Dennis McKiernan may write another Mithgar novel

In the 1980s I could not find enough Middle-earth books by J.R.R. Tolkien. They simply had not yet been published by Christopher Tolkien or his designees. Like so many other Tolkien fans I bought The Sword of Shannara and was about as disappointed as anyone. It was badly written, horribly plotted, and looked way too much like a Tolkien ripoff.

The amazing thing about The Sword of Shannara is that it topped the New York Times Bestseller list despite being one of the worst written books in the fantasy genre. Many a better-written book has never even appeared on the list.

Dennis McKiernan's Mithgar books openly acknowledged a Tolkien influence (although McKiernan claimed other influences that I always felt were sincerely evident in his stories). In some ways he sought to rewrite themes Tolkien introduced in off-handed ways and I appreciated his writing much more than I could have appreciated Brooks' early writing (although I feel Terry Brooks improved drastically over time).

Many Tolkien fans have ripped into McKiernan's Mithgar books without really understanding that he wasn't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. Lester del Rey reportedly greenlighted Sword of Shannara with minimal editing (if any) simply because he knew there was a huge demand for a book like The Lord of the Rings. I like to think the Iron Tower Trilogy was published at least in part because of the quality of the writing.

The Arizona Daily Star interviewed McKiernan, who is still writing (he is circulating three mystery novels). McKiernan mentions there are 18 Mithgar novels so far. Okay, I lost track of the series and didn't realize it had progressed so far. I know that at one time I had 5 or 6 books in the series, back when I was faithfully trying to buy as many series as I could.

I invested my discretionary income in Darkover, Gramarye, CoDominium, Witch World, Middle-earth, Pern, and maybe a dozen other series but I rarely managed to acquie all the books in any one series. When some of my favorite authors began allowing other writers to share their worlds I stopped buying the books, often because they were coming out too fast for me to keep up.

Nonetheless, long before Robert Jordan began amazing people with long cycles and story arcs other authors were well on their ways to topping 20 books in a series (an idea that I raised in one session at the 1992 World Fantasy Convention which brought gasps and moans of disbelief from the audience). McKiernan may break the 20-book barrier yet. We'll just have to wait and see, but he did mention that he is thinking about writing a new Mithgar book.

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