Armageddon’s Children by Terry Brooks

So, quick story. Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara is the first book I remember reading. I mean, I obviously read other books before that, but The Sword of Shannara is the first book that grabbed me, that I can still remember characters from (Panamon Creel, anyone?), and that perhaps set me off on this literary journey that I’m still on. I’m going to guess that I was fifteen years old.

I remember reading The Elfstones of Shannara shortly thereafter, and I remember waiting anxiously for The Wishsong of Shannara to be published -- which came out in 1985, when I would have been seventeen years old. 

I also read a few of Brooks’s “Magic Kingdom of Landover” books -- definitely the first, and maybe The Black Unicorn and Wizard at Large as well. But that’s about it. For one reason or another, I fell out of the habit of reading Brooks -- probably when I fell away from fantasy novels in my mid-twenties.

One day I was reminiscing about all of this and I decided to check out what Brooks might have written since those days, and -- my word. He sure has been busy. Shannara, it seems, has turned into an entire literary universe, with many novels taking place both before and after the events of the original trilogy.

And then I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be fun to read all those books in “chronological” order? Not in their order of publication, but in the order of that universe’s own chronology -- including re-reading my beloved original trilogy somewhere in the middle.

So I went to the Internet and found the list -- Shannara books in chronological order -- and that told me to read the “Genesis of Shannara” series first, beginning with its first volume, Armageddon’s Children.

Except, Armageddon’s Children is not the first story in this long tale. As I read it I kept coming across references to an even earlier story -- implicit in references to characters like Nest Freemark and John Ross -- characters who don’t really feature in the “Genesis of Shannara” series, but who seem to preface it, to help construct the world in which Armageddon’s Children takes place.

And so, it was back to the Internet and the discovery of Brooks’s “The Word and the Void” series, which is a trilogy that predates the “Genesis of Shannara” series, and which begins, pretty much, in our present day world.

By this time, I was already deep into Armageddon’s Children, so I decided to finish reading it, but then to jump back to the first novel in “The Word and the Void” series, Running With the Demon, and properly start my chronological Shannara adventure there. 

I’ll blog about Running With the Demon soon, but as far as Armageddon’s Children is concerned, it was a relaxing read. Brooks’s prose was eerily familiar to me, and the care that he shows for his characters -- both the heroes and the villains -- was wonderfully present.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.