A blast from my eleven-year-old past

[swan_tower]

I somehow managed to miss the fact that they made a Shannara TV series. But it aired on MTV (and will be getting a second season), so I decided to give it a shot.

Watching it is . . . interesting.

More precisely, watching it is like taking a trip in the Wayback Machine to my eleven-year-old brain. These were the first adult fantasy novels I ever read, purloining them off my brother’s bookshelf — my first introduction to high fantasy. I keep thinking of Benedick’s line from Much Ado About Nothing: “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale men’s souls out of their bodies?” Back then, capital letters could hale my soul out of mine. The last descendant of the King of Shannara has to use the Elfstones to help a princess take a seed from the Ellcrys to Safehold, where she’ll immerse it in the Bloodfire and renew the Forbidding that keeps Demons out of the world — yyyyyyyyeah. Nowadays that mostly sounds goofy and artificial to me, but back then, it was awesome.

The TV series doesn’t do a whole lot to restore that power. For me to care about a Destined Hero, I need to care about the characters, and neither the writing nor the acting here is good enough to really compel me. The show also has a certain look to it that I don’t have a good name for, but it’s a lesser version of the same thing that drove me straight out of Reign after a single episode; people look like they’re wearing costumes instead of clothing, and furthermore they look like they’re about to burst into the latest auto-tuned pop hit. One of the reviews I saw gave it a tepid recommendation to those looking for a “teen-friendly Game of Thrones,” and that feels apt. I have trouble telling the two female leads apart, if the camera angle doesn’t show their ears: one’s an elf, one’s a human, but they’re both generically pretty dark-haired young women wearing MTV’s idea of fantasy chic. Their hair is too clean and well-brushed, nobody ever has more than cosmetic smudges of dirt on them, and the entire thing feels like it’s made out of plastic.

Which isn’t to say it’s complete crap. I stopped reading Shannara ages ago, so I had no idea the setting is technically our world, post-magical-apocalypse. That’s an interesting twist on the epic fantasy thing, and sometimes you get the characters riding past the crumbling remnants of modern technology and architecture. I also give them points for having racially diverse elves — and most of the characters we’ve seen so far are elves. On the other hand, no points for Obvious Romani Parallel Is Obvious and Offensive: really, Brooks? We needed a clan of itinerant sexist thieves? The show intermittently entertains me, but it hasn’t yet (as of the first three eps) risen above the status of “thing I can put on on the background while I do other stuff because its plot isn’t complex enough and its performances aren’t compelling enough to really require my attention.”

I don’t much expect it to do so, either. But still: it’s interesting to revisit my eleven-year-old brain, and to muse on what she used to think.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[sovay]

I stopped reading Shannara ages ago, so I had no idea the setting is technically our world, post-magical-apocalypse.

That's interesting. I never started reading Shannara, so I had no idea, either.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia tells me that the post-apocalyptic backstory got established in a trilogy about ten years ago, so who knows when along the line Brooks got the idea into his head.

[sovay]

Wikipedia tells me that the post-apocalyptic backstory got established in a trilogy about ten years ago, so who knows when along the line Brooks got the idea into his head.

Well, whether or not it was planned from the start, the knowledge makes it valuable to me: I have been keeping a list of post-apocalyptic fantasies at the back of my head for years, because they're much rarer than post-apocalyptic science fiction and I find them interesting, and I didn't realize Terry Brooks should have been on it.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Who else in on the list? Saberhagen, I assume.

[sovay]

Who else in on the list? Saberhagen, I assume.

No, so please tell me which Saberhagen I should be reading! Currently it's things like Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy (1976–79), Steven R. Boyett's Ariel (1983), Pamela F. Service's Winter of Magic's Return (1985) and Tomorrow's Magic (1987), Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis' Death Gate Cycle (1990–94), and Max Gladstone's ongoing Craft sequence (2012–). I've never read Peter Dickinson's Changes trilogy (1968–70), but from all descriptions it sounds like it fits the bill. I am reluctant to include M. John Harrison's Viriconium books even though The Pastel City (1971) is explicitly set on a far-future dying Earth because the succeeding books will undermine this familiar paradigm to the point of metafiction. I'll probably remember others as soon as somebody mentions them. I haven't actually written this list down before.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Empire of the East. The various books of swords take place later in the same universe, but EotE lays it out.

[sovay]

Empire of the East. The various books of swords take place later in the same universe, but EotE lays it out.

Thanks. I bet I should be looking at a lot of my childhood Andre Norton, too.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Robin McKinley's Sunshine? It's set in the aftermath of a war, and at one point the protagonist acknowledges the fact that even though humanity technically "won" the war, they're in the process of slowly losing the world.

[sovay]

Robin McKinley's Sunshine?

Works for me! I hadn't quite considered the level of the war apocalyptic, but the irrevocable changing of the world might qualify.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I feel like it's a subtle kind of apocalypse. There are all the bad magic patches and so forth where the war contaminated things, and the siege mentality that starts to crop up as you go along.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Bujold's Sharing Knife kind of qualifies, though the apocalypse is in the distant past -- true of EotE, for that matter; neither is post-apoc the way Alas, Babylon is.

Tolkien, arguably: Eriador is a depopulated wasteland apart from the Shire (the Bree villages are the only settlement within 100 leagues of the Shire) not to mention stuff like Numenor. Arguably more of a long secular decline, especially for humans.

Cherryh's _Angel with the Sword_, kind of. Technically SF, set in the Alliance/Union universe, but with the tech dial set back to "medieval Venice" or close enough. The apocalypse of Angry Aliens is I think not in living memory but not that far past, either.

I think all of these use the 'apoc' to set up the situation, especially "fantasy in SF drag", rather than having people dealing with "the apocalypse just happened". But from what I hear the same is true of Shannara, so...

[sovay]

Eriador is a depopulated wasteland apart from the Shire (the Bree villages are the only settlement within 100 leagues of the Shire) not to mention stuff like Numenor.

If we're going with Numenor, then A Song of Ice and Fire qualifies because of the Doom of Valyria. I'm not quite sure I would call either of those events an apocalypse, however, any more than I would our world's eruption of Thera.

I think all of these use the 'apoc' to set up the situation, especially "fantasy in SF drag", rather than having people dealing with "the apocalypse just happened".

I'm all right with the apocalypse having occurred in the distant past or out of (normal) living memory.

P.C. Hodgell's "Child of Darkness" is immediately post-apocalyptic fantasy, but it's also no longer canonical within the Kencyrath series, so I don't quite know where to count it.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

It was certainly apocalyptic for the Valyrians and Numenoreans... OTOH, Westeros seems to have been pretty removed from it, and it's ancient history for Middle-Earth. The fall of Arnor is more to the point, I think, and our heroes certainly pass a lot of ruins, along with the whole "depopulated wasteland" bit (also Eregion and Moria.) One thing Planetos is not is depopulated.

[marycatelli]

There were clues even in the first book.

[beccastareyes]

I only read The Sword of Shannara* but I thought I remember the 'post-apocalyptic Earth' being at least alluded to at one point.

* I was slightly older -- maybe highschool or college-aged -- and had read more fantasy, and this one in particular reads like the author played mad-libs with The Lord of the Rings.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, the first book is a point-by-point rehash of LotR. But I hadn't read LotR yet, so I didn't notice. :-P (And Brooks does get more original later.)

Any hints of post-apocalypse certainly flew over my eleven-year-old head.

[marycatelli]

The first time you encounter a cliche, it's not a cliche to you.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was alluded to a few times in Sword (which I read many times when I was 10-13 or so). At one point the party is attacked by something lurking in a ruin made from metal girders, and when Allanon or someone is infodumping history there are vaguer allusions.