...kinda suck.

The series is blatant plagarism of LotR, Dune, Michael Moorcock's multiverse (The Queen of Swords more or less), Earthsea...

Oh, and the blunt christian overtone. Ye, that's a bit hamfisted.

Or shall we mention the ingenuit of the naming convention here, like The Mountain of Dhoom?

-----------

So ye, they have a ton of stuff to fix for the tv-series.

Eeerm, yes? The point being? There was loads of books on that series, and the guy dies without finishing it, so I only got a few books in. It wasn’t great. There was a game made of it, didn’t know there was a tv series, but they do it of everything now. It will be groups of emo teens pouting at the camera.

younger me enjoyed the stories very much, translated into dutch their is much use of rich language which is something i do appreciate, story wise it holds some comparison with LOTR ( dune i don't see ) but it is a story of its own. I belief last year i did a re-read only to find that the end books written by the new author just didn't stick with me. apparently the nature of Jordan was as much of an appeal to me as it was his story writing

btw i'm curious with what you call the christian overtone, to me its not really evident but yea i'm also raised as a christian so bound to overlook this ;)

the tv show was great in its own right with a beautiful choice for Kahlan and the not so serious tone for the series all together .... oh wait no .. wrong series

i meant that i don't expect to much from a tv show, there is so much war , magic, huge continents .. the only thing they won't have any trouble with is supplying all the beautiful women mentioned in the show

lucky for us tech advances of today do manage to create convincing scenery without a 100 billion dollar investment though the real shit is still a bit out of reach

Not to mention how Shannara and the Sword of Truth turned out so there is almost no pressure on that point of course lotr is out there but that is so low magic

I've read the first Dune book, Hobbit and LotR books and whole Earthsea cycle but haven't check on Michael Moorcock's books.

As for the Wheel of Time books, I read only 3 of them, in my opinion they were original and really cool to read, can't say anything about plagiarism though, maybe I'm not that good at sensing such things. Earthsea had some similarities with LotR books though. I will complete my reading for Wheel of Time one day, as for the upcoming TV series I expect it to be good yet inferior to books in every way possible.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. XD

I started reading it when it first came out. I liked the first 2 quite a lot. I quit after book 5, for a few reasons: it was obviously dragging on and on, there seemed to be longer and longer gaps between releases, and I just wasn't really enjoying them that much anymore. Oddly enough, I later ended up buying all the books as used copies for cheap. My intention was to read the entire series to get the complete story. But the thought of re-reading the ones I'd already read and the thought of slogging through another 9 volumes... nah. I donated the books to goodwill and never looked back.

Well, WoT is confessed to be started as a LotR-fanfic, and "the writer was a fan of Dune" - so much so he ripped off the entire Bene-Geserit organisation (as the aes sedai), the entire fremen race (as the aiel), the whole Paul Atraides being gene-engineered/bred over eons to be the Quisatz Haderac/Muad-Dib...

Then there is the end-fight of Book 2, the chaos-created animal-men, the Three As One and more elements ripped off (used less talented of course) from Queen of Swords...

I don't remember what I catched from Earthsea... The name Atuan, Tombs of Atuan comes to my mind.

So ye, as much as WoT-cultists hate Terry Goodkind (who blatantly stole The Seeker of Truth thingamajg from WoT), RJ is equally guilty.

I wonder what RJ ripped off after Book 4... Well, where to start this...

- the Main Villain (though certain group I hold more evil) is named SATAN.
- EVERYONE believes in the One True Gwad, The Good White Light (oh, ye, Satan has the Balck Light, throwing in same casual racism of the time), independently from religion or world-view
- there is a character called Belial, Ismael, Asmodeus...
- the core story of the series is that Gawd fights Satan (wether Gawd actualy exists in this universe or not), starting with the prologue, pushing the otherwise-would-be-protagonist to the sideline even...
- then there are the crusaders and their Inquisition...
- there is the arian-supremacy believing Light/Gawd-believeing christain-nationalists (aka. nazis), the sean-chans... On whom Book 4 is specificaly telling will survive and continue on at the end... Obviously because they are christians, thus "good".

It's not AS hamfisted with its message as Narnia, but hey, I'm only at 2/3rd of Book 4, so this can change. Narnia got worse too with every coming book, wh not this!

I still remember a line from a review in Dragon magazine concerning the first book. Might be a bit paraphrased, but basically, "Readers may surface after swimming through 800 pages of fairly small type wondering if anything interesting has actually happened." The answer is no, nothing particularly interesting happened, and the author has some annoying tics that start grating after a while. After forcing myself through two more I said "why am I doing this" and gave up.

Well if you put it like that i'm almost wondering if i read the same books as you did, to me the first 4 books where just the adventure of a small group of youngsters who happen to have a certain alignment with .. uhm ... fate ;)

I read all the books in the series. I guess there are few people not disapointed in the ending, but besides that, in spite of the awfully inconsistent pacing, I have to say I enjoyed most of it. Technically, Shaitan or the dark one, but yes, it makes no quips in identifying it with the arch-demon we all know and "love" :P. But I would argue Mashadar is a far greater evil.

I also really like the distinction the author made between evil that opposes good, but seeks dominion over the material realm (much like "the forces of good" do), and evil which is pure chaos and destruction, driven by an endless famine for the end and corruption of all things. I've also read a lot of fantasy and SF... but my favorite has to be Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. I hope, but think it is unlikely I will get to read anything that comes close to it. The Wheel of Time I would just call good, for the most part (it has its "just ok, but a bit boring" moments).

I can also recommend Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, the hard SF of Greg Bear (Blood Music, Eon series), Ursula K. Le Guin's fantastic world-building in the Hanish cycle and her other books. I hope one day I will do them all justice in my own way (am working on a book of my own). Clearly you overuse the term. Calling it heavily inspired by the above though would not be an exaggeration. The author even admitted to drawing inspiration from Dune.

Yes, was a long time back, but 1 and 2 were ok, should have stopped at a trilogy. Anyways, I got to about book 4 and found out the writer had died at book 12 leaving it unfinished. I mean he could have just penned “and they all lived happily ever after!l. Reckon GRRMartin is hoping for the black abyss so he doesn’t have to finish the final book either.

Death doesn't exactly send calendar invites, you know :P. In any case, the series was finished by Brandon Sanderson, in a rather questionable, but I guess not disastrous way. Apart from the final book, I'd say he did a good job of it.

I only ever read the novella included in the Legends anthology and found it almost unbearable. Maybe it was my lack of familiarity with the larger saga, but I thought it was a confusing, terribly boring mess and it put me off from ever giving the main books a shot.

Still, I find it hard to believe it could be a worse rip-off than Sword of Shannara was, or that it the christian overtones could be worse than in A Wrinkle in Time (and I'm actually pretty forgiving as far as that goes - despite being an atheist I still like the Narnia books a lot, except for the last one).

I personally got to about book 7 or 8, but the world, story and the number of new characters, just kept getting bigger and longer. I eventually gave up and I bought all the hardcover versions up until that point.

If the Kindle versions ever goes on discount, I may get them. So far, I was able to get the first 3 books when they went on sale. I would like to finish the tale, though a part of me dreads it lol.

There was an Aiel, one of female guards Rand had, that I always wondered what happened to her. I forgot her name, but in one scene she used her shield to parry an attack during the end battle with the Aiel guy posing as the false Dragon.

Then it seemed like she just disappeared. This is different than the ones that disappeared at Shadar Logoth later on.

For the life of me, I can't recall if she was ever mentioned after book 4 and that has always bothered me lol.
.