I actually hated the original dragonlance trilogy. I could not get over the feeling that the stuff was written in a few weeks. The plot seemed to be constructed with the same care as that given to putting away the dishes after a greek wedding (sorry... complicated insult... not funny...). Actually, I didn't think there was any plot construction. Just a series of events, characters with "cool-sounding" names with no meaning (by which I mean that they grabbed a random assortment of Tolkienesque names and misapplied them badly), and fighting. Woopee, was my reaction. I remember reading LOTR right afterwards to get the taste out of my brain.

Wies and Hickman can be entertaining at times, but mostly they specialize in mind-candy. But they did mangae to write a very good book once. It was their first novel of the Death Gate cycle, Dragon Wing. It had a good premise, interesting set-up, believable characters (to an extent), and some interesting social dilemmas. (The plot however still consisted of nothing more than a series of actions.) But IMHO they ruined the potential of the first book, and just made the rest all formulaic and boring. The final book was just this horrible pointless mess of a thing which defeated the whole point of the series (saying good and evil can never win over each other, so this whole big build up for a battle was just pointless); it made me angry. I finished the series almost out of spite. But still, the first book was a diamond in a whole bucketful of rough.

For me, the only thing that comes close to LOTR's scope and depth and creativity is Milton's Paradise Lost.

But then again, that's not exactly considered "fantasy"; of course Tolkien didn't consider it fantasy either, but myth.

My 2 cents.

Dave C-Q