Jordan--pissing on the man's grave

In September of last year, the speculative fiction world was shocked with the loss of one of its greats: Robert Jordan. Fans wept, authors made tributes, and the rest of the world said, "Who?" I'm sure most of you remember the backlash of emotion and anger. Mostly, this shock was due to the fact that his magnum opus, the Wheel of Time series, was still incomplete. Now, unless someone finds the technology to reanimate the dead a la Herbert West, that means that someone else will have to finish the series.

This post is not about that.

See, upon Jordan's death, I looked at my booklist and decided that I may as well read some of the poor bastard's work. I received the first book, The Eye of the World for Christmas, but did not get to reading it until just this past week. I started it on Tuesday, and finished it on Friday. "Great!" you think. "That must mean it was good!"

Au contraire.

I'm a big fan of George R.R. Martin. His thousand-plus page novels take me only a couple of days to read. This book came close in length, but my quick reading of it was not due to my enjoyment. Just the opposite. I couldn't stand it, and so I tried to get it over with quickly.

This novel starts off like a verbatim copy of Lord of the Rings, including the wise helpers that disappear for at least a portion of the novel, the hapless farm-dwellers upon whom the fate of the world depends, and distinctly evil creatures and persons involved to try to stop the illustrious band of do-gooders.

Gag.

I understand that a lot of authors want to rip Tolkien off. If you can say that your book series is still wildly popular fifty years later, you must be doing something right. And how better to do that "something" than to steal it. How did this shit fly in the early nineties? I understand ripping off another novel and being hailed as original in maybe the seventies or eighties, but the nineties, people. Robert Jordan thought that maybe no one would see through his "originality" as recent as that.

Upon finished this book, I discovered that it was actually a stepping stone of a pathway of ripping-each-other-offedness. Tolkien came up with some shit in desperate need of editing. Jordan took Tolkien's shit, tried to make a log exactly like it, and then populate it with stock characters and called it original. Now it gets interesting. I'm sure that Jordan's last page revelations were a big deal when the book came out. But I've read Terry Goodkind before this dead guy, so not only did I see it coming, it really only made me more upset. Granted, Goodkind came after Jordan, with Wizard's First Rule being released in 1994. So this really only meant that Goodkind ripped Jordan off.

And all three of these badly written series are psychotically popular.

I suppose some discussion about archetypes and classical stories talking to something primal inside of us would really just whisk this whole problem away and make me seem like a spoiled brat, but let's look at it from an objective eye.

Fantasy is genre work. That means that the people who write it are also those that read it. And those that read it are going to read other works in the same genre. At what point is being unoriginal considered a good thing when your target audience has read the exact same novel that you are ripping off?

I know I'm in the minority. How can someone call someone a bad writer when they are barely cold in the coffin? I try to separate the artist from the work, but I'm not always successful. I hate Metallica because their music sucks and they are assholes. Anne McCaffrey is off her rocker, but she can still spin a readable tale. Goodkind is a bad writer, and an asshole at that. I never looked into Jordan's handling of fans, or attitude toward life. But I can tell you right now that I think his writing sucks.

Go ahead and try to make me change my opinion. I spent four days this week glancing at the clock at the end of every page. In what universe is this considered the aim for the writer and the reader?