Knights & Knaves Alehouse

One of the qualities of Tolkien's Middle-earth is that it is our own world, this very earth underneath our feet with Orion coldly burning in the night sky above. Tolkien's deep love of our world suffuses his work.

While I have read only the first of Martin's series, I do not remember anything like that in his book (which of course is set on a completely different planet, whereas Middle-earth is the mythic past of planet Earth).

Matthew wrote: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.

Shrug, ever since the second book it seems pretty clear to me. Take a fairly straightforward depiction of medieval politics and have it play out against a backdrop of a impending zombie apocalypse. Back in the late 80s when it first came out the Zombie Apocalypse wasn't the thing as it is now.

To me what matters in this situation is the characterization. So far I enjoy both the book and the show in that regard. I think Martin problem is that he imagines Westeros as a real place all too well. And thus always find one more thing to write about. And I think he may lost interest in the "present" of Westeros in favor of the stuff about its past that he created along the way.

And if the show is any indication, the big "bad" of the series is a fantasy version of zombie apocalypse. Martin very much aware was goes on in the larger sci-fi and fantasy community and feel that his once great idea is now a cliche.

GRRM is facing the same problem that almost anyone who devises an "epic" in outline form and then writes it in sequence faces - that the process up actual writing up to the late-middle has added so much more depth and detail than what was initially envisaged that the originally-outlined finale now seems trite and insufficient.

robertsconley wrote: Shrug, ever since the second book it seems pretty clear to me. Take a fairly straightforward depiction of medieval politics and have it play out against a backdrop of a impending zombie apocalypse. Back in the late 80s when it first came out the Zombie Apocalypse wasn't the thing as it is now.

I don't think anybody finds the basic story surprising, though I am not sure "straightforward depiction of medieval politics" is a very good description.

robertsconley wrote: To me what matters in this situation is the characterization. So far I enjoy both the book and the show in that regard. I think Martin problem is that he imagines Westeros as a real place all too well. And thus always find one more thing to write about. And I think he may lost interest in the "present" of Westeros in favor of the stuff about its past that he created along the way.

I am not particularly interested in the characterisation, which is similarly fairly straightforward. What has always been tantalising in the story is what the characters do not know about their world. Why is magic gone? Why is it coming back? Why are winters so long? What is the nature of the crow? The mysteries are what kept me turning pages, even when I had guessed the answers.

robertsconley wrote: And if the show is any indication, the big "bad" of the series is a fantasy version of zombie apocalypse. Martin very much aware was goes on in the larger sci-fi and fantasy community and feel that his once great idea is now a cliche.

That concept was hardly even new then.

Haven’t seen it mentioned yet, but it was announced the final season of GoT won’t come out until April 2019.

So that gives GRRM an additional 8 months to get a book out before the show concludes. Not that he’ll do it. We’re already getting to the point that if he’s going to have it out by the 2018 holidays we should be hearing something.

I'm not a fan so its no big deal to me.

I was force marched to watch four seasons of the show by superficial friends who insisted the novel series was good. They had read the entire series and I had just read the first book which I didn't enjoy. Around season four those superficial friends moved and it was like a weight was lifted. No more endless "Did you see it last night?" inquiries. Every time that I watched the show, I kept thinking of ways to fix the story to make it work. Not my cup of tea. Fantasy is hard. Martin seems to be on a different wavelength. If he did D&D like they claim it was probably a talky campaign. That is all I keep thinking. TALKER.