RIP Terry Goodkind

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Once upon a time I went to visit my Aunt Janice and Uncle Bob, accompanied by my ex-wife,who may have still been my girlfriend at the time as I'm a bit hazy on the exact date of the trip. We talked. We ate. Aunt Janice's main courses and desserts were awesome. I was always a bit more cautious about her side dishes. And, as it usually did when I got together with Aunt Jancie, the subject of reading and books came up. She jumped up talking about a library book sale she had been to. She had some books that weren't for her (she was mainly a romance reader) and wanted to know if I wanted them. I pulled them out of the bag they were in and looked at them. On the spines the words "Terry Goodkind" were written. At the time, I had never heard of the guy, but I figured "Why not?" The blurbs had a fantasy feel to them, so I thought I'd check them out. 

That was a good decision. Goodkind's fantasy world was well realized. His characters lived and breathed. I was carried away to a world where magic was real and so were its practitioners. It was a world where not everything was as it seemed. D'hara was a world that looked to the ancients as a source of power and to the future and what could be.

Some of my friends would refer to Terry's writing as "competency porn." Richard Cypher (later Rahl) the woodsman and main character knew how to do a lot for himself. He never threw his hands up and walked away from a project if he could find a way to make things work, and he usually could. Kahlan Amnell was a woman of extreme talent and iron will who did what needed to be done regardless of what it cost her. She was the kind of woman every man wanted for the most part. I mean that whole thing where she could straight up destroy your mind and make you accept her most horrible command as your deepest wish was a little bit terrifying, but hey, what woman doesn't have some kind of drawback somehow?

 And the villains, were evilly evil persons who were evil. Or at least they seemed that way, up until they didn't anymore. It turns out that sometimes someone is something other than what we don't like about them. That's a lesson that today's society would do well to learn. Of course there are, and always will be, legitimately horrible people and Goodkind made it clear to all of us that there were some people in his world that were flat out beyond redemption. He showed us what to do with those people and how to do it.

 As a matter of fact, the first book in the Sword of Truth series was Wizard's First Rule," and it's an important one to remember. "People are stupid. They will believe anything they want to be true or fear to be true." That's another one to hold on to in today's society. I won't go into specifics, but there is a lot of this going around.

Goodkind was a modern day philosopher. His Wizards Rules (of which there are ten if you count "The Unwritten Rule. I'm not such a fan of that one, myself) are good rules for life. They're not hard and fast rules about how to conduct oneself as much as they are a framework for critical thinking. Goodkind portrayed the world not in terms of moral absolutes but as a place where one must think for himself. He portrayed his characters as individuals struggling to make the world a better place. He clearly makes a case for individual rights in his books without being preachy about it.

It was a few years and a divorce later when the girl I was dating at the time introduced me to Legend of the Seeker. I loved the show but it just wasn't the same. I'm guessing that Mr. Goodkind was the only one who could deliver his world the way he envisioned it. That's not meant as a knock to the show runners. They did a fine job, they just weren't Terry Goodkind.

The world lost Terry Goodkind today. We lost a man who could write things that were not only entertaining but also had a purpose. A man who believed that one person can make a difference and who held his beliefs up for all the world to see. A man who created a world we could all get lost in. A man who held many of us enthralled. A man who sold twenty-five million novels not because of who he was but because of how well he could write.

It's a sad day, but I'm sure if Terry were here he'd view it as what it is: An inevitability. Being alive is, after all, a fatal condition. It was actually a heart condition that did him in, but the empirical data all points to the fact that no one lives forever. He didn't. My Aunt Janice, who introduced me to the series, passed on over a decade ago. That's hard to believe, but it's true. But Goodkind was, at his heart, a man who showed us all how to evaluate facts for ourselves and the facts are in: We've lost him.

 So Rest in Peace, Terry Goodkind. May your sleep be slow and unencumber by ties to the world that you have left. May your family take comfort in the fact that you managed to touch the loves of so many others while you were here. There are few who can say as much. May your family, and your fans, also take comfort that you have earned the Author's Immortality: Although your body has failed you, your words remain and you can continue to touch the lives of others.

There is a story that goes around in my family about an answering machine tape. When one of my great-aunts passed another of my great aunts (and there are approximately a million of them) called her answering machine to hear her voice so many times that someone eventually recorded the voicemail message and gave it to her. What we're looking at here is an analaguous situation. Terry is gone, but his voice can still be heard in his books. He won't be forgotten.

The first book in the Sword of Truth series is available for purchase at the link below: