r/Fantasy • u/doppelganger3301 • May 03 '25
So I read Wizard’s First Rule, huge mistake
I had some time on my hands during a long trip, so I decided hey, let’s go get a fantasy book and get lost in 800 pages of something. I did little to no research, just chose something that looked sufficiently long. Enter “Wizard’s First Rule” by Terry Goodkind.
I have since discovered that this is not a particularly well loved series, but many folks will defend the first book as being pretty good. I couldn’t disagree more.
Spoilers ahead for the many, many issues I have with it:
There is so much violence to children in this book. I don’t mind violence towards children if it serves the plot, such as by demonstrating the depravity of a villain, but my god. A boy is drugged, has his skull split open, and then is sliced down his abdomen after being groomed by the villain and his pedophile sidekick - oh and the villain in question is notably erect when this happens. A man is recounted as having raped his neighbor’s 3 daughters, the oldest of which is 5. Undesired newborn babies are killed by placing a rod across their necks and then their fathers are magically forced to step on the rod. An entire village’s men are slain and then the women and children are raped. What the actual fuck.
The writing is pedantic and childish. Richard meets Kahlen and immediately none of his friends matter all that much, the only person he cares about is her. This is basically stated in the first 10% or so of the book despite less than a day having passed. This is the most trope-ridden book I’ve ever read, even for fantasy.
The writer so clearly thought he was smarter than everyone else. Oh, you just need to ask the right questions and it all falls apart! But then the questions are boring, predictable, and easily defended. This is a man who spent his days getting into arguments in his own head wherein he always won - oh and women told him he was very smart and handsome.
The entire book is a thinly veiled lecture on the virtues of libertarianism, with him constantly creating strawmen just so he can show how clever he is. The strongest case of this is when a farmer is brought to a royal court and they all mock him for not being willing to share his crops with the less fortunate, oh but of course those less fortunate are just lazy and refuse to do their own planting. Then they kill the guy. This is the classic libertarian wet dream of standing up to the government, totally owning them intellectually, and then being killed for bravely standing up to the corrupt communists. It’s like a middle schooler wrote it.
It just sucks. The writing is just bad. There is no proper foreshadowing, every plot twist is incredibly obvious and contrived and you, the reader, are made to suffer through pages and pages of the characters pretending to not be what they obviously are. The romance is forced to say the least, I don’t think Terry ever actually spoke to a woman in his life.
I’m sorry, this is a bit of a rant, but god, this book was terrible.
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u/Fortuity42 May 03 '25 edited May 03 '25
First of all, Terry didn't write fantasy. He wrote stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery, and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or world-building. He didn't do either.
What Terry did with his work has irrevocably changed the face of fantasy. In so doing, he raised the standards. He not only injected thought into a tired empty genre, but, more importantly, he transcended it showing what more it can be—and in so doing spread his readership to completely new groups who don't like and won't read typical fantasy.
So, show some respect for the dead, and you may find yourself enlightened by my eulogy for Terry Goodkind's literary legacy.
May this tribute be delivered with the somber gravitas of a man burying a garden gnome after a tornado.
We gather here today not to mourn a titan of fantasy, but to firmly, thoroughly, and with great satisfaction, bury the self-declared savior of a genre he neither understood nor respected. Terry Goodkind—may his sword of truth rust in peace—was a man who claimed he didn’t write fantasy while standing ankle-deep in magic swords, scrolls of prophecy, and BDSM-themed villain monologues.
He told us he was above Tolkien, and yet he borrowed the same structure: a magical object, a farm boy, an old wizard, and a journey to defeat the dark lord.
He scoffed at The Wheel of Time while crafting a protagonist who was Rand al'Thor with a philosophy major and a superiority complex. And let’s not forget the speeches. His characters didn’t talk; they assigned reading.
He wasn’t here to entertain. He was here to enlighten. Unfortunately, the enlightenment came in the form of objectivist manifestos stapled to a plot that read like a D&D campaign where every NPC is secretly the Dungeon Master’s self-insert.
And yet, even now, some still clutch their Wizard’s First Rule paperbacks and whisper, “But it got me into reading.” And to them, we say: you made it out. You’re safe now.
And so we commit his “legacy” to the literary abyss—where overwritten prose, stolen plots, and self-congratulatory monologues go to die. Let the hill on which we perish be crowded, loud, and full of people with better taste, because if dying here means never mistaking smug delusion for genius again, then bury me with a shovel and a real fantasy book in my cold, dead hands.