Long Form Fantasy
Let’s hose away the bloody remnants of horror week, and talk of brighter things. Like fairies, elves and pretty pretty ponies.
Well, elves anyway.
Terry Brooks’ Shannara series is his most famous work, starting with 1977’s Sword of Shannara. I got to meet him a few years ago when he came to the bookshop I was working in on a signing tour, where he proved to be a top-notch bloke.
The first Shannara book was probably the first non-Tolkien elves’n'wizards book I read, way back in the day, and the stand-out bit for me as a kid was the setting: Earth, thousands of years after nuclear armageddon, where magic worked, elves had always existed, and dwarves were mutated humans who took their species name from pre-armageddon works of fantasy fiction. That’s a bit of a mind bender when you’re 10.
As it turned out, I prefered his non-Shannara books, the Magic Kingdom series (rich lawyer buys the throne of a fantasy realm) and the pretty sinister Word and the Void, set in contemporary Illinois. The latter features a cameo by Owain Glyndwr, a historical icon round my way known as the last true Prince of Wales, and, aside from a bit part in Shakespeare, an obscure figure outside of the motherland. It’s a shame, but I never got round to asking why he used Glyndwr as a character.
I’d pretty much lost track of Brooks’ books when I saw the first few volumes of Genesis of Shannara on the shelf in Borders. I assumed it was a pre-armageddon prequel, but as it turns out Brooks is doing an Asimov and linking the Word and the Void books to his main series.
It’s something of a temptation to writers to piece together a shared universe for their characters. I always like Asimov’s robots turning up in the Foundation series, but I suspect I’m in the minority on that. In Terry Brooks’ case, it does kind of make sense, in that I think there have been hints in the past of the connection between two series, though I’ve no doubt that somewhere out in the wilds of the internet there’s someone losing their shit about it. For my part, it’s renewed my interest in rereading the books, and if we were being cynical, gives the publishing company the opportunity to re-brand and re-release the Illinois trilogy.
