The first time I read any part of
The Waste of Time (or
The Wheel of Overtime or whatever you call it) was also the last. I skimmed about eight chapters, grinding my teeth all the while at the slowness of the story. As I recall, it took an entire chapter for two characters to fetch a keg of beer up from the cellar, meanwhile trading Gossip from the Outside World™ that could be summarized as follows: 'Aye, measter, there do be strange goin's-on in that arr Outside World, marry begob. Lucky we never has none o' that violence and adventure stuff here in Stereotypical Bucolic Hamlet, eh, measter?' And insert Glyph of Heavy-Handed Foreshadowing Irony™.
Then came the first 'The Wheel Turns . . .' chapter, and I threw the book against the wall. A ridiculous portentous title for an undigested infodump: two of my least favourite things. One would suppose that a book with a 100-page glossary wouldn't need to be interrupted by chapters of crib notes on the background, but then one wouldn't be Robert Jordan.
Mr. Goodkind is a very strange author, writing very strange books for what must be a very strange audience. He really seems to believe that his mission in life is to preach the gospel of Ayn Rand to all the wankers at those SF cons he's heard tell of. Most people consider it rude to give spoilers without warning, but I'm nothing if not rude, so with no warning at all, here is the entire storyline, plot, and thematic resolution of the complete works of Terry Goodkind as of even date:
Terry Goodkind approximately wrote:See Atlas. See Atlas shrug. Shrug, Atlas, shrug.
The fantasy field at present seems saturated with authors hell-bent on slinging 1,000,000-word doses of epic hash, each one of them missing some essential literary vitamin or even an entire food group. Please understand this to be a brief caricature, as none of these authors are as bad as I make them out:
Eddings has no originality to speak of (he started repeating himself even before
The Belgariad was over), Martin has no sense of pace or dramatic unity, Goodkind has no world-building or skill with prose . . . and Jordan has no end. That's why I remain a staunch SRD fan after all these years. He's the only man in the field of BFF who serves up the entire family paella.
That said, my own books suck worse than anybody's. The world has yet to discover this; let it count itself fortunate.
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