In the spirit of the "Alternative Authors" craze, here's a new mem:

Take a book or series that you have read and give it the title it really deserves.

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Here's my contribution:

The Heritage of Shannara series

1. The Scions of Shannara: The Reruns of Shannara
2. The Druid of Shannara: The Tepid (and in No Way Phallic) Love Story of Shannara
3. The Elf Queen of Shannara: Most Predictable Horrorfic Ever of Shannara
4. The Talismans of Shannara: Why Don't You Just Build the Atomic Bomb of Shannara?

'tis truly a wonder of cheese and corn. Scions was kindasorta worth while, and I liked Druid despite the unrealistic dialogue.

Edit, 17:55 CDT Thu 20 Apr 2006 - here are my Reviews of Shannara:

The original series:

Elfstones [9 out of 10] was on par with any fantasy I've ever read save The Lord of the Rings itself. It is far superior IMO to Eddings' Belgariad. I'd compare it to C. S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy and Mercedes Lackey's good Valdemar stories.

Sword, I hear, is a LOTR clone, but a good one. (I'm gradually reading it now.)

Wishsong was okay [8] - not great, but still better than the Belgariad.

The second quartet:

Scions [6] is about at the level of the Belgariad, or a little better - very trite, very obvious, just all-around boring.

Druid [7] was actually very good - nice plot, tense, intriguing - except for the atrociously implausible dialogue ("oh, we're being chased by a 40-foot tall monster through the streets of a ruined city! let's duck into an abandoned building and have a half hour-long discussion on the metaphysics of its origin, shall we?"). The love story was actually tragic and mildly touching without being cloying; I just didn't care for the total futility of it. If you like lots of magic, you'll like this story. If you are tired of Warcraft-like races and creatures (and remember, this second book of the Heritage series came out about six years before the original Warcraft), you may want to skip the whole series.

Elf Queen [3] is embarrassing. I could have hacked MegaHAL to generate a better story. It's as if the plot of every SF&F B-movie were put into a blender and spiced with a dash of soap opera. It tries to be epic and instead feels like a warmed-over fanfic. I'd compare it to bad episode of Buffy or Angel, but it'd be a massive insult to Joss Whedon. It's a total waste of time, and I wish I had the two days I spent reading it back, but for the fact that I wanted to finish the series.

Talismans [6] was okay, as good as Scions and almost as good as Druid, but the plot was atrocious. I gave it a 6 instead of a 5 only because I liked the ending. The "mysteries" in the plot are laughable. No, really. Also, Brooks tends to get ridiculous in his magical arms race. In this final book, they gather all the "XYZ of Shannara" and put it together for a final fight against evil. Woo. Sound like a season finale of Buffy? If only.

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Banazir