“In a restless world like this is,” as the song used to say, our customers can always go . . . elsewhere. That’s what makes the loyal ones such a boon and a comfort, no? Well, find me a more faithful body of readers, a better bunch of folks and better customers than the Science Fiction and Fantasy community. Fans, fanatics, all united by ideas and enthusiasm, and of every age, race, shade and persuasion, from kid wizards to wizened Wellsian futurists, there’s nobody in all the wide world more loyal than they to their favorite writers, books, bookstores and stories. Bless ’em. And outside of country music, I can’t think of any artists likelier to mix regularly with the hoi polloi, and love them right back.
We’re lucky enough to have a number of America’s best SF writers and fantasists right here in the Northwest, and none better or better known than our own Terry Brooks. Dear man. Like his loyal readers and our loyal customers for his many novels, he does not disappoint. Long may his series run, on and on, forever and ever, amen. (Hey, if it weren’t for what would now seem to be the never-ending stories of Dune, Robert Jordan’s still posthumously rolling Wheel of Time, and that modern Scheherazade of subsidiary characters, George R. R. Martin, etc., it might get mighty lonely at the bookstore, come a Saturday night, no?)
So, just on the off chance that Terry Brooks’ enthusiasm for this sort of thing might flag someday, I offer a few titles, all of my own invention, pretty sure that not even my irreverent suggestions, if written, could break the seemingly inexhaustible spell of Shannara.