How are these books to read? Does it change from character to character every 1 minute like the tv show? I imagine it would be really difficult to follow what is happening?
Or is it just some meme book that people read and think they are intelligent? I enjoy the show but dont really read much fantasy.
I enjoyed them. Theyre fun to read as each chapter skips from character to character but each book only focuses on a select few so its not challenging to keep up with. its not exactly great lit but, they are fun if you emerge yourself.
but dont start because the series will never be finished and fuck that fat fuck
They're really entertaining at their best, the popularity of the books (even before the tv show) is no surprise. However the risk of the series never getting a proper ending is very possible and I consider it a huge fault in a plot driven series like ASOIAF.
Are there are 1 or 2 books to be written?
Every time someone calls GRRM fat, he eats a page of the latest manuscript and has to rewrite it.
If I call him thin, will he vomit up TWoW?
There's supposed to be two more. the Winds of Winter and a Dream of Spring.
I've read the books but haven't watched the show.
Winds of Winter is never coming out, so there's no real end at the moment.
In hindsight, the books were enjoyable but mediocre.
Can you imagine being such a brainlet that genrefiction is "difficult" for you to follow?
They're fucking trash.
They have fantastic worldbuilding. It's like a travelogue of a place that doesn't exist.
Agreed. First rate world building. Decent writing overall but nothing brilliant.
This, the world is great and you get a good feeling of it by just reading the story which is the first thing i look for in a fantasy story
they're fun to read and if you enjoyed the show you will enjoy the books as well (or even more)
I read them all over a summer when I was at university and had nothing to do. First 3 are pretty good, last 2 are a bit of a mess.
Not revelatory or anything but they were decent enough time killers.
The last 2 are better on a reread, if you can be arsed about it
Difficult to follow, more like difficult to finish. I couldn't get past the first book without cringing.
Maybe if he ever finishes the series.
The last 2 in existence you pedan t
No I mean I'll reread them if he ever finishes the series.
There are plenty of fantasy authors who claim to be doing something different with the genre. Ironically, they often write the most predictable books of all, as evidenced by Goodkind and Paolini. Though I'm not sure why they protest so much--predictability is hardly a death sentence in genre fantasy.
The archetypal story of a hero, a villain, a profound love, and a world to be saved never seems to get old--it's a great story when it's told well. At the best, it's exciting, exotic, and builds to a fulfilling climax. At the worst, it's just a bloodless rehash. Unfortunately, the worst are more common by far.
Perhaps it was this abundance of cliche romances that drove Martin to aim for something different. Unfortunately, you can't just choose to be different, any more than you can choose to be creative. Sure, Moorcock's original concept for Elric was to be the anti-Conan, but at some point, he had to push his limits and move beyond difference for difference's sake--and he did.
In similar gesture, Martin rejects the allegorical romance of epic fantasy, which basically means tearing out the guts of the genre: the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, and with them, the moral purpose. Fine, so he took out the rollicking fun and the social message--what did he replace them with?
Like the post-Moore comics of the nineties, fantasy has already borne witness to a backlash against the upright, moral hero--and then a backlash against the grim antihero who succeeded him. Hell, if all Martin wanted was grim and gritty antiheroes in an amoral world, he didn't have to reject the staples of fantasy, he could have gone to its roots: Howard, Leiber, and Anderson.
Like many authors aiming for realism, he forgets 'truth is stranger than fiction'. The real world is full of unbelievable events, coincidences, and odd characters. When authors remove these elements in an attempt to make their world seem real, they make their fiction duller than reality; after all, unexpected details are the heart of verisimilitude. When Chekhov and Peake eschewed the easy thrill of romance, they replaced it with the odd and absurd--moments strange enough to feel true. In comparison, Martin's world is dull and gray. Instead of innovating new, radical elements, he merely removes familiar staples--and any style defined by lack is going to end up feeling thin.
Yet, despite trying inject the book with history and realism, he does not reject the melodramatic characterization of his fantasy forefathers, as evidenced by his brooding bastard antihero protagonist (with pet albino wolf). Apparently to him, 'grim realism' is 'Draco in Leather Pants'. This produces a conflicted tone: a soap opera cast lost in an existentialist film.
There's also lots of sex and misogyny, and 'wall-to-wall rape'--not that books should shy away from sex, or from any uncomfortable, unpleasant reality of life. The problem is when people who are not comfortable with their own sexuality start writing about it, which seems to plague every mainstream fantasy author. Their pen gets away from them, their own hangups start leaking into the scene, until it's not even about the characters anymore, it's just the author cybering about his favorite fetish--and if I cyber with a fat, bearded stranger, I expect to be paid for it.
I know a lot of fans probably get into it more than I do (like night elf hunters humping away in WOW), but reading Goodkind, Jordan, and Martin--it's like seeing a Playboy at your uncle's where all the pages are wrinkled. That's not to say there isn't serviceable pop fantasy sex out there--it's just written by women.
Though I didn't save any choice examples, I did come across this quote from a later book:
"... she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest . . ."
Imagine the process: Martin sits, hands hovering over the keys, trying to get inside his character's head:
"Okay, I'm a woman. How do I see and feel the world differently? My cultural role is defined by childbirth. I can be bought and sold in marriage by my own--Oh, hey! I've got tits! Man, look at those things go. *whooshing mammary sound effects* Okay, time to write."
Where are the descriptions of variously-sized dongs swinging within the confines of absurdly-detailed clothing? There are a set of manboobs (which perhaps Martin has some personal experience with) but not until book five. Even then, it's not the dude being hyperaware of his own--they're just there to gross out a dwarf. Not really a balanced depiction.
If you're familiar with the show (and its parodies on South Park and SNL) this lack of dongs may surprise you. But as Martin himself explained, when asked why there's no gay sex in his books, despite having gay characters, 'they’re not the viewpoint characters'--as if somehow, the viewpoints he chooses to depict are beyond his control. Apparently, he plots as well as your average NaNoWriMo author: sorry none of my characters chose to be gay, nothing I can do about it.
And balance really is the problem here--if you only depict the dark, gritty stuff that you're into, that's not realism, it's just a fetish. If you depict the grimness of war by having every female character threatened with rape, but the same thing never happens to a male character, despite the fact that more men get raped in the military than women, then your 'gritty realism card' definitely gets revoked.
The books are notorious for the sudden, pointless deaths, which some suggest is another sign of realism--but, of course, nothing is pointless in fiction, because everything that shows up on the page is only there because the author put it there. Sure, in real life, people suddenly die before finishing their life's work (fantasy authors do it all the time), but there's a reason we don't tend to tell stories of people who die unexpectedly in the middle of things: they are boring and pointless. They build up for a while then eventually, lead nowhere.
Novelists often write in isolation, so it's easy to forget the rule to which playwrights adhere: your story is always a fiction. Any time you treat it as if it were real, you are working against yourself. The writing that feels the most natural is never effortless, it is carefully and painstakingly constructed to seem that way.
A staple of Creative Writing 101 is to 'listen to how people really talk', which is terrible advice. A transcript of any conversation will be so full of repetition, half-thoughts, and non-specific words ('stuff', 'thing') as to be incomprehensible--especially without the cues of tone and body language. Written communication has its own rules, so making dialogue feel like speech is a trick writers play. It's the same with sudden character deaths: treat them like a history, and your plot will become choppy and hard to follow.
Not that the deaths are truly unpredictable. Like in an action film, they are a plot convenience: kill off a villain, and you don't have to wrap up his arc. You don't have to defeat him psychologically--the finality of his death is the great equalizer. You skip the hard work of demonstrating that the hero was morally right, because he's the only option left.
Likewise, in Martin's book, death ties up loose threads--namely, plot threads. Often, this is the only ending we get to his plot arcs, which makes them rather predictable: any time a character is about to build up enough influence to make things better, or more stable, he will die. Any character who poses a threat to the continuing chaos which drives the action will first be built up, and then killed off.
I found this interview to be a particularly telling example of how Martin thinks of character deaths:
"I killed [Ned] because everybody thinks he’s the hero ... sure, he’s going to get into trouble, but then he’ll somehow get out of it. The next predictable thing [someone] is going to rise up and avenge his [death] ... So immediately [killing [Robb]] became the next thing I had to do.
He's not talking about the characters' motivations, or the ideas they represent, or their role in the story--he isn't laying out a well-structured plot, he's just killing them off for pure shock value.
Yet the only reason we think these characters are important in the first place is that Martin treats them as central heroes, spending time and energy building them. Then it all ends up being a red herring, a cheap twist, the equivalent of a horror movie jump scare It's like mystery novels in the '70s, after all the good plots had been done, so authors added ghosts or secret twins in the last chapter--it's only surprising because the author has obliterated the story structure
All plots are made up of arcs that grow and change, building tension and purpose Normally, when an arc ends, the author must use all his skill to deal with themes and answer questions, providing a satisfying conclusion to a promising idea that his readers watched grow. Or just kill off a character central to the conflict and bury the plot arc with him. Then you don't have to worry about closure, you can just hook your readers by focusing on the mess caused by the previous arc falling apart. Make the reader believe that things might get better, get them to believe in a character, then wave your arms in distraction, point and yell 'look at that terrible thing, over there!', and hope they become so caught up in worrying about the new problem that they forget the old one was never resolved
Chaining false endings together creates perpetual tension that never requires solution--like in most soap operas--plus, the author never has to do the hard work of finishing what they started. If an author is lucky, they die before reaching the Final Conclusion the readership is clamoring for and never have to meet the collective expectation which long years of deferral have built up It's easy to idolize Kurt Cobain because you never had to see him bald and old and crazy like David Lee Roth
Unlucky authors live to write the Final Book, breaking the spell of unending tension that kept their readers enthralled. Since the plot isn't resolving into a tight, intertwined conclusion (in fact, it's probably spiraling out of control, with ever more characters and scenes), the author must wrap things up conveniently and suddenly, leaving fans confused and upset. Having thrown out the grand romance of fantasy, Martin cannot even end on the dazzling trick of the vaguely-spiritual transgressive Death Event on which the great majority of fantasy books rely for a handy tacked-on climax (actually he'll probably do it anyways, with dragons--the longer the series goes on, the more it starts to resemble the cliche monomyth that Martin was praised for eschewing in the first place)
The drawback is that even if a conclusion gets stuck on at the end, the story fundamentally leads nowhere--it winds back and forth without resolving psychological or tonal arcs But then, doesn't that sound more like real life? Martin tore out the moralistic heart and magic of fantasy, and in doing so, rejected the notion of grandly realized conclusions. Perhaps we shouldn't compare him to works of romance, but to histories
The first 3 are pretty good, but don't bother with the 4th and 5th.
He asks us to believe in his intrigue, his grimness, and his amoral world of war, power, and death--not the false Europe of Arthur, Robin Hood, and Orlando, but the real Europe of plagues, political struggles, religious wars, witch hunts, and roving companies of soldiery forever ravaging the countryside. Unfortunately, he doesn't compare very well to them, either. His intrigue is not as interesting as Cicero's, Machiavelli's, Enguerrand de Coucy's--or even Sallust's, who was practically writing fiction, anyways. Some might suggest it unfair to compare a piece of fiction to true history, but these are the same histories that lent Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock their touches of verisimilitude. Martin might have taken a lesson from them and drawn inspiration from further afield: even Tolkien had his Eddas. Despite being fictionalized and dramatized, Martin's take on The War of the Roses is far duller than the original.
More than anything, this book felt like a serial melodrama: the hardships of an ensemble cast who we are meant to watch over and sympathize with, being drawn in by emotional appeals (the hope that things will 'get better' in this dark place, 'tragic' deaths), even if these appeals conflict with the supposed realism, and in the end, there is no grander story to unify the whole. This 'grittiness' is just Martin replacing the standard fantasy theme of 'glory' with one of 'hardship', and despite flipping this switch, it's still just an emotional appeal. 'Heroes always win' is just as blandly predictable as 'heroes always lose'.
It's been suggested that I didn't read enough of Martin to judge him, but if the first four hundred pages aren't good, I don't expect the next thousand will be different. If you combine the three Del Rey collections of Conan The Barbarian stories, you get 1,263 pages (including introductions, endnotes, and variant scripts). If you take Martin's first two books in this series, you get 1,504 pages. Already, less than a third of the way into the series, he's written more than Howard's entire Conan output, and all I can do is ask myself: why does he need that extra length?
Some say 'at least he isn't as bad as all the drivel that gets published in genre fantasy', but saying he's better than dreck is really not very high praise. Others have intimated that I must not like fantasy at all, pointing to my low-star reviews of Martin, Wolfe, Jordan, and Goodkind, but it is precisely because I am passionate about fantasy that I fall heavily on these authors.
A lover of fine wines winces the more at a corked bottle of vinegar, a ballet enthusiast's love of dance would not leave him breathless at a high school competition--and likewise, having learned to appreciate epics, histories, knightly ballads, fairy tales, and their modern offspring in fantasy, I find Martin woefully lacking. There's plenty of grim fantasy and intrigue out there, from its roots to the dozens of fantasy authors, both old and modern, whom I list in the link at the end of this review
There seems to be a sense that Martin's work is somehow revolutionary, that it represents a 'new direction' for fantasy, but all I see is a reversion. Sure, he's different than Jordan, Goodkind, and their ilk, who simply took the pseudo-medieval high-magic world from Tolkien and the blood-and-guts heroism from Howard. Martin, on the other hand, has more closely followed Tolkien's lead than any other modern high fantasy author--and I don't just mean in terms of racism.
Tolkien wanted to make his story real--not 'realistic', using the dramatic techniques of literature--but actually real, by trying to create all the detail of a pretend world behind the story. Over the span of the first twenty years, he released The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and other works, while in the twenty years after that, he became so obsessed with worldbuilding for its own sake that instead of writing stories, he filled his shed with a bunch of notes (which his son has been trying to make a complete book from ever since).
It's the same thing Martin's trying to do: cover a bland story with a litany of details that don't contribute meaningfully to his characters, plot, or tone. So, if Martin is good because he is different, then it stands to reason that he's not very good, because he's not that different. He may seem different if all someone has read is Tolkien and the authors who ape his style, but that's just one small corner of a very expansive genre. Anyone who thinks Tolkien is the 'father of fantasy' doesn't know enough about the genre to judge what 'originality' means.
So, if Martin neither an homage nor an original, I'm not sure what's left. In his attempt to set himself apart, he tore out the joyful heart of fantasy, but failed replace it with anything. There is no revolutionary voice here, and there is nothing in Martin's book that has not been done better by other authors.
However, there is one thing Martin has done that no other author has been able to do: kill the longrunning High Fantasy series. According to some friends of mine in publishing (and some on-the-nose remarks by Caleb Carr in an NPR interview on his own foray into fantasy), Martin's inability to deliver a book on time, combined with his strained relationship with his publisher means that literary agents are no longer accepting manuscripts for high fantasy series--even from recognized authors. Apparently, Martin is so bad at plot structure that he actually pre-emptively ruined books by other authors. Perhaps it is true what they say about silver linings . . .
Though I declined to finish this book, I'll leave you with a caution compiled from various respectable friends of mine who did continue on:
"If you need some kind of closure, avoid this series. No arcs will ever be completed, nothing will ever really change. The tagline is 'Winter is Coming'--it's not. As the series goes on, there will be more and more characters and diverging plotlines to keep track of, many of them apparently completely unrelated to each other, even as it increasingly becomes just another cliche, fascist 'chosen one' monomyth, like every other fantasy series out there. If you enjoy a grim, excessively long soap opera with lots of deaths and constant unresolved tension, pick up the series--otherwise, maybe check out the show."
If someone calls him skinny does he finish a book? that would explain the last 7 years
Nicely put.
I liked them they were entertaining.
It was a long time ago so I don’t remember the details but I do remember being really fascinated with Cersei Lancaster’s.
You can see her motives and they are realistic. But Martin didn’t sugar coat her at all. She was still a bad person. Usually the author makes the characters either too good or too evil when they go inside their villains head.
Did Cersei stand out to anyone else? I thought Dani’s story was really fun to read also but everything else was kind of bland. Entertaining and worth reading but mediocre.
What fantasy novel or series do you think is better? Or what would you recommend. You seem to be very knowledgeable about the genera.
They're so fucking good. I rarely read genre since high school and I was not prepared for how good they are. It doesn't have the density of Wolfe or the floweryness of Le Guin or the madcap imagination of Vance, but it's not trying for that. It's honestly closest to Tolkein, just in the flawless world building and it's well of empathy, but so much pulpier and more propulsive. He really uses those ten years in Hollywood, the pacing and plotting is just perfect. Not a single wasted scene. He's so much better at script writing than those dummies doing his show.
if this isn't the pot calling the kettle black i don't know what is
This is such utter crap. It's nothing but wonder, ideals, heroism, rollicking fun and social messages. And not once does a fucking female character describe their own tits. Not fucking once, y'all just a bunch of meme spouting faggots.
t. has never read feast of crows
First and third are great. Fifth is good. Second is decent. Fourth is complete shit
It's literally just cobbled together from poorly understood real world history.
>fascist 'chosen one' monomyth
Jesus fucking Christ
welcome to the fantasy genre, user
>Did Cersei stand out to anyone else?
Yes, and I'm expecting her death in TWoW to be the highlight of the series. The show made it obvious that keeping her alive past her "sept moment" will only ruin her.
he ain't wrong
The first two or three books are decent fantasy novels. The rest are shit: nothing happens besides pages long descriptions of places, foods and clothing.
Difficult to finish, more like difficult to open. Look at those garish covers
I have, tho I'm not yet done Dance With Dragons. I loved every minute. When I press people what this filler is they usually say the Brienne chapters, but I thought her quest through the Bloody Mummers was the best part.
neck yourself avatar fag
The books are definitely better than the show, it goes into far more depth on the thoughts of the characters and their motivations that the show could not possible be able to put on screen. There are far less plot holes and it doesn’t go to shit like in season 7 GoT.
It does change from character to character, as the books go on, more characters are introduced, but it does give a decent length of pages for each character before zipping to the next. As long as you don’t have the memory of a goldfish it’s pretty easy to keep track of each plotline
unironically based
>hates LOTR because muh everything is good vs evil, muh high fantasy
>probably his series gonna end with the mary-sue winning and marrying the other marry-sue and live happily.
But Martin loves LOTR
wrong!
>Did Cersei stand out to anyone else?
She did to me, I read the books when I was 13 and still had an unnatural attraction to "evil" female characters who still had redeeming qualities, Cersei's being her love toward her children (even though some people say its her being a narcissist. For some reason they think an "evil" woman isn't capable of experiencing any positive emotions). Her bitterness about not being born a man, or not having the same rights as one, and her need to be validated while doing a bunch of ridiculous things, resonated with me on a personal level.
I never understood why some people (adults mostly, I read the books years ago) read a series that is known for its "grey" characters but still feel the need to say one of them is completely good or completely evil. Cersei was and still is a fundamentally bad person but that doesn't take away from the fact that she's a tragic character who caused her own downfall, making it imo even more tragic, and I'm not good at hating tragic characters. I hope she accidentally murders Tommen, I don't know if it happened in the show
South American covers are amazing which is one of the reasons I started reading the books. Marc Simonetti's illustrations are 10/10
>Implying I'll read all this mental diarrhea about something so simple
lmao
2 more but he keeps pumping out short stories and encyclopedias about the setting instead.
Feast is the best book in the series, only pleb filtered brainlets would disagree.