Reply #134: "Know thine enemy", eh?

[Shadowen]

Ah, well. I suppose it's a little like Terry Goodkind's work. Goodkind started as quite a promising and talented writer. However, with book 3, his subtle jibes and apparent steals seemed to ballon into blatantly ripping off Jordan, though admittedly, an enemy who uses religion as a primary motivator isn't a big innovation. Book 3 and 4 were enjoyable. As book 5 came around, you started to get a bad feeling...

And by book 6, the full-on objectivism/capitalism philosophy was baldly there, being force-fed into your throat. Book 7 was a creative switch, and a bit of the old glory coming through, though there was much melodramatic speechifying at the end, and then book 8, an obvious anti-pacifism and pro-Iraq war screed, to use one of Goodkind's own turns of phrase, took the "spark of hope" and "plunged it into cold water".

EDIT: Oh, and out of curiosity, I read the first few pages of the first Left Behind book...and perhaps I had the advantage of knowing what the series was about, but I couldn't believe how the idiot was telegraphing the story to his readers. Even if you have a major spoiler on the book's dust jacket saying "This book is about the fucking Rapture!", you should try to keep some mystery about it, at least for the first little while.

I mean, come on. An airplane pilot who finds excuses not to go to church with his Bible-thumping, God-fearing wife and who's eying the hot stewardess, and feels just a little guilty about both?