Knights & Knaves Alehouse

I like the books. I reread the series when the last book came out (7 years ago!) and they really hang together and it's been a bummer watching the show runners scripting out his outline in their hackish manner these last few season. That being said I'll be really surprised if he finishes the entire series. Now if he had said he was giving up watching the Jets, attending every Sci-Fi convention ever (he loves his public!) and Wild Cards I might believe it!

He’s going to die and someone will ghost write the end. What a waste. I liked the books despite the grimness (at least i liked the first three when I read them SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO!!). Of course, he’s no Tolkien and anyone who thinks he is needs therapy.

For what it’s worth, the tv series is way more rape-y than the books. Not that the books aren’t rape-y.

Melan wrote:Not much into escapism, but yeah - the dreary mudfarmer aesthetic and misery porn felt fresh and interesting when Drizzt and Tasslehoff still roamed the land, but today, it has nothing left to give. Deadly dull. Like someone who spends his life bitching and moaning about his misfortunes. After a while, you can't help but wonder how many of his issues are self-inflicted.

Donaldson was the first in this lifetime to cover misery tourism for the fantasy genre in his Thomas Covenant books. 40 years ago that was fresh and interesting to me. The world was well detailed, and the main character interesting if annoying and sometimes repugnant. It was as if Thomas Hardy wrote fantasy novels.

Even when the GoT show was still running on the source material, it was getting stupid. That is, miserable just for miserablenesses own sake. The stupid just simply ramped up when they ran out of Grrmanthium. It's like they were asking "WWGD do?", and not receiving any answer, they just wanted to end this any way possible while still feeding the beast.

Welleran wrote:He’s going to die and someone will ghost write the end. What a waste. I liked the books despite the grimness (at least i liked the first three when I read them SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO!!). Of course, he’s no Tolkien and anyone who thinks he is needs therapy.

Yeah the Tolkien comparisons are pretty overblown though every popular fantasy author has been compared/contrasted to Tolkien since the 70's. I'm guessing that C.A. Corey, the composite novelist made up of two of GRRMs ex-assistants I believe, who wrote the books The Expanse is based on is probably the lead candidate on deck for the ghost writing.

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I love that, and Tolkien of course wins, both in the video and in the real world.

GRRM is no Tolkien, but he is second place, on the grounds of worldbuilding first and foremost, followed by plotting and characterization. I don’t say close second, but, I don’t know who is, at least in the fantasy fiction genre. The ugliness and hopelessness in ASOIAF is more than I prefer, but, it doesn’t dominate the experience, for me.

I'm probably getting in over my head here given how long it has been since I've read some of these books, but . . .

I see GRRM and Tolkien as doing very different things. Both created detailed worlds and histories, but Tolkien seems more like an epic myth where the focus is more on what the characters say and do than their internal thought processes or motivations. GRRM seems much more focused on the personal psychology of the individual characters. If I had to draw parallels, I'd put Herbert's Dune in the same category as Lord of the Rings and R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series in the same category as A Song of Ice and Fire.

Falconer wrote:Perhaps decided to focus on his obligations.

https://grrm.livejournal.com/564326.html

Or he's gone into hiding because he's tired of people asking about the series he's apparently not going to finish.

I'm actually okay with that. I thought the fourth and fifth books were pretty poor, so I have no confidence in his ability to wrap things up any better than the show is going to. Maybe it would be better if he just let it go.

Geoffrey wrote:If I ever read the series, it won't be until after the 7th and last book is out in paperback. Then, we'll see.

Chances are my 13-year-old daughter will be able to legally buy a bottle of wine by that time.

You optimist!

I recall reading a couple months ago (can't remember where, or if it was actually reputable or just idle rumormongering) that GRRM isn't even working on ASOIAF volume 6 anymore and is instead writing a series of prequel books about the history of House Targaryen.

T. Foster wrote:I recall reading a couple months ago (can't remember where, or if it was actually reputable or just idle rumormongering) that GRRM isn't even working on ASOIAF volume 6 anymore and is instead writing a series of prequel books about the history of House Targaryen.

He's already written at least one prequel, right? That's a pretty good indication that his eyes are no longer on the prize (to put it mildly).

Yeah, volume one of the GRRMarillion will be the next book to be published. Hey, “Game of Thrones” is almost a wrap, and HBO needs fodder for its 5 prequel spinoff series.

I like Game of Thrones both the show and the books as their own things. However for me second place is reserved for Elizabeth Moon and her Deed of Paksenarrion corpus. An outstanding treatment of the evolution of a D&D style paladin. The only weak spot in the whole thing is Liars Oath. The followup series, Legacy of the North, does the neat trick of focusing on the secondary characters from Deed and really expands the world as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deed_of_Paksenarrion

My biggest worry about A Song of Ice and Fire was that it was going nowhere, and that seems to have been borne out in the television series. It does not actually have anything to say, it is just sort of meandering on to a straightforward conclusion with Jon Snow the hero-king.