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[Urbane Guerrilla]

Rrrrff. Terry Brooks is slowly learning to write, but he's really somebody to write better than. Admittedly, that's not setting the bar as high as, say, writing better than Alan Dean Foster (always competent, always publishable -- and never great). Brooks' writing is amateurish: too many modifiers and a longstanding apparent fear of the word said. Hardly anyone in the Shannara books ever simply says anything; it's always an excess of synonyms. This kind of material niggles at me until I put the book firmly down (rather like in this post). It took me two tries to plough through Sword Of Shannara, and I've only leafed through the rest to see if Brooks had improved his prose. For years, he had not.

As for that sociopath Hubbard, who founded a "religion" for the money in it, the less said the better. Three paragraphs into the first chapter of the first book of BFE was enough for me to know the writing wouldn't get any better. That man desperately needed an editor, and never had one. I'm never picking up Dianetics or taking up Scientology; I read two biographies of the man back to back. Run, do not walk, from that stuff; no good could come out of the man in those bios.

For literary grace and style in the fantastic, give me a Zelazny or an Anderson any day. For philosophy and an admirable transparency of prose (a subtler gift than you might think), give me Heinlein.