Thirty five years after its publication, it’s difficult to read The Sword of Shannara for the first time and not feel like it’s one derivative cliche after another. Reading The Sword of Shannara with a 21st century perspective can be any combination of frustrating, confusing, exciting, boring, and amusing.

I was the absolute perfect audience for Brooks and del Rey: young, impressionable, and about to start a lifelong love affair with fantasy. I wanted hidden magic, elves, dwarfs, and a whole new fantasy world to explore. With all the fervor and passion in my adolescent body, I wanted to start over and experience from scratch that same wonder I’d felt while reading Tolkien. But, when that fantasy mojo clicked, it clicked hard and I was left scrambling through my mom’s library-Hambly and Brooks, Donaldson, Kurtz, and McCaffery-for something that would fill the Hobbit-shaped hole that I’d never known existed inside of me.

Disinterested in fantasy before I’d found Middle-Earth, my childhood was filled with all things science fiction: Tom Swift, Michael Crichton, Star Trek and Star Wars were my jam. It was my first real foray into fantasy after Tolkien. I first discovered Brooks as a boy in the mid-’90s, just finishing up elementary school. There’s something familiar about this fellowship. What The Sword of Shannara is lambasted for today-being a Lord of the Rings ripoff and a paint-by-numbers epic fantasy-was on its publication a foreshadowing of what was coming to for the genre. Brooks has stated on multiple occasions that del Rey’s entire motivation was to create a more marketable version of Tolkien’s story, and to reinvigorate reader interest in secondary world fantasy. It’s impossible to ignore the similarities between the two novels. Power-hungry, fallen angel-type who wants to take over the world and cover it in sadness and despair for some reason.A quiet youth plucked out of his idyllic home by a tall, mysterious and grumpy magic-user.

It was also, by all intents and purposes of its editor, a shameless ripoff of Lord of the Rings. Donaldson’s subversive Thomas Covenant series - it saved epic fantasy. The writer’s name was Terry Brooks, his novel was called The Sword of Shannara, and - alongside Stephen R. That is, until Lester del Rey, famed science fiction author and editor, plucked a young upstart writer out of law school and published his debut novel.

The annotated sword of shannara