The Menace to the Fantasy Genre

His step into the literary spotlight began with a hardcover book of over five hundred pages of worthless garbage. None of the words were worth the amount of time that the printers took to ink them all onto the sheets of paper and the entire story was not worth the amount of money that was spent binding it into hardcover books. The publishers spent most of their time going on about how great it was that a teenager took the time and effort to write a book, but what they really should have said was that he was a menace to the fantasy genre. A self-proclaimed genius, he mentions that fact during interviews and has been quoted saying that he is in fact a genius and that his writing is ‘on par’ with the J.R.R. Tolkien, who is known as the ‘father of modern fantasy literature’ and who’s influential works (Lord of the Rings) have given rise to the popularity of the fantasy genre. And some teenager who thinks that he can write well believes that he is remotely close to that type of writing. Listed as his literary influences include Tolkien as well as Anne McCaffrey, who wrote the Dragonriders of Pern series, which the menace also ‘borrows’ ideas from. The main character of his debut work is a Dragon Rider, the last Dragon Rider around and therefore given special treatment and protected by every single nation’s army in the story. The story itself is overly cliché with the main character going from being a simple farm boy who is uneducated and doesn’t know how to read or write or fight and suddenly learns how to do everything (and learns how to do it well) within a year. And while this is plausible, but it seems highly unlikely that anyone can successfully do it all within the time frame of a year. While his books are directed at children, the vocabulary that he uses is most certainly not. Of course, he also writes poorly and appears to feel the need to add in a long impressive-sounding word every once in a while, even if the word does not fit, make sense or is a noun when it should be a verb. His plot line could easily be interchangeable with George Lucas’ Star Wars, as the main character (the formerly uneducated farm boy) goes through the training of becoming a Dragon Rider to avenge the murder of his uncle (much like how Luke Skywalker becomes a Jedi to avenge his father’s ‘death’, among other major plot similarities between the two works). Going from this first book to his second book, the writing does not improve; in fact some critics go as far as saying that he has declined in the amount of what talent he had before. This particular menace is sometimes rumored to only be popular because he’s a teen author, which should not make him instantaneously popular as that says nothing about this talent for writing and only of how many years he has been alive.

But however many faults that Christopher Paolini, the author of Eragon and Eldest, may have, he does have some (albeit few) good points that somehow led to his popularity. With the use of his parents and his parents’ money, he had the first book, Eragon, he self-published with the use of a vanity press. He then spent over a year going on a tour across the United States to promote his book, which was later picked up by Knopf, who bought the rights to publish the entire Inheritance trilogy. It shows that he is persistent and confident that his writing will be warmly embraced by the general public (which, unfortunately, it is). He is a popular author, despite the fact that many critics feel that it is not worth reading and that he takes too much ideas from much more popular literary works, but while that may be, his books do have children who didn’t previously read books in the fantasy genre to read fantasy (and later on, they will go on to read better fantasy). And while Christopher Paolini is a menace to the fantasy genre, there is no denying that his writing does allow children to read and learn to love the fantasy genre. He gives them a chance to read bad fantasy first so that they have something to compare other books to later on in life and they will look back fondly at the dust-covered books and then proceed to cringe at how embarrassing it is that they once thought that Paolini’s books was the best works of fantasy ever.

Written December 10 2006.