Perhaps somebody should point out that SRD, in his younger days, frequently used obscure words not so much for their meaning as because he liked the sound of them. Somewhere or other he has said that he wanted to produce the same effect with words that Wagner did with music, and his choice of vocabu...

No contest. I'd book a one-way ticket to the Commonwealth (from Silverlock, by John Myers Myers, and if you haven't read it yet you're in for a treat).

Experto crede.

In no particular order: Sam Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings Sméagol/Gollum, LOTR Saltheart Foamfollower, TCTC Steerpike, Titus Groan & Gormenghast Tyrion Lannister, A Song of Ice and Fire (Heavy on the S's, I see. Could thiss be a bit of a biass, my preciouss?) Westley, Vizzini and Fezzik definite...

17, 'Balrog level'.

I missed the question about Malory.

I should have known better, 'cos he and I were cellmates back around 1470.

(Of the three statements above, one is a dam' lie. .00001% extra credit for the first one who can tell me which one it is.)

The Sword of Shannara is definitely one of the 50 most important SF/fantasy books; I just wouldn't put it in the 5000 best . It proved that there was a market for Tolkien clones out there, and also showed just how little those readers would settle for. The fantasy field became a lot more profitable...

I'll say this much - those informative interludes only serve to aggravate the situation :) They're pretty bad cases of infodump, yeah. And the name SRD gives to them to set them off from the actual chapters -- Ancillary Documentation, forsooth! One of the rare moments in The Gap where SRD succumbed...

Boy. Did I have it all wrong. I thought that feeding blood actually prevented the cycle from shortening. That's what the Clave was led to believe. If they'd actually known that the Banefire was feeding the Sunbane, they wouldn't have carried on for 1500 or 2000 years. Once Covenant left Revelstone,...

A couple of years ago, some AI research group 'solved' checkers: they worked out, by brute computer power, the exact optimum sequence of moves. I believe Black always wins if nobody makes any mistakes. Hopboard has now joined (noughts & crosses)(ticktacktoe)(pick your side of the pond) as a Triv...

So, what you're saying is that the son of a doctor, who has worked in a hospital for two years and has a language university degree does not recognize Melenkurion as Greek? Not at all. What I'm saying is that he didn't borrow the word from Greek. At most, he borrowed the sound of the word. SRD is a...

I've always admired C.S. Lewis, and it's pretty obvious to me that SRD has been heavily influenced by him. In some ways, the Land could almost be seen as a deconstruction of Narnia, in which Aslan never appears to set things right. (And TC himself reminds me of a grown-up Eustace Clarence Scrubb in ...

Hell, DelRey put together a special commerative edition of Brooks version of LOTR...er I mean of Shannara, and Eddings repetitive saga, they without a doubt should do something in tribute to Donaldson, a far more mature, powerful and significant writer. Unfortunately, Del Rey is a sad travesty of w...

It's quite true that Hile Troy was a berk. The text more than hints that Foul personally chose him to answer Atiaran's summons, so that he would lead the Lords straight up a blind alley and let Foul wipe them out as a fighting force. That said, we don't have to blame SRD completely for the holes in ...

Del Rey is notorious for the poor quality of their bindings. A friend of mine used to read just about any fantasy book she could get her hands on. The first thing that made her pickier -- this would be in the early eighties -- was that all her Del Rey books kept falling apart on her before she'd eve...

The field is wide open, really. I was fortunate enough to have the chance of asking SRD about the Seven Words. He says he made them up more or less arbitrarily, and denied that they have any specific meaning. In particular, he said he didn't derive Melenkurion from Greek. But it's a fine suggestion....