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This isn't actually directly related, but I have a lot of thoughts on Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire for which there's no good place to put on the internet.
I first read A Song of Ice and Fire in 2006. I eagerly awaited A Dance with Dragons for years, read it, and was totally disappointed. I spent years afterwards re-reading the books, reading the meta, trying to get into Martin's brain, and looking for other works that would scratch the same itch. After the HBO finale aired, I got the closure I wanted because I could easily fit the non-D&D components into the framework I had of Martin and his oeuvre (and it would totally work if he finished the books).
But ultimately I began to loathe the entire thing.
As an attempt to scratch the same itch, I ran into Dorothy Dunnett (and her Lymond Chronicles, the House of Niccolo, and King Hereafter specifically). Her work is everything that aSoIaF notionally aspires to be (and happens to include elements that match with aSoIaF so well that I cannot assume it to be coincidental).
I've come to realize that A Song of Ice and Fire is poorly written historical fan-fiction (poorly written compared to Dunnett or O'Brian, not to Sanderson or Rothfuss, compared to them, it's practically Shakespeare), but instead of being constrained by historical fact and the ambiguity of written records, he simply lays on another flavor of breadth for his lack of discipline to go in actual depth.
It's clear that he wanted to originally write a purely fictional account of the War of the Roses after reading Dorothy Dunnett and Maurice Druon but fell prey to the same problem he now faces with finishing the series--He knows how it actually ends and lost any desire to finish it. He literally says he has this problem in the letter attached to the original draft to his editor: "As you know, I don't outline my novels. I find that if I know exactly where a book is going, I lose all interest in writing it."
But he promised a fantasy novel to his publishers and the man has to eat and has bills to pay. So he did what fantasy authors always do when they have no original ideas. He filed off reality's serial numbers, put on Working Man's Dead, sparked up a jay, flipped Great Britain upside down, called it Westeros, and started editing what he had into a giant historical crossover after he got bored of playing Darklands ("What if the mythological beings of the middle ages were actually real?").
And I think this is ultimately why George R.R. Martin hates fan fiction. He has never read a historical anecdote or a piece of fiction that he didn't lift, lightly edit, and pass off with a wink. It's entirely a series of calling rabbits smeerps. I'll be the first to admit that he's a master at doing this, but it's solely a vehicle for him to play at writing historical fiction without any of the accountability or constraints that Dorothy Dunnett, Umberto Eco, Patrick O'Brian, Robert Graves or other masters of the genre display.
These historical fiction authors are exemplars of what Chesteron wrote of trains: 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' Martin wanted a train that could go anywhere, discovered that trains that go anywhere must in the end still arrive somewhere, and abandoned it with token resistance. He's no longer a man with bills to pay.
The problem with Martin himself is that the charity that he affords to the gray morality of his own characters is never applied himself to those actually living in reality. He'll undermine his own antagonists and demand empathy from the reader for them, but never for his real life personal antagonists. Martin and Rowling both have the rich, white, blue blooded child as their only one dimensional characters for a reason. Being rejected for being poor and lower class is the one dragon they've never actually slain (and is at the root of both their seminal works). I believe Martin will also be treated by time as a relic of the 1960s counter-culture with the same problems that Terry Pratchett, John Cleese, and Seinfeld will have. You can't build on top of traditional mores by undermining them and then expect that your work will stand on its own when the bottom of tradition falls out.
Admittedly with all this said, he is still leaps and bounds of ahead anything else in contemporary high fantasy, but it only works so long as you remain outside the reality that he's pointing towards. Yeah, yeah, institutions are corrosive and pollute the human spirit. Yeah, yeah, it'd be great if there was an omniscient philosopher-king that ultimately inherited authority and legitimacy from the destruction of the powers-that-be and reaffirm that the Good exists, is One with the World, and shepherds the world to heal from the weight of past sins. And it'd be great if the legitimate and unknown Rightful King declines to assume the office to allow this all to happen. But try to make it happen in real life, George. You could save everyone a lot of time by not needing to preface everything with "it's actually a commentary on..." and forcing your readers to deference every pointer you make to the real world.
Agreed, Martins writing style was good for the tone of the subject matter covered in GRRM, which ultimately is the mundanity of perceived evil. Evil acts are just acts that happen in the normal grind of a shit world with shitty actors.
The problem is that after he got tied up rewriting Dance Of Dragons and Feast Of Crows for years, he just lost interest in plotting a path to the end. Autistic commitment to the mundanity of terrible things happening to good people means an autistic commitment to timelines, and GRRM got sidetracked in his main plot, introducing new characters primarily as a plot progression point - Quentyn to bring Dany out of Mereen, or Aegon II to get Tyrion out of Braavos - and the concepts he could write into that character to show how shit life is for heroes became more interesting to write than Dany fucking about as a shitty administrator, and it just became a sprawling web of concepts vaguely anchored to a main plot GRRM lost interest in literally last century.
I don't actually think GRRM is smart enough a writer to really walk the talk of criticizing the lack of 'Tolkeins tax policy' or whatever smugfuck Gritty Real World concept must be elaborated on to refute the narratives of high fantasy. The construction of his world is shoddy enough to begin with, but how a world is constructed is never the point of a story. A world is simply the skeleton on which the flesh of a characters interactions are draped onto, and GRRM was pretty good at having character moments. The problem is that his characters needing to mechanically interact in consistent manners meant he had to work more on that skeleton, and the failings became increasingly untenable to work together. A particular irritant I have is his concept that economic prosperity of Westeros was founded on Lannister gold and later the largesse of loans taken from the Iron Bank. Like, what the fuck bro, your main setting literally is about multiyear winters, fucking spend more than 10 lines talking about agriculture if you're so committed to subverting the handwaving of Tolkeins economics-free world. At least Tolkein talked about the sacking of the Shire and the terribleness of replacing pastoral idyll with industrialization, whereas GRRM spends way too much time tracing incestuous bloodlines instead of making his world not revert to 'eternal refrigeration'.
As much as I enjoyed the first couple books and most of the short stories this has always been my biggest beef with ASOIAF. A multi-year long winter is a potentially civilization-ending event for a preindustrial society, made even worse given they occur at irregular intervals (limiting the ability to plan for it). This ought to have massive downstream effects on social organization, economics, military planing, and (ironically given Martin's complaints about Tolkien) Taxation, yet we don't see this. The Westeros we are presented with is basically just an ersatz renaissance Italy with dragons and ice liches.
Finally I've always found Martin's critique of Tolkien (he says that Aragorn was a good and virtuous king, but what about his tax policy?) to be somewhat facile. If Aragorn was virtuous i think it is reasonable to presume that his tax policy was at least moderately fair, and if he was a good king, i think its reasonable to presume that it was competently administered. What more do we need to know? LotR is a fantasy novel, not a economics treatise.
Martin may as well be hating on a fairy-tale for ending with "and they lived happily ever after", because no matter how happy Snow White and Prince Charming are together they will eventually grow old, suffer from back pain, and die. Like, what the fuck bro, that's not the point of the story, nor does it change anything.
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Did you ever try the Malazan series? It seems to have the highest reputation for critical value in fantasy.
It never came on my radar and honestly I don't really do fiction anymore (besides what I read to my kids and an occasional revisit to a classic).
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I read the first one and it was shockingly bad. I don't understand how that bad of a book got published, much less made into a series with fans.
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I think the critique is pretty spot on. To me his issue is that he’s so busy commenting he’s forgetting to tell a story. And I do think part of it is actually that most of his stuff seems to be a reskinned version of something that already exists. In short his world-building sucks. Theres just nothing unique and interesting about the story. It’s basically the trope of feudal society with lords fighting for power, set in I can’t believe it’s not England, and filled with the fashion for grey morality even when it hurts the story.
Honestly, that’s why I like Sanderson a bit better. He’s not the best at plotting, but when he creates a world, he doesn’t just plunk a bit of magic into a setting. The entire world is alien and works off of completely alien physics and biology. His world likewise seems to flow from those assumptions. The shards can bend matter, and thus people use them to make buildings.
Sanderson? Sanderson is the most banal, extruded fantasy product workmanlike writer to come out of the RPG/fanfiction sphere, and his main virtue is base-level competence and being extremely prolific. Problem is his extreme prolificness doesn't even produce interesting books (like Stephen King did in his coke fiend days), just more and more and more of the same. Fictionalized RPG worlds complete with entire extra continents and secret prestige classes and bonus spell lists and artifacts and new monster manuals, but the stories are all basically Protagonist Figures Out Cheat Codes.
I have no problem with people who think Sanderson is more enjoyable than Martin (I have read more Sanderson than Martin), but whatever you think of Martin and his morality, his writing is far better than Sanderson's.
Like any famous author, Sanderson has leaned a bit too far into the aspect of his work he’s famous for - all the magic systems stuff - and he tries slightly too hard to be topical. But his early work is fantastic, especially the first Mistborn series, and his later work is often good too.
Beyond all that, though, he was special to me as a modern fantasy author who didn’t seem corrupted by the nihilism of our age. He wrote about princes genuinely trying to be good leaders, priests in a corrupt priesthood losing and regaining their faith, how to trust in your friends when you have no guarantee that they won’t let you down.
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I don't care what others think, I like Kaladin and I will fight you to the death in defence of his wholesome bridgemen.
But I will agree in part that Sanderson does not know how to write a convincing heterosexual relationship. I suppose it would be too much to ask a Mormon to write erotica. But then again, Meyers of Twilight fame can do it, why can't he?
I liked Kaladin in the first book, but Words of Radiance was so boring I decided there was no way I was reading eight more books of this (I think the Stormlight Archives is meant to be 10 books, which knowing Sanderson means it will actually be three 10-book series). That is pretty much my experience with Sanderson; first book or two in a series is good, after that it becomes crap. (Mistborn is an exception, though the third book was very flawed, and the second trilogy did not hold my interest at all.)
I thought, initially, that I was reading about a depressed man. It turns out that Kaladin is actually a man "suffering from depression", which is quite a different thing.
I'm not sure if I'll read book five. It's just too tiring for me.
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Agreed, and that makes sense if his main talent is creating an interesting world/magic system. Once that's been outlined and a few adventures have occurred, there's not a lot of meat left.
I did like his early novel(la?) about the protagonist with multiple personalities.
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I don't agree that Martin's writing is far better than Sanderson's. They are on the same level imo. I honestly have no idea how you can say he doesn't produce interesting books, when almost all of his books (except Elantris, which was a snooze) absolutely gripped me. The fact that he's prolific is just icing on the cake. Extremely well written books which also come out once a year? Yes, please!
They are interesting in the way a comic book is interesting. Martin's prose is far better, and Sanderson just has no depth. But I realize that some people don't care about that at all (hence the enormous popularity of fanfiction and litrpgs), and I admit I am pretty judgmental about writing quality. That's why I made the distinction between good and enjoyable; I have read a lot of his books, after all (and enjoyed most of them).
I find this such an alien viewpoint; once writing has reached a (fairly low) bar, I find it to not really matter towards my enjoyment of a book.
The part of the book I have always felt matters is what it says, not how it says it. Caring about the quality of the writing seems like receiving a gift, and discarding it because the wrapping paper was poorly chosen.
I found ASOIAF to be utterly predictable, save for the character deaths (which I suppose is a twist, in its own right). Someone like Feist, Sanderson, or Cook may have flaws in how they write, but the stories themselves are way more interesting to me.
Some people care about wordsmithing and sentence crafting, some people only care about story. There are definitely people who don't understand why anyone would care about the other thing, just as there are people who don't understand why anyone would read fiction.
My theory is that it depends on reading speed. Slower readers (me in foreign languages) care more about sentence crafting because they spend more time with each sentence, whereas in English I am naturally a very fast reader and ‘reading’ a page is a bit like looking through a transparent pane glass.
@Amadan, how much time would you spend on one of Martin’s books, if you don’t mind my asking?
I am a somewhat slower reader usually, but I'm not sure that's the reason. Though I suppose speed reading would make it harder to appreciate individual sentences.
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I’m not talking about his plotting. His stories are honestly fairly predictable from my point of view. But he does create worlds that don’t feel like they’re transposed versions of medieval Europe. Martin doesn’t do that part well at all. The Religion of the Seven is a reskin of Christianity more or less. The plot is pretty much War of the Roses. It’s just like if you’re creating a fantasy world, I think you should put a little effort into making the world something other than our world.
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China Miéville is alien. Sanderson...
Then there's the time he filed off the serial numbers of six sigma slop:
I tried desperately to read Sanderson on the recommendation of a very good friend of mine so we could talk about it, but once I encountered a thinly veiled "Parshendi Lives Matter" rant, I just couldn't do it anymore.
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I'm also enjoying Dorothy Dunnett, and I find that Guy Gavriel Kay scratches a similar itch (he isn't explicitly historical but its extremely clear what his inspiration is, so he constrains the story that way).
I'm not sure Martin's problem is a lack of interest, or frankly even in skill. He's far too much of a perfectionist, and the amount of moving pieces that he has to manage in TWoW is staggering. The reception of the later sessions of the show I think caused some quite extensive rewrites from him, which is why we are seeing such a huge delay. Interesting that Dance is your least favorite book in the series: I just did a reread this summer, and while I found I didn't like Dance as much as I used to (was my favorite book in the series from about 2012-2022), it still held up pretty well thematically.
I'm not sure the blue-blooded characters are all one dimensional in ASOIAF. Joffery is probably the least well developed of these I can think of, but he still clearly has reasons for his shitness (absent, whoring father and doting/controlling mother). Even in Harry Potter this isn't true: Draco gets a redemption arc in the last few books.
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