polishgenius, on Oct 4 2008, 06:59 PM, said:
What I'm really trying to say that the influence is as much if not more down to SW than Brooks. I think it'd have happened anyway. Taking a look at later authors like Eddings or Feist, they have at least as much in common, storywise, with SW as with Tolkien/Brooks (although there's similarities between those too, in fairness).
I'm not saying Brooks wasn't influential, because his being the first of that time did obviously impact later authors, but I don't think you can say he was more influential than Tolkien, and as I say, I think the wave that Brooks was first of would have happened without him.
This is an old argument made many times before: does man make the event or do events make the man? I think my favorite example of this argument was carried out between Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky. Both using Napoleon as an example, Tolstoy argued that events make the man, and that had Napoleon never been born someone else would have taken his place and the world would have moved in the same direction. Dostoevsky, arguing that man makes the event, was convinced that Napoleon was, as we all are, a singular human being, and had he never been born no other would or could have done as he did, and the world would now be a much different place. So, did Brooks make the event, or did the event make Brooks? We could argue all day about it, but I don't think we'll come away with any clearer conclusion than did Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In any event, I don't think it matters whether or not Brooks simply got there first. His commercial success paved the way for the future generation of fantasy, and therefor he was both significant and influential; not in how he impacted other authors, but in how he impacted the publishing practices for the genre.