The Corean Chronicles
Original?
Now... I'm not about to get into comparative "quality" -- not in this blog, at least, but I have to admit that the "not so original" comment, when comparing Recluce to books published later, concerns me. At the time the book was published, almost all the quotes and reviews noted its originality. That it seems less "original" now to newer and often younger readers is not because it is less original, but because there are far more books out with differing magic systems. Brandon Sanderson, for example, has developed more than a few such systems, but all of them came well after my systems in Recluce, Erde, and Corus, and
The word "original" derives from "origin," i.e., the beginning, with the secondary definition that it is not a copy or a duplicate of other work. In that sense, Tolkien's work and mine are both original, because our systems and the sources from which we drew are substantially different. Tolkien drew from linguistics and the greater and lesser Eddas, and, probably through his Inking connections with C.S. Lewis, slightly from Wagner. I developed my magic system from a basis of physics. Those are the "origins."
The other sense of "original" is that signifying something preceding that which follows, and in that sense, my work is less "original" than Tolkien's. But it's more "original" than that of Sanderson or others who published later, for two reasons. First, I wrote it earlier, and second, I developed magic systems unlike any others [although the Spellsong Cycle magic has similarities to Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger, but a fundamentally different technical concept].
There’s also a difference between "original" and "unique." While it is quite possible for an original work not to be unique, a truly unique work must be original, although it can be derivative.
Inn any case, my concerns are nothing compared to those raised by the reader review I once read that said that Tolkien's work was "sort of neat," even if he did rip off a lot from Terry Brooks.
