Let’s begin with a preface: I have read a lot of Terry Goodkind’s books. Wizard’s First Rule distracted me from my finals, and I persevered with the Sword of Truth series for way, way too long, ploughing my way past endless and increasingly bonkers Objectivist polemics thinly disguised as plot. (I hadn’t known that Goodkind rates Ayn Rand, but it makes absolute sense.) I even took in that epitome of bad writing, his infamous evil chicken scene. (“This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People’s chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest.”) I can’t explain why I read so many – I read an awful lot, and quickly, and perhaps it was a necessary escape from the Serious Literature of university.

So. I come to 2018’s Terry Goodkind cover controversy well-versed in his writing, which is why I read his latest comments with raised eyebrows: last week, Goodkind decided to publicly shame (he has a history of this) the cover artist of his latest fantasy novel, Shroud of Eternity. He wrote on Facebook that it was “a great book with a very bad cover. Laughably bad.” After a bit of a backlash – the artist called him “totally disrespectful” – Goodkind decided he had to explain himself further and said he was upset because the cover was “sexist”.

He told io9: “I write stories centred around [sic] strong female characters. I objected to the sexist cover my publisher commissioned for this book … Is it too much to ask that my female characters not be portrayed as hiking for miles in thigh-high, heeled boots?”

He told the Bookseller: “I only regret that I wasn’t more clear that I was not objecting to the quality of the painting, but rather the nature of the image that misrepresents my characters and work. It’s easy for people to confuse those two things. I feel that I have a moral right to object to an image that so openly degrades my work.”

Goodkind says he writes “strong women of great integrity” and that’s why he was upset. But I don’t think he really understands what a strong woman is. Kahlan, the heroine of Sword of Truth, is ostensibly strong – she is the Mother Confessor, one of the most powerful women in Goodkind’s world. She also has very long and beautiful hair, for Magical Reasons. But she is constantly having to be saved by the hero Richard, for whom she is a virgin: if she has sex with him, her orgasm will steal his soul. Or as this brilliantly brutal review from the excellent Pornokitsch puts it: “Richard is a Seeker. Seekers are men, because only men can get angry. Kahlan is a Confessor. Only women can be Confessors because only women can love. Later we learn about the Torture Nymphs (women, as only women can be sensitive and wear leather), Wizards (men, as only men can do math and handle pain) and Sorceresses (women, as only women can be inferior to men). Richard’s dim brain is pleased with the idea that he is a man, and therefore doesn’t have to wear leather.”

And there is So. Much. Rape. So much. Those Torture Nymphs – Mord-Sith – provide the vehicle for an endless run of bad, BDSM torture scenes. Fortunately, they wear red leather so the blood doesn’t show. It’s all just grotty and icky – and that’s not even getting to the statue that Richard carves, of himself of course, which converts everyone from socialism to capitalism with its great beauty. (Want to see a really bad cover? Check this one out.)

The bottom line is, you can’t just give a woman a major role in a series and say this makes them “strong”. Being feminist isn’t just about including women in your books, and Goodkind’s are just about the last place I’d go to find “strong women of great integrity” in my fantasy fiction – much better try Juliet Marillier, NK Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor or Monica Byrne. Goodkind, I’d say, has bigger challenges to overcome than a hike in high-heeled boots.