Is David Eddings any good?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

On 2/16/2018 at 7:51 PM, Werthead said:

If you read The Rivan Codex, you'll see Eddings cheerfully admitting that he did absolutely everything in his writing career for the money, the money and nothing but the money. He was not making high art, and he openly admits to plagiarising himself with both The Malloreon and The Tamuli for more green.

I really don't think there's anything to get worked up about if that did happen, especially since I don't think it's physically possible for any writer who took over to be worse than Eddings (apart from KJA, obviously).

I’m not particularly worked up.  I just don’t think there is much to plumb with Edding’s stories.

[Galactus]

The Belgariad is quite good for the kind of YA fantasy (even though it wasnt branded that way) it is. The sequels are pretty bad though.

Elenium has a few interesting bits and pieces, but is as a whole not as good, Iwould say. 

[litechick]

This thread prompted a re-read.  At my present state of maturity (or immaturity) I found this section hilarious:

"The sword was so huge that he should not have been able to hold it, much less lift it; but as he braced himself with his feet widespread and his shoulders pressed back against the wall, the point of the sword rose easily until the great blade stood upright before him.  He stared at it in amazement, feeling a strange throbbing between the hands he had clasped about the hilt."

:rofl

[Werthead]

52 minutes ago, litechick said:

This thread prompted a re-read.  At my present state of maturity (or immaturity) I found this section hilarious:

"The sword was so huge that he should not have been able to hold it, much less lift it; but as he braced himself with his feet widespread and his shoulders pressed back against the wall, the point of the sword rose easily until the great blade stood upright before him.  He stared at it in amazement, feeling a strange throbbing between the hands he had clasped about the hilt."

:rofl

The chances of this being deliberate I think are about 105%.

[Maltaran]

That definitely flew over my head at age 11

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

13 hours ago, Maltaran said:

That definitely flew over my head at age 11

Yeah, I missed that blatent double entendre when I read the book.

[Werthead]

Always worth remembering that Eddings was 50 years old when he started writing The Belgariad, was a frustrated writer of books for adults who kept being shot down for being crap, and literally started writing the fantasy books to cash in on the post-1977, post-Tolkien fantasy boom. He also had a self-deprecating sense of humour (even after once actually setting himself on fire). It's very safe to assume that anything like that in The Belgariad was deliberate.

[Argonath Diver]

I just love hearing ongoing chatter about Eddings being such a shameless hack. I definitely thought that series was really, really cool, back when I also liked Feist and Star Wars pulp.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

I just love hearing ongoing chatter about Eddings being such a shameless hack. I definitely thought that series was really, really cool, back when I also liked Feist and Star Wars pulp.

For years I didn’t know that Feist had borrowed a friends RPG campaign world to write his novels in.

[polishgenius]

22 hours ago, Werthead said:

He also had a self-deprecating sense of humour (even after once actually setting himself on fire).

To be fair, you kind of have to have a self-depreciating moment when the method you use to check if you've drained the tank of your car is to drop a lit match into it.

[Werthead]

19 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

I just love hearing ongoing chatter about Eddings being such a shameless hack. I definitely thought that series was really, really cool, back when I also liked Feist and Star Wars pulp.

His autobiographical notes in The Rivan Codex are very, very honest and open about these things. He wrote for the money and very happily sold out. He sold The Malloreon over a dinner and they signed the initial contract on a napkin, when he didn't have a clue WTF it was going to be about. He also confirms that he and Leigh wrote the whole thing together and that Lester Del Rey refused to credit them together, saying that "male and female co-authors don't sell books" and wouldn't change his mind, even after Dragonlance's success with just that model. They had to wait until after the first four series (which were under contract under David's name alone) were done so they could renegotiate.

[GAROVORKIN]

On 2/3/2018 at 7:39 PM, polishgenius said:

Oh sure, but Paolini is a shameless tithead and Eddings, while brazen, was apparently not completely lacking in shame...


I would also like to take this juncture to remind you, apropos of nothing, that David Eddings once decided to check, when preparing his motorcycle for some rebuilding work, to check if he'd flushed out the fuel tank by dropping a lit match into it.



He hadn't.

I got to see the Eragon  film , I didn't much like it .

[Darth Richard II]

I don't remember Eddings touting himself as a super original child genius.

[Werthead]

Yeah, he didn't. He basically said "I'M HERE FOR ALL THE MONEY, ALL THE TIME, S'UP?" He appreciated his fans and everything, but he knew he was not writing high art and never pretended he was.

[litechick]

On 4/19/2018 at 4:37 PM, Werthead said:

The chances of this being deliberate I think are about 105%.

Depends on what you consider 'deliberate'.  My theory is that every man has a tale to tell about the first time he saw his own erect penis. I believe that Eddings wrote it organically, saw what it was, and then said 'eh, wtf' and published it anyway.  So I would consider it deliberate and not-deliberate at the same time.

[Greywolf2375]

I do a reread of the Belgariad/Mallorean/Elenium/Tamuli at least annually.  I read them for the first time in my teens, played in a D&D campaign that was partially based around some of the stories so fell in love with them.  Now, I read them like getting to see an old friend I don't get to catch up with as often as I'd like.

@Werthead - you may know this; I am positive I read somewhere that Sparkhawk, etc came out of a partially finished story of the Tamuli that an editor got their hands on early and asked for the whole story so the Elenium was born.  Any idea if that is true?

I do enjoy also reading their other books - the Rivan Codex is an interesting read into how he designed and built the world.  It's amazing to see how many retcons happen in the Belgarath and Polgara books, but also fun to read through.

[Lord Patrek]

The fantasy genre has evolved a whole lot in the last 2-3 decades. Most of the stuff I read in the 80s and 90s wouldn't hold up today, methinks.

I always feel a bit weird when I see threads like these. Sure, Eddings' novels/series don't make the cut these days. Time was, I loved him. I showed up at the bookstore the very day The Seeress of Kell was released and was excited when it reached number 1 on the NYT list. As a younger, less demanding readers, David Eddings offered exactly what I was looking for: a fun read.

I was a different reader then. I loved Weis and Hickman, Salvatore, Eddings, Brooks, Feist, Rawn, etc. Should we all put them in the grinder?

Doing it for the money. You think Jordan kept producing those subpar installments filled with extraneous material because all that shit was necessary for WoT to make sense? Of course, he and Tor did it because each book debuted at number 1 on the NYT list. As far as I remember, no one was complaining about Eddings back then. We ate up those books with a spoon and asked for more.

Let's not forget that Eddings sold millions of books around the globe. He must have been doing something right, eh? Younger, undoubtedly dumber, Pat enjoyed everything until Polgara the Sorceress and Belgarath the Sorcerer. Compared to many of his peers and authors that came after, sure Eddings may look like a bit of an overachieving hack. But those books/series still scratched that itch for me back in the day. So I'm not going to piss on them and those who wrote them because my tastes in novels have changed over the years. Looking back at those SFF titles that I loved the most in those days, I reckon today I'd think they're shit if I'd reread them.

I also used to drink crap like Budweiser, too. Then I moved on.

That's the way love goes. . .

[Argonath Diver]

Hey, I still drink Budweiser, if it's what is available! That's a pretty excellent comparison, to be honest. Eddings may not compare to modern stuff, but he can still get the job done for a simple Sunday afternoon quaff.

[Darth Richard II]

Well, I think you can put most post Death Gate Weiss/HIckman in the grinder yeah, but I still give Death Gate and Rose of the Prophet and YES EVEN DRAGONLANCE an occasion reread cause sometimes I want to read books that aren't peasants being raped for 900 pages.

 

Rawn can suck it til I get that third Exiles book though.

[Jussi]

David Eddings was extremely popular here in Finland in the 90s. He was the best-selling fantasy author for a long time. It has been claimed that Eddings single-handedly saved a struggling publisher which decided to translate The Belgariad. The series sold like hotcakes and was quickly followed by The Mallorean, The Elenium and The Tamuli. Every book was published first in hardcover.

Eddings' popularity continued for many years, and all of his novels except High Hunt and The Losers have been translated in Finnish. It all started in 1991 with Pawn of Prophecy.

Today Eddings' books are out of print in Finland.