I’ve been reading Terry Goodkind’s sixth novel in the Sword of Truth series, Faith of the Fallen. It’s such an amazing novel. He really has a great mastery of character development, motivation and touching scenes… Acts of malace or kindness are equally well depicted. One character, Nicci, reminds me of many people I’ve known over the years, people blinded by the beliefs they have been taught their whole lives, even when they face the fact that thet they are flawed and only bring pain. How acting justly and with purpose or loving can be seen as a sin because a book or doctrine tells them so…
That’s one thing that many people don’t seem to get about “fantasy” literature. In it’s truest forms it’s not escapist so much as showing you different angles of the world we live in everyday…
Look at Tolkien, the most famous fantasy proponent. He was an environmentalist far before it was fasionable to be so…. his love for nature, especially the forests of England which were being destroyed during his lifetime, was obvious in the way he described landscapes with such detail and wrote of trees not being mourned even though they are ancient things of beauty and some untangable wisdom/history/knowledge…
That’s one thing that many people don’t seem to get about “fantasy” literature. In it’s truest forms it’s not escapist so much as showing you different angles of the world we live in everyday…
Look at Tolkien, the most famous fantasy proponent. He was an environmentalist far before it was fasionable to be so…. his love for nature, especially the forests of England which were being destroyed during his lifetime, was obvious in the way he described landscapes with such detail and wrote of trees not being mourned even though they are ancient things of beauty and some untangable wisdom/history/knowledge…