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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4065053" data-attributes="member: 4937">I certainly don't think that Jordan is a great novelist, but I think at this point you've gone too far.  There are alot of valid critiques of Jordan.  But yours is an excessively petty and argumentative one.  And I know all about excessively petty arguments. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Jordan is not a particularly inventive writer.  The whole first half of 'Eye of the World' reads like a blatant ripoff of Tolkien.  However, the same could be said of quite a few fantasy author's early efforts.  And it is true that alot of the stuff in his novel is taken directly from other sources, and that people don't know this might be disappointed to discover that he's not as original as they might like to believe.  But I think that plagarism takes it too far.  I'm as familiar with Tolkien's language as anyone who doesn't have the last name, and if Jordan had have used similar phrasing at any point I would have noticed.  Paraphrasing 'Go Rin No Sho' is no more plagarism than paraphrasing the Bible or Greek myths.  It is a literary technique called allusion, and in the context of a fantasy that explores the notion of reoccuring myth and history it is more than completely acceptable - it is part of what makes WoT potentially more than an interesting sword and sorcery bodice ripper.  Jordan shows a nice breadth of education and thought in his use of allusion, and it makes for a richer reading experience.  Sadly, Jordan never does live up to the potential here or really of any of his early story elements, nor is he being particularly original even so.  The very same allusion, in very much the same usage, and in a work of far more literary merit occurs in Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun'.If you wish to tell me that Gene Wolfe's use of allusion without attribution is a cheap ripoff which doesn't add richness, I'll forever distrust your taste in literature.  There isn't a finer wordsmith working in the English language today.  I'll stack 'Book of the New Sun' or 'Wizard Knight' up against anything by any author.Jordan isn't up to that standard.  But neither is he a poor writer.  He is actually a very good writer.  He writes powerfully, evocatively, stirringly, passionately, and at times even movingly.  He makes good use of language.  He has a good ear.  He's not even completely lacking in creativity, for all the fact that you can find marks of Tolkien, Herbert, Wolfe, Malory and various other sources all over his works.  (If you are going to draw inspiration from something, might as well be the good stuff.)  Sadly though, he lacks a good sense of story.  He tends to ramble.  Far too many pages go by with nothing really advancing the story.  He tends to forget plot elements that he's already introduced, and tends to introduce new plot elements to no real purpose.  He gets too easily caught up in soap opera melodramatics.  But these are principally flaws in the craft of story telling, and not his writing itself. And you can't really fault his productivity, save to wish he'd got started earlier in life or lived longer.  I wish I had half of his ability to bang out pages.</blockquote>

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