Shannara Coming to the Small Screen

I guess we can thank “Game of Thrones” for more than just being awesome television, its success seems to be opening up more fantasy possibilities.

Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series is being produced as a television series. The first season will be based on “The Elfstones of Shannara,” which is the second book in the series. While Variety doesn’t mention a reason as to why, I would suspect it has to do with the fact that the first book “The Sword of Shannara,” while good, is pretty much a Lord of the Rings clone.

This could be interesting as the series combines two hot fads: Epic fantasy and post-apocalyptic Earth.

I reviewed the original trilogy a long, LONG time ago.

3 replies on “Shannara Coming to the Small Screen”

  1. This could be interesting. The books have quite a mixed reputation. The first novel was the first fantasy paperback to make the NY Times bestseller list. On the other hand, the protagonist of this year’s Hugo-award winning Among Others describes it as a “total crap rip-off” of Tolkien. I’m not suggesting either perspective should be considered authoratative, but they do suggest the range of reactions people have to the book.

    • The first book is definitely Tolkien-esque, but to be fair, it’s just another version of “The Hero’s Journey.” Shannara gets dinged because it’s that story + magical fantasy (with Elves and Dwarfs and so on).

      As the series progresses, it drifts away from Tolkien and into its own version of Fantasy. Some of my favorite books in the series are from “The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara” trilogy where he adds magic airships and a closer look at the leftover technology and science from the “Old World.”

  2. It’s been round about a couple of decades since I read the original trilogy but I seem to recall dimly that the first book was a fairly tedious quest story with a boatload of exposition. (Wait, that fairly accurately describes LOTR, too.) Seems to me anything critical from the first book can easily be filled in with flashbacks and so on.

    Don’t get me wrong, it was great reading, but I can definitely understand why they might want to pick up the action “in progress” in volume 2.

Comments are closed.