I have not read all the annoying epic fantasy series.

[snarp]

I'm trying to educate myself culturally. What are the classic annoying fantasy series that I need to have read, as a nerd?

Notice that I'm talking about annoying fantasy series - like, stuff where every single book has the same plot, or the cast of characters grows by six or seven people every book and every book gets longer because they all need to have stuff to do, or the last eight books have pretty much just been about the author's hat bondage fetish, or whatever.

I have read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books and Raymond Feist's Magician books.

Comments

[jetsam]

David Eddings' Belgariad and Piers Anthony's Xanth series are the two that leap immediately to mind.

[havocthecat]

How could I have forgotten the Xanth series?

I never bothered with Incarnations of Immortality. I got two chapters into the first one and put the book down.

[branchandroot]

+1 on Belgariad and Xanth. Both annoying and repetitive. And Xanth scores double for being about the author's hat bondage fetish, though not /quite/ as overtly so as some of his other stuff.

Dune and at least the first subsequent trilogy, depending on whether you consider it sf or fantasy.

I think you must have /something/ D&D related. The Dragonlance trilogy, for preference, but you could probably get away with RA Salvatore's first two Drizzt trilogies which are a /tiny/ bit less Tolkien Cliff Notes.

Probably good to get in the Dragonriders of Pern books, at least the first three. For, you know, annoying-fantasty-epic values of good.

Hmmm. *goes out to look at the Shelf of Shame* Ah, of course, how could I forget! Robert Lynn Asprin's MythAdventures series!

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

There's a perennial argument about whether Pern is SF or fantasy. (Personally, I think SF, but I'm not sufficiently interested in the argument to get bothered by people who call it fantasy.)

It seems like everyone is mentioning Eddings, so I will too. He certainly qualifies. However, he writes engagingly enough that he's still fun to read, at least until his various tics pass from "amusing" to "meh" to "irritating" to "if ONE MORE CHARACTER makes a dry quip I will KILL SOMEONE."

I have only read a couple of Mercedes Lackey books, but I think that some of her serieses are old enough and popular enough they could arguably be called "classics." And I found certain aspects of them quite annoying, but of course YMMV.

Um... Elric of Melnibone, one of the early incarnations of the Eternal Angsty Whiner?

Oz? Narnia? H. P. Lovecraft? All classics, all old enough to have bits that grate on modern sensitivities, depending on how much allowance one gives to people writing back in the day.

[manifesta]

I second the Dragonlance series (though I can't bring myself to call it annoying, per se, because I love it too damn much) orrrr pretty much anything Forgotten Realms.

[mikkeneko]

Ooh, yes, Forgotten Realms, especially the Angsty Drow series. (I love Drizzt Do'Urden and always will, because he's my angsty noble dark elf boyfriend, but I don't try to pretend that he was a good character.)

[nagaina]

The Sword of Truth series. Eventually devolves into pure Objectivist porn with a cast of thousands.

[snarp]

I fear that I may lack the necessary fortitude for the venture.

[havocthecat]

It's like you've encapsulated the entire Wheel of Time series into one paragraph. Without even reading it.

Also, anything David and Leigh Eddings have ever written after the Belgariad. But I should warn you that it feels to me like everything they've ever written is also a little, um, racefail-y too.

[snarp]

It's like you've encapsulated the entire Wheel of Time series into one paragraph. Without even reading it.

I'm beginning to feel some trepidation regarding this project.

[havocthecat]

And well you should! Many fantasy novels have very little point to them, and a lot of the authors mentioned are really trying to milk those cash cows past the point where they ought to. IMO.

Mind you, I say that as someone who has read most of the series listed thus far.

Oh! Also, you should check out the Shannara books and the Magic Kingdom For Sale books, both series by Terry Brooks. There's some fail there, especially, IIRC, with Wishsong of Shannara. Probably past that, but, after a while I just gave the hell up on that world.

And if you want some supreme amounts of several different kinds of fail along with the rest of the annoyance, you should check out everything Orson Scott Card has ever written.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I found the "Magic Kingdom for Sale" books considerably less unbearable than Shannara -- not that they were in any way GOOD, mind you: the characters are still just as cardboard, the prose is still just as clunky, the setting and plots just as generic and predictable. But they at least don't involve EVERY SINGLE PAGE having things in it that scream "I am not even bothering to try to file off the serial numbers from Tolkien, I'm just covering everything up with hastily-applied Post-It Notes and a little duct tape!".

[juliet]

Yeah; I liked "Magic Kingdom for Sale" a lot (though admittedly I read it aged about 12, so, um), but picked up Shannara at the library a couple of times, read a page or two, and put it right back on the shelf. And I really wasn't all that discerning when I was 12.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

David Eddings. Every series has the same plot, which is pretty boring in the first place, suffers greatly from one characterisation by nationality + offensive implication from the fantasy nationalities counterpart.

Shannarah. Not only is it a ripp off of Tolkien, but it's a bad rip off.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Damn, I was going to say Eddings!

There is so much that is wrong in the world of Eddings, in both politics and story, but he's skilled enough to make it pretty entertaining anyway. Even as a sophisticated, enlightened adult, I got swept up all over again when I went back to reread the Belgariad--I could see all the things that were wrong with it, but I enjoyed it anyway.

(Also, while I think he's wrong-headed about all kinds of things, it always seems superficial--the books are sexist, but in a smug, cutesy, parroting-the-received-wisdom-of-gender-politics way, not anything really thoughtfully misogynistic; the race tropes are exasperating and offensive, but not malicious; the politics are ridiculous, but in a way I find very typical of the fantasy genre, that kind of thing. YMMV on how much that might genuinely offend.)

Xanth, maybe? Dragonlance? Forbidden Realms? I know I read more drek than that, but I guess most of the drek I read wasn't that memorable.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Dragonlance isn't that annoying. It's just... not very good. Xanth definitly counts *shudders*

Really there are so many bad epic fantasy, it's hard to remember them all.

Oh, did someone mention Terry Goodkind? I managed to avoid him luckily, but from what I heard he's an exceptionnal good example of horrible epic fantasy.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

DAMN YOU GUYS. :( I wanted to say it too.

I think Dragonlance might be too niche-y...

Shannara was such a bad ripoff that once I started predicting the plot and finished the first book, I didn't read any more--and that was BEFORE I got burned out on fantasy and quit reading it. (That was about 15 years ago or so, and the only thing I regret about that move is that it meant it took me a while to be talked into reading both Harry Potter and the Locke Lamore books, because of the fantasy taint.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I was going to say Eddings!

Possibly also Dragonlance. Shannara is skippable - I skipped it, and God knows I read just about everything else, except Goodkind.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

By skipping Shannara you completely missed the sensation that you'd read this before ... oh, wait, it was The Lord of the Rings!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

And also, while the first 5 Belgariad books are pretty entertaining, especially if you're sixteen, the second five canonically repeat the EXACT plot of the first five. Canonically! It is explicitly stated that because of a magicevilprophecydimensional... thing... everything is happening all over again.

That, more than the usual "kill your parents and beg for mercy because you're an orphan," to me defines chutzpah.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Yes! It's bad, bad meta. That is not what meta is for.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Although in my opinion, the repeated theme of "Everything has already been decided and you have to stick exactly according to the pre-defined plot" was not as annoying in the Belgariad as it was in Belgarath the Sorcerer. I much preferred the times where disaster occurred because Belgarath simply made a mistake -- like not expecting Torak to invade Drasnia -- than when he had an opportunity to make the world a better place but didn't because 'the prophecy told him not to,' like when he didn't kill Zedar in Morindland.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Belgarath the Sorcerer is what happens when the authors can't make up their damn minds. And are also trying to retroactively make sense of ten thousand years of history that had previously only been a brief backstory for the main plot.

Still! Not nearly as bad as what happens when they then decide to publish another book that retreads three thousand of those ten thousand years of history while claiming that the original narrator had it all wrong!

[snarp]

That is the best idea ever. I will do that all the time from now on. Like, I'll make blog posts that are all the same, and at the end put the disclaimer that I am just following the prophecy. The prohecy that I made up.

It'll be great.

[snarp]

I think I actually read both the first Belgariad book and the first Shannarah book at some point! I'm pretty sure it was within a few weeks of each other, even. Reactions here suggest my first priority should be repeating the past.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Seconding Terry Brooks for the most egregious "this is blurry Xerox of Tolkien, just like all my previous dozen blurry Xeroxes of Tolkien!" I've ever seen. Blatantly unoriginal and his prose causes me ACTUAL PHYSICAL PAIN.

And has nobody mentioned Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books yet? Must be a lot of repression of traumatic memories going on...

[distractionary]

Yeah, I didn't make it more than a third of the way through the first Thomas Covenant book before the pain burned out all involved synapses.

[juliet]

I liked the Mordant's Need books (there were only two of them, which probably helps, & also probably makes it *not* Annoying Epic Fantasy of the sort requested), but similarly only made it 1/3 of the way through Thomas Covenant before throwing the book across the room.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, one more I forgot earlier, if we're including "looks like fantasy at first but is technically SF because all the *MAGIC* is really just non-supernaturally-explained psionic stuff, also we have spaceships and computers": Christopher Stasheff's various "Warlock" series, which I gave up on at some point in the 1980s for getting too dull and repetitive, and a quick glance on Wikipedia says he's STILL cranking them out. o_O

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

"looks like fantasy at first but is technically SF because all the *MAGIC* is really just non-supernaturally-explained psionic stuff"

Also in this category: When True Night Falls. The magic is just a natural scientific alien phenomena!

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

I put forth the Drizzt books, because while I love them, with a love that is sick and filled with shame, they need to be made fun of more often.

[hollyxu.livejournal.com]

Does Anne Bishop count as 'epic'? Because it sure was annoying.