Howdy, squiders. Hope you’re doing well.
I’ve finally finished the next book in my Shannara readthrough (I read the last book–technically the first book chronologically–in spring of 2022. Making excellent progress, she says sarcastically.) and thought we should probably talk about it.
To catch people up, because it’s been awhile, The Wishsong of Shannara was the gateway book that got me into adult fantasy, a genre that continues to be near and dear to my heart all these years later. In 2020 (?) my spouse and I watched the first season of the Shannara Chronicles, which loosely follows the events of The Elfstones of Shannara, and I had the thought that now that the series is complete, I should read through all the books in chronological order.
You see, the original Shannara series is pretty straight fantasy. But as time goes on and you read more books, you go on to realize the entire series is actually science fantasy, with this happening on a future Earth in a post-apocalyptic time period. I read the books in the order they were published so my understanding of how this came to be is spotty.
The Word and the Void trilogy (Running with the Demons, A Knight of the Word, and Angel Fire East) act as a prequel to the rest of the books, taking place in more or less modern day, before whatever apocalypse happens that creates the fantasy world in the later books.
They’ve been…not what I was expecting, to say the least. Magic exists pre-apocalypse, though in a completely different form, and it’s not clear how we get from Point A to Point B. (None of the magic that exists pre-apocalypse seems to exist afterwards, with different magic instead, though I’m hoping that as I go through the books things will make more sense.)
A Knight of the Word takes place five years after the events of Running with the Demons, following Nest Freemark and John Ross again. The entire book takes place over a couple of days, with a few flashbacks. John Ross has attempted to renounce his title as a Knight of the Word after a traumatic experience where he failed to save children, and Nest is sent to help him realize that he can’t give it up, and if he continues along this path, he’ll fall to being a servant of the Void. (In this world, the Word is “good” and the Void is “evil,” and there’s been more or less a shaky balance between the two for time immaterial.) And if he falls to the Void, the apocalypse that is coming will come faster and so forth.
Arguably not a lot “happens” in this book. It is very much an exploration of trauma and people’s responses to such and how we choose–or not–our own identities. Aside from the occasional demon battles and a handful of other supernatural creatures (sylvans, which were also in the first book, and tatterdemalions, which are a strange conglomeration of dead children’s memories), it could be contemporary fiction in many parts, dealing with issues of today. Not that that is a bad thing. The pacing is still good and it didn’t feel like it dragged in any parts.
As someone who read several of the “later” books (chronologically), it’s hard to look at this initial trilogy and see how we get to where we’re going. There’s not a lot of threads stretching between these books aside from the characters and this potential looming apocalypse (which must come to pass at some point). No overarcing plot for the trilogy or anything along those lines.
But we persevere. Next up will be Angel Fire East. I’m not going to commit to a time period on that, because we see how that goes.
Have you read the Shannara books, squiders? Read through these prequels? Does it make sense eventually?
