The outer circle · what came after
The Legacy
He died on a Thursday. Within a day the people who write fantasy novels and the people who sell them were talking about him in public, in their own words, plainly and with feeling. A novelist. A bookshop. A friend.
17 – 18 September 2020
What was said out loud
The news went up on Facebook, in a post that called it an unimaginable loss for the publishing industry. Then the trade said its own piece. The readers are in The Books, hundreds of them, in their own words. These three are the other half of it, and all three went up within a day of the news.
I just heard that Terry Goodkind has died. I never got to meet him, but he and I, Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks always seemed to be following around the country on our tours. My condolences to those who loved him, and to those readers who drew inspiration from him.
R.A. Salvatore · 18 September 2020
They never met. What they had instead was the road: four men touring the same country, year after year, always just missing each other.
We are tremendously sad to hear about the passing of author Terry Goodkind. Wizard’s First Rule played a pivotal part in the introduction into the fantasy genre for some of our booksellers and we’re sure many of our customers as well. His books are a staple of the fantasy genre.
Mysterious Galaxy Books · 18 September 2020
A bookshop’s notice is a particular kind of evidence. They know which book puts a person into the genre for good, because they are standing there when it happens, holding the till.
In shock to learn of the death of Terry Goodkind, master epic fantasy author. He was also a very close friend, but he was an extremely private man so I didn’t share photos and stories. Yes, he could be a curmudgeon and he knew it, but I loved him anyway. Miss him already.
Kevin J. Anderson · 17 September 2020
That is the only sentence anywhere on this site written by someone who actually knew him, and it keeps him whole: difficult, aware that he was difficult, and loved anyway. Everything else on this page is a date or a number. That one is a man.
My privilege in life is the joy of writing books and telling stories about people who fascinate me, the good and the bad… I am grateful to all of my readers for the critical role they play in making these books possible. Your passion is my passion, and I thank you.
30 June 2020
The last one he saw published
The Children of D’Hara is five short parts, published in order across two years: The Scribbly Man, Hateful Things and Wasteland in 2019, then Witch’s Oath and Into Darkness in 2020. Into Darkness was published on 30 June 2020, eleven weeks before he died.
Whether he meant that one as the end is not in the public record. What is in the record is the date. He was seventy-two, he had been publishing for twenty-six years, and eleven weeks before the end there was a new book of his going into shops with his name on the spine.
Then two things happened without him
In October 2021 the five parts were collected and published as a single volume. In 2022 Tor printed Wizard’s First Rule again — the novel it had bought at auction from a writer with nothing else in print, twenty-eight years after it first went out.
Both of those are print runs, which is a plainer and better kind of proof than any eulogy: the books were still earning their place on a warehouse shelf long after the man who wrote them had stopped being able to speak for them.
The ring nothing living crosses
Why this chapter is the outer circle
The Grace on the front page is drawn in five parts, and this chapter stands in the outermost of them: the underworld, the ring past which nothing alive is supposed to go. It is the ring his novels keep circling — the Boundary is built out of it, the Keeper waits behind it — and in September 2020 he crossed it the way everybody does.
And the rays do not stop there. That is the entire drawing, and it is worth looking at again with this page in mind: eight lines out of the star at the center, straight through the world of the living, through the veil, through the outer circle, and off the edge of the sand.
Which is symbolism, and it is also a plain description of what happened. A boy who was told early that words on paper would always be hard for him wrote thirty-two books. Two years after he died, one of them came off a press again, because people who will never meet him still wanted to read it. The gift went straight through the ring and kept going.