Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9731233" data-attributes="member: 18">I feel like my RED FLAG sensor was just working really well when I read the first one, because the combination of both glorified and exploited sexual violence (in various configurations) with certain other factors (attitudes of characters, terrible names) told me the writer and any further books in the series would be absolutely cooked (though we didn't use that term back then).Let he who is without sin...I made through FOUR, count 'em, four Prince of Nothing books (i.e. into first book of the second trilogy) before I realized Bakker just didn't have any ideas at all, and was fully doing "LotR but grimdark, with lots of 700 AD Near East vibes (but nothing deeper than vibes) and with just increasingly non-stop (mostly offscreen but still) rape". By book 4 he's literally ripping off entire sequences from Tolkien, just crudely grimdarking them up. I was just really hoping someone would either get out the laser cannons (which the first book immediately says exist, and that the main bad guys are aliens) and really start blastin' or at least kill bloody Anasurimbor Kellhus (a character who had outlived any kind of value by early in book 3, when it became entirely clear he was just a monster himself, but the author inexplicably continued to act as if he was cool). Instead the other """"hero"""" of first trilogy bangs his daughter and cries a lot. Classy! Makes you think! Think about whether the author actually believes any of this drivel particularly...Wizard's First Rule was the first book I literally got so mad with I tried to throw it out the window after I finished it. Luckily I missed because I was four stories up and then just put it in the bin. It was the first book I ever binned though.I did abandon one of the Shannara novels in an airport in the 1990s because it was so nothing, so weak, but I was confident someone else might enjoy it so just left it on a bench and walked away.</blockquote>

Verification