That really isn’t true. I mean, it follows a generally similar narrative arc, but that in and of itself isn’t particularly damning, and the details are quite different in a number of cases. It’s certainly nowhere near the best book in the series, though. FWIW, I’ve been told this show is going to skip Sword and the first season will be adapting my favorite book in the series (and the second), The Elfstones of Shannara, which involves a massive demon invasion and the main character fleeing desperately with a crucially important elven girl (a princess, I think) and a small band of protectors while a murderous, unstoppable demon hunts them down. There’s a lot of dismemberment and similarly violent deaths. I can’t wait to see them try to reproduce that on basic cable. (They’re not going to, I bet.)
Edit: Yeah, that trailer isn’t very revealing but burning leaves? Iron claws? Shuddering mouthless demonface things and elven cities? That’s Elfstones, not Sword. …oh, and there’s the elfstones themselves. Yup.
My memories are 20 years old so I can’t cite specifics, but it was much more than just the overall narrative arc. As I remember, for every character in the Fellowship (except I think Merry and Pippin who were merged into one), there was an equivalent who had a very similar personality and role in the party. A couple similar characters could be harmless coincidence, but not the whole party. And I remember there being a lot of plot beats that had direct parallels as well.
Anyway, it’s fairly irrelevant to the TV series, as that’s based on later books. And honestly, there are plenty of bad adaptations of good source material and vice versa, so I’m not going to condemn the TV series based on that either way.
Looks quite good. FX look decent enough on the whole. Had to chuckle at the actress getting teary over the sets though - I suspect they spent a lot of time in front of green screens, not fully constructed sets, but we will see!
I dont believe I read them in order, so maybe thats why I didnt pick up the Plagerism being too bad in the first book because I read it later on. As I recall, it seemed lime the use of the chalkovs gun from the previous series started the trouble in the next seriuos. Also, I really enjoyed the reluctant characters later in the seriuos.
Sorry if I didn’t make sense. I thought it was pretty clear, but I usually type on my phone, and as you know, the website is complete crap on the phone. I usually can’t type too much on the desktop, since I’m watching my super awesome sweet, excitable 18 month old. God, she is the best! Very tiring though, but totally worth it. Also, she loves notebooks, so I try to keep that out of her reach.
I guess my point was that although the first books were awfully similar to Tolkien, I started reading some of the later series first. They were far more originally (to my mind). It had some interesting ideas, with Shannara being a land of magic with a history that seemed to be our world after a titanic nuclear war (it reminds me of Adventure Time, now that I think about it). I liked how it seemed that the misuse of the previous series mystic weapon or power or whatever (referred to as a Chekhov’s gun - you can find more here) would be part of the problem in the next series (some sort of misuse, or the actual correct use brought more problems with it). It looks like this series will have the Elf Stones in it, which is cool.
Still, it’s MTV, so it’s made for a younger audience, and when I read it, I was a preteen or teen, so who knows how it hold up today for me. I’m not going to watch it, but I’d hardly get on anyone’s case about it, since I’m not the target audience.
Now, some people have drawn a different conclusion from me, but I really think that I benefited from not starting with the first books published. It seems that fantasy and sci-fi authors usually improve overtime, so later books are more interesting.
That music in the trailer is terrible. Thank god for Ramin Djawadi. And can’t anyone involved in the show’s production pronounce the series correctly? It’s SHAW-NAH-RAW, not Sha-naer-ra.
Ugh. Someone tell MTV that a compelling trailer does not contain 79 quick cuts in one minute. I’m less interested now than the almost zero interest I had before watching whatever that was.
That would be one of the reasons I think it’s not the blatant LOTR ripoff some people assert it is. It’s not just hinted at, really. There’s an early attack on the main character by a giant cyberspider thing in a radioactive ruin from the old civilization, the other “races” are mutated humans based on how they rode out the apocalypse, the Druids are actually the last keepers of advanced tech, etc.
It’s a shame they’ve made it so blatant from the outset. In the books, you get hints that this is really a post-apocalypse story, then clues build up until it becomes a matter of fact thing. Here, it’s just straight-up in the trailer.
That fall from technology was something that I expected to be built up in The Wheel of Time books. There were a few hints of this in the early novels, but that concept drifted away as the series progressed. I know that I thought it was really cool in my early read and ended up being disappointed - for a wide range of reasons, not just the apparent dropping of this idea.
Having absolutely inhaled the Shannara books in middle and high school, one of the coolest parts of the books were the fact that it was clear there was something more to the world than you saw on the surface. And the later voyages novels really delved deeply into that territory. I feel like I need to re-read the series at this point.
Also, I can’t think of a more simultaneously most appropriate, and least appropriate place for this series to get made than MTV.
