whatever he once claimed, Terry Goodkind has always been a fantasy author. Now we're gonna talk about whether he is, as a fantasy author, worth reading, how he stacks up to other authors, and whether his claim of doing things differently than other fantasy authors holds true.
Look at the bolded sections above. That's what Goodkind thinks of any fantasy that he didn't write. Routine, mundane, predictable. The literary equivalent of fast food. It's also what he thinks of fantasy readers. We routinely consume this pablum because we're creatures of habit, and our natural response is negative whenever we encounter true originality.
Goodkind loves to talk about his originality. Look at the quotes from the chat; he has "irrevocably changed the face of fantasy." He has "raised the standards." He has "inject[ed] thought into a tired, empty genre." Okay. How original is he?
Well, Wizard's First Rule starts off with a young woodsman in the forest by himself, meeting a fair maiden and taking her to meet his wizard friend. We learn that he's an orphan, that he was raised by a man he thought was his father, and we eventually learn that his actual parentage makes him the heir to a secret magical destiny. Over the course of the series he increases his power and influence and eventually becomes an emperor.
He and his lady love have to stop a mad wizard who wishes to rule the world. Once they defeat him, they have to defeat the Keeper of the Underworld. After that the chief villain is a man who can walk in dreams and control people's thoughts. Along the way he meets dragons, demonic creatures and animals that talk. Places have names like "The Valley of the Lost" and "The Towers of Perdition" as I've already talked about. Gollum is present, and he works for a "Witch Woman", who oozes sexuality and temptation for our pure hero.
In other words, it is not appreciably different in tone, presentation, character archetypes or even prose from such works as The Chronicles of Prydain, The Belgariad, Riftwar, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn or The Wheel of Time, among numerous others. Over the years I have had encounters with plenty of people who admit they like, even love, Goodkind's works, and most of them have been people who grew up reading, or at least enjoy, writers like the ones I just mentioned, as well as Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gordon R. Dickson, Terry Brooks, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Mickey Zucker Reichert, RA Salvatore, Dave Duncan, Ed Greenwood, Kate Elliot, Melanie Rawn, Dave Wolverton (aka David Farland) or LE Modesitt, Jr. I don't wish to pull a Goodkind and act like these writers are worthless, because they aren't, but what they are, mostly, is popcorn.
Neil Gaiman once split literature of any sort into four categories: popcorn, steak, caviar and celery. Nothing wrong with any of them, really, but it's probably not healthy for any of them to be the only thing you consume. By 1994 those writers, but primarily Robert Jordan, were among the most popular and widely-read among fantasy circles. Their sales were mostly nothing like Jordan's, but among genre readers they were frequently talked about, and in many cases readers had grown up with these writers, as I mentioned, and one thing I hear frequently from them is that Goodkind feels very "familiar", and that's why they started reading him and why they like him. The co-worker who initially introduced me to Goodkind told me that before reading Wizard's First Rule, all he had ever read, or wanted to read, was Forgotten Realms fiction, which is a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons and contains umpteen hundred books all written by authors who could be hired for chickenfeed, or were game designers themselves, and are mass-produced. While I'm sure some of those writers are actually pretty good (or at least became very popular outside FR fiction), and a few of them have made names for themselves, most of them, let's say, were paid what they were worth. And no, my co-worker didn't think Goodkind was better. He thought Goodkind was "as good". He reacted to Goodkind the way he reacted to all the others; he loved the concept of "Wizard's Rules", and he loved the various monsters and spells in the book.
I'm not suggesting this is the reason Goodkind was as successful as he was, but it does seem to me that people recognize that with The Sword of Truth, what they are getting is fantasy about as routine as it gets. Far from challenging them or inspiring them or making them think, they love it because it's precisely the opposite; easily consumed pap that requires no real thought. Yes, there are those fans that lap up Goodkind's descriptions of his books, but they are the rarity. 90% of the Goodkind readers I've encountered have stated that they know there's nothing original or creative about Sword of Truth but they love it because it's "pure fantasy". In some cases, they even admit it's a guilty pleasure, and as it's now 24 years old, there are even readers today who have a soft spot for it because they grew up with it.
Let's also subject Goodkind to the Fantasy Novelist's Exam. Okay, so this exam is mostly meant for comedy, and meant to take pot shots at RPG fantasy and Robert Jordan, but it does highlight a lot of cliche's in the genre, and there's no question that a "typical fantasy" writer would score at least twenty, so let's see how he does: 36 out of 75. That...sucks. It sounds better than it is because there are a few questions on there that are mostly there for comedy's sake, or questions that build on each other. I answered no, for example, on the question about the "planned trilogy", but yes to "quartet or decalog", because at this point there are nearly enough books from that series to be considered two decalogs, and no doubt more will come. Besides, the test says that if you answer yes to even one question it's time to start your writing over. I'm more even handed than that but I will say that if you score higher than ten on this test, your novel is very much in danger of becoming "typical".
So, I have to say the only person who truly thinks Terry Goodkind is original is Terry Goodkind. Even his followers and hangers-on probably only repeat this falsehood because Goodkind expects it.
But Goodkind is able to claim utter originality by tarring the whole of fantasy literature with the same broad brush. If you listened to him and only him in regard to what you can expect from any fantasy he did not write, your impression would be that the rest of the genre consists entirely of Tolkien clones or books based on RPG's or kiddie lit that not even the kids actually enjoy. Recall what he said about "typical fantasy" and Tolkien:
"Typical fantasies saturate the core fantasy readers and can't grow beyond. Only a few have, like Tolkien which is why every fantasy book blurts out "The Next Tolkien!" It's a lie that only fantasy readers believe or care about."
Yeah, let's address this a bit closer. First of all, Tolkien didn't "grow beyond" typical fantasy (a term that is increasingly meaningless). He more or less invented it. No, he didn't invent fantasy or fantasy literature, and plenty of great pre-Tolkien fantasy literature exists, but he's the man who is seen by most as the godfather of fantasy. Most "typical" fantasy is considered "typical" because it follows Tolkien's mold, for the most part. Goodkind does this as well, with his rustic, isolated hero, wise wizard mentor in flowing robes, quest to save the world while pursued by flying creatures and, naturally, Gollum. Also, the reason why so many fantasy novels contain a blurb comparing the work to Tolkien is because it has long been perceived that no one reads fantasy aside from Tolkien. This is an idea that is going away, and I haven't seen the word "Tolkien" on a book he didn't write in a good five years. But Goodkind is wrong that fantasy readers believed that lie or cared about it. Comparisons to Tolkien on cover blurbs usually elicits groans from fantasy readers.
But it's pretty clear that Goodkind thinks that all fantasy is varying degrees of the worst sort of RPG-based lit that's out there. RPG-based lit is the network sitcom of fantasy, only more prevalent: more and more are produced every year and if you can think of a fantasy game of any stripe, it's certain to have reams of literature based on it. The old standby, Dungeons and Dragons, has literally thousands of books based on it. It's mainly by this virtue that Goodkind's claims about "most" fantasy doesn't amount to outright lies, but again, he has often abandoned pretense and actually stated what he believes; all fantasy that he didn't write is a bunch of stale claptrap with no redeeming value at all, popular only for the same reasons MacDonald's is popular, it's cheap, it's easily consumed, and you don't really notice its harmful effects until later. Which, again, is how a lot of readers describe Goodkind himself, but at the moment I'm more interested in looking at what the genre actually looks like as opposed to what Goodkind continually claims.
Goodkind first hit the scene in 1994. He rose to prominence in the genre shortly thereafter, becoming a bestseller before the decade was over. Before he came along, the genre boasted several authors of varying quality and focus that had made names for themselves, dating back well over a century, but ultimately all important building blocks of the genre, including, but not limited to, ER Eddison, Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirrlees, Robert E. Howard, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, TH White, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague De Camp, CL Moore, Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Ende, Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delaney, Madeline L'Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Piers Anthony, Randall Garrett, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Fred Saberhagen, Glen Cook, Karl Edward Wagner, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, CJ Cherryh, Gordon R. Dickson, Patricia A. McKillip, Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, Diana Wynne Jones, Robert Asprin, Morgan Llywelyn, David Eddings, Raymond E. Feist, Barbara Hambly, Stephen R. Lawhead, Patricia C. Wrede, Steven Brust, RA McAvoy, Terry Ptrachett, Joel Rosenberg, David Gemmell, Mary Gentle, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Janny Wurtz, Tadd Williams, CS Friedman, Brian Jacques, Lois McMaster Bujold, Katherine Kerr, Mercedes Lackey, Mickey Zucker Reichert, RA Salvatore, Dave Duncan, Ed Greenwood, Kate Elliot, Melanie Rawn, Dave Wolverton, Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix, Andrzej Sapkowski, Katherine Kurtz, Le Modesitt, Jr., Sean Russell, Michelle Sagara, Michael A. Stackpole, Robert Jordan, Paul Kearney and Jack Whyte, just to name a few.
For good or ill, by the time there was such a thing as a Terry Goodkind novel, those were the names that had risen above the rabble to be considered noteworthy. One would be incredibly hard-pressed to suggest they're all just a homogeneous blend of same shit, different pile. The names I just named all added unique or at least notable facets to the genre, and changed it at least a little. Some did it better than others, and Goodkind did it better than some (like I said I don't think he's the worst fantasy writer ever), but to suggest that Goodkind is so incredibly different compared to that entire list is laughable.
For what it's worth, by the time he started making these claims, authors such as JV Jones, Greg Keyes, Chris Bunch, David B. Coe, JK Rowling, Anne Bishop, Tanya Huff, Ian Irvine, Jane Lindskold, China Meiville, James Barclay, Steven Erikson, Stan Nicholls, Jim Butcher, Jacqueline Carey, Eoin Colfer, Richard K. Morgan, KJ Bishop, Paul Kearney, George RR Martin and Chris Wooding were also having an impact. And again, you cannot suggest that all of them were alike to each other, just doing the same old same old over and over again. Many of the names I just mentioned have gone on to have (or already had) a much greater impact on the fantasy genre and literature as a whole than Terry Goodkind.
And all these names, with the possible exception of Tolkien, have been brushed off as mere "typical fantasy" by Goodkind. None of them can hold a candle to his brilliance.
Does this really hold up under scrutiny? I mean, I don't think anyone has ever held a study comparing Goodkind directly to the authors he trashes, but as popular as Goodkind's books may be, does anyone not named Terry Goodkind, or not in his inner circle or hoping to be, really believe that Terry Goodkind is measurably better than Peake, Anderson, Moorcock, Cook, Wolfe, Zelazny? Or that he wasn't almost immediately outclassed by Rowling or Martin?
And I'm not talking about sales, here. I acknowledge that Goodkind outsells most of the names I listed (most). I'm talking about impact on the genre, impact on literature and the general critical consensus. Is there anyone out there seriously prepared to offer up Terry freaking Goodkind as the overall example of the best work in the genre period?
Not without being laughed out of the room.
The final point I want to address is the idea that Goodkind has so much more to say in his works than other writers do. Okay, I'll grant that Goodkind does preach a lot. A lot. In fact, as I've already expressed, his later books seem to be less story and more sermon with a tad of plot thrown in. His detractors have expressed that this isn't exactly a good thing, however, and if you do have a point to make the best thing to do is make it an organic part of the story rather than just set up a character who voices your views directly. That being said, if Goodkind thinks he's the only one out there using his books to share his moral, social and political views, then he is sadly mistaken.
Outside of the general popcorn fare that is designed to be mass-consumed, practically every fantasy writer explores their views through their literature. Fantasy is probably the medium most often used to present allegory and applicable themes and ideas. Which authors have been doing it before Goodkind? Just look at the list above. With perhaps only one or two exceptions, all of them and more! And most of them did it better than Goodkind!
I'll conclude by once again acknowledging that of course Goodkind has fans. I'm not saying that no one likes him. I am not saying he hasn't garnered some great reviews, because he did. But no one aside from Terry Goodkind would suggest that his works have truly transcended the genre. No one thinks he's the man who changed the game and elevated the genre, showing what more it can be. Not one author who became notable later thanks Goodkind for opening the door for them (which he still thinks they should be doing, even to this day).
In fact, he's not just typical, he's derivative. Even plagiaristic. I'll cover that in my next post.
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