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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 513909" data-attributes="member: 5171">I think it's important to judge the novels for what they were trying to do.Tolkien was, if I remember correctly, trying to take the epic heroic quest and tell it from the point of view of not-heroic folks. He gets the tropes of the heroic quest right, and you have to admit tha the defined the genre.  For all that and my Masters in English, I've still never gotten through the Similililialilrlrialailion.  Not my bag. And I've read Chaucer...Brooks was trying to rip off Tolkien.  Go him.  Laughing all the way to the bank. Personally, I think he sucks hard enough to strip the brass off a doorknob, but that's just me.Eddings was trying to write a heroic quest fantasy with a human face again, using something closer to normal speech and bantering between the heroes. While I wouldn't like it if I read it for the first time today, I liked it when I read it at fourteen. I'd classify Eddings as good if he's the first thing you read in this genre, but pretty derivative otherwise. It's not as though he's breaking a lot of new ground with his characters (open to debate on this, of course).Feist was trying, from what I can tell, to make a story out of some of his gaming sessions. I didn't like the early stuff, when he was pretty much just telling you about his D&D campaign, but when he moved into the later books, and cleaned up his style, I thought he was decent.  Not trying to redefine the genre or anything, but definitely an entertainer.Goodkind was trying to fool a whole bunch of gullible suckers into buying his books under the guise of fantasy novels, when in reality they're a) tripe and b) bad romance novels inelegantly disguised as bad fantasy novels.  I mean, for crying out loud. The man's sucking is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of verifiable established objective fact. Out of respect for Eric's grandmother, I will simply note that Goodkind's profound level of sucking is strikingly analogous, on a number of levels, to a tornado touching down in the middle of a mule farm.Jordan -- I dunno what he was trying to do. Presumably, write the great fantasy epic, and make it longer than anyone else's.  I agree with the folks who think he's lost his way, and I stopped reading after book seven or so. It just wasn't doing it for me anymore. I'm only barely a pro writer, but I'm pretty sure there's a rule somewhere about not introducing new major villains in book seven of your "trilogy". Martin is, I think, trying to shake up the genre by doing to fantasy what cyberpunk did for science fiction. It's fantasy with expletives and on-screen sex and morally righteous people who don't automatically win. I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. And I love the body count -- although, in my mind, no protagonists have died as of yet. There are a ton of important dead people, but none who I considered protagonists. (Being somewhat vague to avoid spoilers...)-Tacky</blockquote>

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