He's wrong because his arguments are philosophically absurd and completely inconsistent with real-world economics, but he's also wrong because he presents his series as being an accurate allegory for the real world when there are plenty of viewpoints that get completely left out, thus making it an incredibly really valid point and i'm impressed by your thinking.ny allegory for the real world. "He doesn't argue both sides" is a stupid argument when talking about non-fiction, but fiction is another story. Again, I point you to most works of postmodern literature - the authors will present viewpoints they completely disagree with simply so the reader gets a much better picture of the complexity of the real world. Then again, the complexity of the real world is one of the central themes of postmodern literature, whereas Goodkind seems to have thorough disdain for moral relativism. Unfortunately for his own cause, Goodkind claims he's writing Great Literature that reveals Deep Truths that other authors aren't willing to address, when he quite patently omits crucial ideas that make up a central part of Western (and Eastern for that matter) thought as though they don't matter. Kind of undermines his intentions. If he hadn't given those interviews I'd probably just write him off as a wacky Randroid writing Objectivist propaganda and leave it at that, but he himself claims that his works model reality in an effective manner. Judging his works by his own standard, they're crap.
It doesn't help, of course, that there aren't any characters that interest me particularly much in the series, and the writing isn't that good. I'd judge the series just on those criteria and put him alongside Eddings and Brooks if he weren't constantly trying to cram his politics down the reader's throat in a thoroughly one-sided and didactic manner while claiming that he was writing Great Literature. It's Goodkind's overinflated sense of self-importance that diminishes his work far beyond what it was otherwise be. Goodkind himself claims that his works contain important philosophical treatises. Therefore I take him at face value and evaluate his works by the criteria by which he has demanded they be evaluated.
And since I didn't really address this fairly in my previous post (though I did allude to it with my comments about Sinclair), Miller isn't really a fair comparison, since Miller never claimed to be writing a Great Allegory for All of Reality. As far as I know, he never claimed to intend The Crucible to be anything other than an allegory for the Red Scare. (Maybe I'm missing something though; to be honest I've never even read The Crucible, much less any of Miller's commentary on it). Goodkind, meanwhile, has claimed Sword of Truth to be much more than a long-winded allegory for the Soviet Union. It's his own comments that diminish his work as literature. I guess if you subscribe to the Death of the Author school of literary criticism you can just disregard what he says, but I personally find it retarded to ignore author intent when evaluating the effectiveness of a work of literature and thus find Death of the Author to be an absurd school of thought.
Also Shlup started with the ooc tags but I just started putting them in by default after she edited the first few in. Now that she's split the thread though I guess I'll edit this one out
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Originally Posted by ShlupQuack
