The Sword of Shannara
A young man and his brother set out on a journey to find the magical "Sword of Shannara". Only the mystical sword can defeat the evil overlord and his minions.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
15mentions
10people
2012–2026years
20% recommend73% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Absolutely. I used to read constantly, from my teenage years through my early 30's, but stopped about 5 years ago? I guess life stress and short form social media taking my free time.
But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.
My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.
Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan) Stormlight Archive; Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson) Belgariad and Malloreon (David Eddings) Discworld (Terry Pratchett) Sword of Shannara (Terry Brooks)- >Indeed, the mentioning of last year's suggestion of Sword of Shannara has been rendered less painful between us by the recent success.
This made me smile. I had forgotten about that book and how much my young self enjoyed escaping into it. I'm guessing from your comment that this is one of those "better remembered than revisited" fantasy titles :)
I'm going to keep pretending it was close to perfection :p
- I never read Sword of Shannara but my brother did. It is a nostalgic title for me. :)
- > A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
You might compare The Sword of Shannara, which is a character-for-character, scene-for-scene copy of Lord of the Rings, but which is technically set in the postapocalyptic future (it's easy to read the book without noticing this) rather than the legendary past.
- How about not simply summarising, but creating a broadly similar novel, with similar characters which undergo broadly similar story arcs?
I can see how it could end up as infringement, but also how one could avoid infringement. The issue would seem to be if the original author wishes to sue.
As an example, compare Brooks "The Sword of Shannara" with Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings". It is widely accepted that the former is heavily derivative for the latter; in my view essentially being an example of the above broadly similar novel.
Yet AFAIK, Tolkein's estate didn't sue Brooks. However if they had, how likely would a victory have been?
Now in the case of "Generative LLM", we may have an even closer "derivative work". However the LLM users could well get away with it if they consume a wide enough canon, and the source authors either do not learn of the derivation, or do not have the means to sue.
