THREADSURRECTION!
Re-reading Shannara to catch up and finish the series, SCIONS was great, and I rolled right into DRUID OF SHANNARA and finished it!
It's interesting to read that one now VS when I read it originally and know Eldwist is a fallen city from our world preserved in stone so it's lasted thousands of years, I picked up on WAY more stuff (Yeah, I don't think I really got that the first time I read it)...and funnily enough I THINK Chicago is the wrong city to assume it is....because the denouement in that one happens in what is clearly a sports DOME next to much taller buildings...so you know what?
I think it's Toronto now, and the 3rd act happens in the Skydome...there are even descriptions of almost faded away statues in recesses high above the ground sticking out of the dome....we have those. Wrigley field is not only not a dome, it's far from any really tall buildings. The argument could be made for it being Manhattan, and the dome is Madison Square Gardens...but that's a LOT further for the crew to have walked (but again, the terrain all apparently changed a LOT in the Great Wars and climate shift...so it's also possible.) I'd just say that Chicago is way off the mark.
EDIT: Yeah, I think it's Manhattan now based on the attention I paid to descriptions. It's a dome surrounded by buildings that are tall enough to see the top of the dome, MSG in NYC has this, and if the Tiderace is the Atlantic and it ate up the Great Lakes and the area around NYC, then I could see how the Manhattan could become the described stone city in a peninsula at the end of a long isthmus. There is also the fact that they walk through the mountains to get there and then the valley with the monstrous bear (Kodan) prior to the Isthmus crossing. Considering the Appalachians are right near there, if the climate/Demon Wars shifted the topography and ground up places and shoved others together, I could easily see the Appalchians being the Charnel Mountains and perhaps this means they didn't have to walk as far as it seems? There are other things too, at one point Horner Dees and Pe Ell come across (in their hunt for the Creeper that the stone king sends out to sweep the city clean every night) come across a sprawling park, with a pond and a fountain that has an angel statue atop it...that's probably Bethesda Park in Central Park proper...a mere 45min walk from MSG. The subways, are also indicative of NYC. The upheaval of the earth probably made most of NYC sink beneath the waves but left a decent portion exposed for the Stone King to freeze into stone, and that upheaval could have created the Isthmus that it exists at the end of.
Love that final confrontation with the Stone King too, it's really well done.
There's some predictable stuff, like knowing that
), but honestly it didn't bother me one bit, Brooks is a spellbinding storyteller even with the predictable stuff I find.
And on into ELF QUEEN!
Oh and in ELF QUEEN, I picture Tiger Ty as being played by Toby Jones, and oh my god does the dialogue and cadence fit for how he talks! I also wonder at the volcano Killeshan...If the climate shift that occurred during the Great Wars really fucked up the landmasses as the rest of the books spell out, then I would wager that Killehsan is not an existing Hawaii island volcano like Kīlauea, or Monaloa...but honestly, Kīlauea DOES fit into the area where Killeshan is located on the map of Morrowindl....so it could be that one still....BUT both Kīlauea and Monaloa are known to erupt ever 2-3 years so it would be weird for it to have lain dormant for the 100 or so years Killeshan did when the elves lived there. I dunno.
I'm gonna be honest, I MAY roll on into THE VOYAGE books after TALISMANS if things keep going as they are. I'm enjoying the shit out of this re-read. It's where I stopped reading the post-HERITAGE books, not out of some dislike, it was because the final book of that series MORGAWR was not out yet when I finished the second one, so I fell off the series until he started the gap filling prequel books, and never retuned to the post JOURNEY books....all of which I own and are in the TRP, hence my re-read and want to push to the end.
Oh oh oh...and knowing that Brooks didn't originally intend for the Word & Void books to be Shannara's pre-history, I'd love to know when that decision came as I THINK it must have been before Heritage as The Word is mentioned multiple times in DRUID as having been the thing that gave the King of the Silver River and other creatures of Faerie their power...But that was in like 1991 and RUNNING WITH THE DEMON didn't come out till 1997, and the first GENESIS book (ARMAGEDDON'S CHILDREN) didn't come out till like 2006. It's really interesting none the less.
This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 21 August 2023 - 01:23 PM
"When the last tree has fallen, and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money, oh no." ~Aurora
“Someone will always try to sell you despair, just so they don't feel alone.” ~Ursula Vernon
QuickTidal 
McLovin, on 22 May 2012 - 02:55 PM, said:
Help
when caught by the Asphinx, takes SEVEN DAYS to figure out how to free himself (which is doubly ridiculous once you realize the Grimpond basically showed him what he would have to do).