I've said it in other places but Terry Brooks...his Shannara series is a very bad LOTR clone...but when I was younger I read and loved them all...
Saw this thread again just as I am sitting here while my wife watches that TV show Castle. I am beginning to think the character is based loosely on James Paterson. Rubbish is stronger language than I would use on any fellow writer, but am not a big fan of the genre. My wife is. That's OK. She has some redeeming values.
They certainly feel somewhat derivative early on, but given that it’s a post-apocalyptic version of our own world I don’t know if the word “clone” fits for me. People hanging out in the ruins of Seattle, WA seems far-removed from Middle Earth.
LOTR: Old powerful wizard finds an unlikely hero who must save Middle Earth by a quest at a great personal cost...in a world of elves, men, and dwarves Shannara: Old powerful druid finds an unlikely hero who must save the (insert item, person, or world) by a quest at a great personal cost...in a world of elves, men, gnomes, and dwarves. I stand by my previous statement. The story is the same regardless of the map you put it on.
That’s true of all manner of stories though it’s a matter of tropes like hero arrives in town, finds a woman in trouble, kills the bad guys , gets the girl, leaves town for inexplicable reason
I mean, that's the hero's journey. One of the most basic story structures of all time. Thousands of years old. You start looking back to Gilgamesh at that point, although he would be the first superhero. Unlikely hero bit is only slightly newer, but not really. If you break stories down to single sentence summarization, most sound pretty identical. At least most in each genre.
Yeah, if you define a story broadly enough you can do this sort of thing with just about any story. Doesn’t fit the definition of a ‘clone.’ Some works are much more derivative than others and the early Shannara books are highly derivative of Tolkien. Today, the books probably seem more derivative of high fantasy in general than they did when first written (he started writing them in the 1960s I think; the first book was published 45 years ago). The series strays from its Tolkien roots as it goes one but there’s no denying how closely he follows Tolkien’s formula in the original books (perhaps one reason they were so successful at the time).
... like hero arrives in town, finds a woman in trouble, kills the bad guys , gets the girl, leaves town because if he doesn't, he's stuck with domesticity instead of a sequel.
An abrasive police detective who drinks too much and doesn’t play by the department’s rules is also their only hope for solving a case before a killer strikes again…
A young woman with no prospects but huge boobies falls in love with her billionaire boss who’s finding it impossible to meet women despite you know being a billionaire
I dunno you guys, I tried reading the first Shannara book recently and I tend to agree with @Joe_Hall . It's much more specific than "a fantasy story based on the 'hero's journey' archetypes". It kind of feels like each individual character has a specific, easily identifiable LOTR analogue--down to pretty secondary characters like Faramir. It just seems there are too many such similarities for it to be easily chalked up to "just using the same tropes". Of course I also thought it was poorly written in a number of other ways, so maybe I'm biased.
Yes, as I said above it's highly derivative of Tolkien. Apparently the whole original trilogy is (I didn't make it past book one). Beyond that, especially in the books that explore more of the post-apocalyptic world and remnants of the modern world (of which I also read one book) the series seems to get fairly well away from Tolkien. In any event, I don't think calling the "series" a clone of LOTR holds up to scrutiny, despite how the original trilogy mimicked Tolkien. There are close to 40 books in the series, iirc.
Just before the pandemic I checked out Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall. The last stamp on the card was 1997, about the same time I read it when I was a student. It's out of print, I might try to buy it off the school. I've said many times before that Lovecraft was an idea man, not a writer. Kind of the same way Bob Dylan is a songwriter but not a singer. Take what they laid down and make it your own, it's a solid foundation.
I find Lovecraft's writing style, such as it was, adds to a lot of those stories in a way contemporaries have missed. Incidentally, I also think Bob Dylan's style of singing adds to his songs and covers by people who are technically better singers rarely compel me in the same way.
Lovecraft always makes me feel like I just found someone's journal scraps in a dusty study. Heinlein comes to mind as a popular writer I don't think is that good. It's true he played a large part in inspiring the ''20th century war but there's aliens and it's in space in the future" motif, of which I'm usually fond. I appreciate that he was an eccentric and had some unique ideas for the time, but the execution and content doesn't land. That may be partially due to the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon setting expectations by talking up his profundity. On the other hand, G.R.R.M is a good writer that I don't enjoy. I couldn't make it through the first Daenerys chapter. I should try a differ IP of his some day.
My wife just finished another by Janet Evanovich. I've never made it past the first chapter. It is of the same genre of TV shows like Castle, and Rizoli and Iles, Hot police broads, and one with a character based on James Patterson. Just not a fan of that whole genre, and usually have something open on the computer as she binge watches the aforementioned cop shows. One thing I noticed with both writers is that their work often features was seems a lot like product placement to me.
Ann Rice. I drug my eyes through Interview With A Vampire. It was torture. I told my Mom and Sister, who loved the whole series, that for my birthday I never have to read another Ann Rice book ever again. I didn't like the movie either.