Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Terry Brooks, Armageddon’s Children

I hadn't read any of Terry Brooks novels since reading The Sword of Shannara trilogy in the late 70s and early 80s. Because the trilogy struck me as being a fairly weak reworking of the Lord of the Rings, I passed on subsequent novels by Brooks, assuming they'd be more of the same. After reading a number of positive reviews of his new novel, Armageddon's Children, however, I broke down because the premise seemed quite interesting.

Armageddon's Children takes place about 100 years in our future (timeline), in which virtually every of today's negative trends have been extrapolated to their logical extreme. Global warming, pollution, war, WMD terrorism, and so on have left the planet dying. Add to this post-apocalyptic premise dashes of other genres, such as: contemporary fantasy, minus the vampires that have become seemingly obligatory in that genre; quest fantasy elements, including the supernatural, Faerie, and magic; and horror and science fiction. The mixture produces a cautionary tale that avoids being preachy and manages to entertain.

The story (and the books that will follow) serves a bridge between Brooks' Word/Void novels and the Shannara series. In it, Knights of the Word must guide a remnant of humanity to a safe place, which presumably becomes the Four Lands. All while being pursued by demons and mutants.

Brooks doesn't waste time on exposition. The nature of the Word and Void are left largely unexplored (although perhaps explained in earlier books?), the "technology" of magic is unexplained, and so on. It's the show rather than tell school of world building, which makes for better story telling, albeit leaving one wondering exactly how those staffs work, for example.

Although this novel is designed to tie two long series of novels into a single future history, Brooks has done a very good job of making it accessible to a newcomer to his work. I don;t think you need to have read the other books to enjoy it, certainly I didn't. On the other hand, the success of Armageddon's Children makes me want to at least track down a copy of the Word / Void series, about which I've read some very positive reviews, and maybe even give the Shannara series another try.

Unlike much contemporary fantasy (see, e.g., the Anita Blake series), in which each novel stands more or less alone, Armageddon's Children is clearly just a piece of a larger tale that's been broken into multiple books. Indeed, the ending is almost a literal cliffhanger. I look forward to the next books in the series.