I just finished reading Terry Goodkind's latest novel in the Sword of Truth series, Naked Empire and I noticed a sudden shift in his storytelling. While the book as a whole is okay, when you put it up against the others that came before it, the story seems to have gotten lost in favor of Goodkind's comentary on current politial trends.

I'm wondering how many of you have also noticed that an author will halt a story arc, especially one that takes place over a series of books, to make some kind of statement? I've heard that Tom Clancy has begun to do this with his latest Jack Ryan novels, although I've not read the specific novel(s) that he does this in.

I'll give you an example of what I mean taken from Naked Empire: In the story, the main character, Richard Rahl, discovers a civilization that abhors violence and until reciently in the story has lived in peace, issolated from its neighbors. It gets invaded by the "bad guys" who Richard has been fighting since the third book (Naked Empire being the eighth in the series), and the citizens refuse to fight, due to their aversion to violence. Richard shows them the error in their ways and gathers a small force of locals to kick the bad guys out. During one of the many battles that take place to accomplish this, Richard leads this group, his "army" as it were, against a building where the enemy is hiding. All around this building are citizens of this civilization who, while clinging to thier belief against violence, place themselves around the building as a human barrier. Not only does Richard and his "army" force their way through, but they KILL the "war protesters" who are preventing them from getting to their target.

It became clear to me that Goodkind has a different agenda in telling this story than in telling the story. Richard got very "preachy" during the course of this book, to the point of repeating the same point over and over again until it began to sound redundant. Then he simply slices his way through this crowd of unarmed people without a second thought as to his actions, which to me seemed a bit out of character for him and ALSO runs the danger of turning into the kind of monster he's trying to fight.

Now, upon reading this book, and reflecting on past books in the series, its also clear to me that Goodkind has certain political philosophies (If I had to guess I'd say he was a strict Libertarian). But given that, I've always agreed with his views as he has represented them through his characters, primarily Richard. This time I had troubles. Richard seemed out of character, just a bit, and took a harder line toward Goodkind's obviously conservative views. And in that way, also because the civilization that Richard finds is not actually crucial to the overall arc of the story, I feel that Goodkind put his own political views forward and forgot about telling the story that he had been telling.

The part about the "war protesters" really disturbed me the most, on many levels. Not only is it, to me, a stain on Richard's character, but I worry about the author. The book came out just this last year. That means that Goodkind was writting it during the heights of the Iraq War debate and all of the arguements for and against. I have to wonder if he, at some point while writing the book, happened to see a group of war protesters on some corner of his hometown (as happened often in MY hometown last spring) and secretly wished he could blow them all away, or cut them down with a sword as he had Richard do in his book. Maybe because I have views that are different from Goodkind's (being a moderate liberal myself) that it really stuck out in my mind.

I don't want to begin a political debate about the war and all of that stuff, you can go to the Lyceum about all that. What I want to know is who else has noticed their favorite author stop a story to make a socio-political comment? Granted almost EVERY author makes some kind of statement within their story, but what I'm talking about is when they seem to stop the story in favor of their statement. Has anyone else read Naked Empire and noticed this? How about Clancy? Who else? Which novel(s)?

No body's read the book? Nobody's noticed? Nobody cares? Which is it?

I've not read Naked Empire. I haven't noticed any authors stopping a story just so they can push their point across lately.

As far as political messages in books go...

In regards to Clancy's books, I can understand. His stories do take place in the "modern era" and if I recall correctly, his Jack Ryan character has moved from counter-intelligence to the political arena. So, of course his readers would want to see how their favorite characters will react in similar real-world situations they're experiencing. So it's not really unexpected in his books.


I'm not overly fond of people using "regular" books, movies, and tv shows to push their political views on the audience.

To be specific I understand that some books/movies are intended from the beginning to convey a particular point. And when they're done well, they work well [such as the original Godzilla movie; the producers wanted a movie to comment on the hydrogen bomb testing that the US was doing].

But as far as an author using "traditional fiction" to deliver a political message I don't like seeing it; mostly because 95%-99% percent of the time it's not done well. The story trips all over itself forcing a particular point on the audience; in the end we get a less than pleasing to terribly written story/show.

I think the ones that do come across well share one thing in common, the story doesn't berate the audience with a view point; instead it is informative of political views. That way while the audience may not agree with the views expressed they may at least get a better understanding why people hold the views.

He killed the peace protesters? That's kind've funny actually.

It's what you get for standing between two armies and, frankly, I'd do the same thing myself if forced to.

If you want a real-life version of this type of thing it would be closer to those "human shields" that went to Iraq than the average protester on the street.

That said, I find authors with their own political objectives or message to generally suck. Most of the time they stack the deck so that the situation favors their own point of view or just plain overdo the whole thing.

I've read all of Clancy's stuff, and I assume that the "political agenda" accusations refer to Executive Orders. It may pop up in some of his other ones, but it's very pronounced in 'Orders'.

This is the one where it focuses a great deal on Jack Ryan actually running the country as President and how he does things. That's all well and good for a premise, but it's painfully obvious that Clancy is using the character to explain how he would do things if he were in charge. It's acceptable to a point, especially in matters of foreign policy and the military, which is what his books have always focused on anyway. But then he also gets into the economy and social issues. I even agree with a lot of his ideas, but it's still distracting to have to plow through this stuff in what's supposed to be a thriller.

Of course, if you're going to tackle the topic of "fiction with an agenda", we can't forget good old Ayn Rand. I enjoyed her books, but I don't have fond memories of John Galt's 30 page lecture on business and economics.

Yeah, as far as Clancy goes, I think I heard that about 'Bear and Dragon', too. That was the one that stuck out in my mind, although I have yet to read it. I simply read a few of the reviews as I was perchasing other earlier works and noticed that a lot of them criticized Clancy for not telling us what Jack does, but rather what Clancy himself "would have done". So when I read Goodkind I was reminded of those Clancy reviews.

I've read Naked Empire, but I didn't notice this thread until today while doing a search for Goodkind.

The drastic shift Goodkind made in this book seemed to start around Soul of the Fire and the political issues dealt with there, but it was not a bad. Faith of the Fallen takes the reader right into the heart of communism and how bad it is, but Richcelt is right. Naked Empire did seem to be very out of place with the rest of the series even with the communist parallels and other political statements made by him in the previous books.

I was glad to see a return to the norm with Chainfire though.

Yes, well guess who Goodkind's favorite author is... that's right, Ayn Rand.

The difference between Goodkind and Rand is that Rand will put her philosophy either in a single book or throughout a series (has she written any series?), but the philosophy is either carfully disguised or else full in the face from the start. If Rand has written a series of books using the same core character(s), then I expect that whatever message she was trying to put forward, given her philosophy, was right there in the open from the very beginning and all the way through the series.

Goodkind, as an alternative, brought his already existing series to a screeching halt just so he could put forth HIS message (which is HIS version of Rand's message). If it was there before, he carefully hid it within the context of the overall story and was able to use it in a way that progressed the story.

In Faith of the Fallen, as Macstorm said, Goodkind put Richard right into the heart of the lion's den (a society based firmly in communism, and not the best qualities of it either) and then preached his message from there. But first of all, Richard wasn't all that preachy (certainly when compared to Naked Empire) AND it actually served to advance the story. Through Richard's words and example he showed the "communists" a new way to live and stirred rebellion right in the heart of the enemy's empire. If Goodkind had simply stayed on that path and ran with that concept, then the 7th and 8th books that followed would have probably been the best he'd ever written, and may have been the beginning of the end of the series, or at least the end of that particular enemy.

Instead what we got was one book that barely dealt with the Richard at all until the end, and then another that dealt with Richard but had nothing to do with the plot he'd built up to in the 6th book, messed with the story and character continuity, and simply stopped the story dead, all so that Goodkind could preach to us some more ad nausium about stuff he'd already preached about and demonstrated in book 6!

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This post has been edited by Copper: 29 Dec 2008, 08:45 PM

I decided not to nuke the whole post because this because it's a cool topic, and I want to get back to it and make some comments.

A spammer found this thread?

not only that, but an afghan spammer!

also, confessor (last in the series) is an AWESOME book. from what i remember.