I just realized that the server often returns a 500 Internal Server Error when one tries to post a comment.  I apologize to anyone who has experienced this problem; I know how discouraging it can be to type out a comment only to find that the website is malfunctioning. 

Comments do seem to post successfully despite the error, but aesthetically receiving an error upon posting a comment is far from ideal.  Receiving these errors seems to be a general problem with Movable Type 4.0 and above.  Rest assured that we're working on it, and in the meantime, don't be afraid to comment and please excuse our errors!

Terry Brooks had a very clear intention when, in an attempt to combat the boredom of law school, he began his now-famous Shannara series: to write a classical adventure story.  "An adventure story, something wonderfully dangerous, filled with hair-raising escapes, men and women of character and purpose, dangers that threatened from every quarter -- that was what I wanted to write and that was how I would escape the mind-numbing predictability of law life." ¹  Throughout his long career, in each of his Shannara books, his focus has been to entertain, to take the reader on a ride that they can see and hear and feel and to instill in them that heady sense of wonder and excitement that only good fantasy can provide.  While his characters always struggled internally with variations on classic heroic angst, the characters always seemed a vehicle for an exciting story, not the other way around. 

With the publication of Running with the Demon in 1997, however, Brooks's focus shifted inward.  Subtitled "A Novel of Good and Evil," Demon was the first book of the Word and the Void trilogy, essentially a pre-apocalyptic urban fantasy dealing with an ongoing and very existential struggle between the magically empowered Knights of the Word and the demons serving the Void.  Given the post-apocalyptic nature of the Shannara universe and the various hints given by Brooks that the epic fantasy series was actually set in a far future version of our own world, it wasn't too surprising when he decided to connect the two stories.  The release of Armageddon's Children (and subsequently, its sequel, The Elves of Cintra), first book in the Genesis of Shannara trilogy, canonized the struggle of the Knights of the Word as the ultimate precursor to the Shannara stories. 

The first two Genesis books set the stage for the apocalypse.  Set in a near future United States where the government and civilized life as we know it has already been wiped out, the characters, consisting of two Knights of the Word, a group of street children, and the reclusive Elves, are poised at the brink of a final, more devastating disaster.  The Gypsy Morph, Book Three of the trilogy, offers an anticlimactic conclusion to a promising story.  There is adventure to be found in the Genesis of Shannara, but it seems to be primarily located in the first two volumes.  While Armageddon's Children and The Elves of Cintra saw the motley band of good guys escaping the devastation of their homes and setting out on journeys both perilous and filled with adventure, The Gypsy Morph sees them struggling to journey's end in comparative exhaustion, with little but overwrought emotional drama to occupy them as they reach their destination.  Although we enjoyed the read and thought the book had a few great points to its name, ultimately, we were unsatisfied.

While catching up on some Wheel of Time news, including the announcement that Universal Pictures, in partnership with Red Eagle Entertainment, purchased film rights to produce live action movies of the entire series, beginning with The Eye of the World, as well as the recent release of the 2009 Wheel of Time Calendar, I meandered into Dragonmount's fan art gallery page, which in turn led me to the artwork of Seamas Gallagher.

His work has a very brutal, graphic tone that showcases his fantastical and often whimsical themes very effectively.  He does quite a bit of Wheel of Time artwork, including the portrait of Uno shown above.  I think you'll find that an hour or so perusing his excellent blog is time well spent.

Charlie Jane Anders wrote an interesting polemic on io9 concerning the growing importance of Young Adult literature for the science fiction genre.  The question presented seems to be whether the popularity of Young Adult science fiction is a death knell or a cry of rebirth for a genre that many argue is experiencing a decline, given an arguable dearth of new, successful science fiction writers.

It's been 20 years since Bruce Sterling compared the "mainstream" of science fiction to a fossilizing Politburo. Since that time, the situation has only gotten more dire. People are constantly remarking on the graying of science fiction readership, but statistics seem to be hard to come by. . . .

Meanwhile, young-adult science fiction is exploding. According to John Scalzi, the top 50 young adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers sold twice as many books as the top 100 adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers. As we mentioned before, there have been hardcore post-apocalyptic novels for kids and young adults for decades. With more on the way. And with City Of Ember finally being adapted to a (hopefully) major movie, more YA readers than ever will be looking for similar stories.

Ms. Anders's opinion seems to be that we should realize that Science Fiction is not in as dire straits as some have said, and that "we should especially celebrate the awesome potential of YA SF to revitalize the field, and bring new readers to SF concepts."

I can't say that I agree.

In this month's issue of the print magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction, Charles de Lint wrote a short review of Greg Keyes's newest book, The Born Queen, the fourth and final volume of The Kingdom of Thorn and Bone tetralogy (which is now definitely on my must-read list).  Found in the recurring "Books to Look For" section, Mr. De Lint's piece praises Keyes's series as an exemplar of the greatest attraction of fantasy literature:

...[W]hat makes this series so satisfying is how it reclaims the sense of wonder that first attracted many of us to reading fantasy in the first place.  Yes, the plotting is deft and surprising, the characters fully realized, the world fascinating.  But you can say that about a lot of books.  What too many of them lack, however, is that feeling of wonder.  The sense that the world is a bigger, more mysterious, and stranger place than we usually take it to be.

De Lint has hit the nail on the head.  This has always been precisely what I look for when reading a fantasy novel.  I wrote something very similar back in my review of Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself: "Ultimately, for me, the true test of a great fantasy is not whether it can show me great battles or deadly court intrigue, but whether it can impart in me a sense of wonder, a fascination with the mystical arcane."   

The ultimate attraction of fantasy, for me and many others, is indeed the ability of good fantasy writers to instill in the reader this "sense of wonder," whether it comes in the form of wide-eyed awe or as a quiet, smiling whimsy.