Terry Goodkind's fantasy series is horrifically cliche. "Hey Richard... You're a truth sayer! Here's your sword! Go stop this dark evil lord in this other land! GO NOW!"
Actually, I love the first book to death. It's way too long though for me to read the rest of the series. Long live Wizard's First Rule, though!
Terry Brook's Sword of Shannarra. I'm a huge fan of his works, but that one is a blatant rip off in plot of LOTR, it has a gandalf (Allanon), heir to the throne-turned ranger, fellowship that meets in the forest city, dark lord that sends his servants out to find the one country boy who can stop him (also seen in Eragon and WOT), and the farm boy who with the aid of a shattered fellowship and his childhood companion, uses an old family heirloom to bring down the incorporeal bad-guy.
Sure there are original takes on Tolkien's ideas, but the reason I like brooks is what he's done with the series since then, especially how he's linked his fantasy with his urban fantasy (squeee!).
So you're going to kill a god. Sure. But what happens next?
There's one book that everyone has failed to mention: Swordbird.
It's another book by a 'child prodigy' named Nancy Yi Fan. Ever heard of Redwall? Well, Swordbird's like a bad fanfiction of it - her own characters act OOC at times. I swear, it's the first book I've ever read where I actually got bored because the characters were so 1-dimensional. Plus there was no detail at all.....
Ok now the most clishe book I have ever read was BERTELI.
The whole book was based on Clishes, the whole idea was that. And gues what, it was HILARIOUS. I laughed my brains out.
Oh and tolkien wasn't the first to introduce that new kind of elves and dwarfs. He actually took them from another book that had been written a few years before Hobit ór LOTRI. He was just better. A lot better.
How good a book is does not depend upon the clishes but upon how it is written.
I gues that the reason I like eragon is because it is like starwars. I liked starwars so why not the fantasy equvalent of the thing also?
To copy reality is good... But to create reality is much, much better. -Giuseppe Verdi-
A lot of things can be found again and again throughout sci-fi and fantasy, and I can list three books that are the main source of stuff they knock off: Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and the one more people are ignorant of: Dune.
A few things I'm sick of specifically:
People bonding to dragons *AHEM!*
Shaitan, and all words like it. It's usually used as a name for a Sauron-type villain. It means Satan in some language or other (purposefully being vague here, don't know specifics). I think Dune started this trend. It was one of the many words used to describe the worms on Arrakis, and it was used to compare it to Satan by a character, not as some overused, "mysterious" label so many writers use.
Vampires!!! >=(
And romance novels in general. But romance with vampires is the worst!
Am I a one eyed hunter of unicorns or a hunter of one eyed unicorns? The world may never know.
