A Song of Ice and Fire
| File:A Game of Thrones Novel Covers.png North American covers for the first five books | |
A Game of Thrones A Clash of Kings A Storm of Swords A Feast for Crows A Dance with Dragons The Winds of Winter A Dream of Spring | |
| Author | George R. R. Martin |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | High fantasy, dark fantasy, medieval fantasy |
| Publisher | Bantam Books (USA, Canada) Voyager Books (UK, Australia) AST (Russia) |
| Published | August 6, 1996–present |
| Media type | print (hardcover and paperback) audiobook |
A Song of Ice and Fire is an ongoing series of epic fantasy novels by American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin. Martin began writing the series in 1991 and the first volume was published in 1996. Originally planned as a trilogy, the series now consists of five published volumes; a further two are planned. In addition there are three prequel novellas currently available, with several more being planned, and a series of novella-length excerpts from the main Ice and Fire novels.
The story of A Song of Ice and Fire takes place in a fictional world, primarily on a continent called Westeros but also on a large landmass to the east, known as Essos. Most of the characters are human but as the series progresses others are introduced, such as the assumed-to-be-extinct cold supernatural Others from the far North and fire-breathing dragons from the East. The series is told in the third-person through the eyes of a number of point of view characters, 31 by the end of the fifth book.
There are three story lines that become increasingly interwoven: the chronicling of a dynastic civil war for control of Westeros among several competing families; the rising threat of the Others, who dwell beyond an immense wall of ice that forms Westeros' northern border; and the ambition of Daenerys Targaryen, the exiled daughter of a king who was murdered 15 years earlier in another civil war, to return to Westeros and claim her rightful throne.
The "Ice and Fire" series has been translated into more than 20 languages. The fourth and fifth volumes reached the top of The New York Times Best Seller lists in 2005 and 2011.[1] Overall, the series has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.[2] One of the excerpt novellas won science fiction's Hugo Award. The series is the basis of a great number of derived works, including the HBO TV series Game of Thrones, a comic book adaptation, a card game, a board game, a role-playing game and two video games.
Plot synopsis
A Song of Ice and Fire follows three principal storylines that are divided by geography and participants. All events are told from the perspective of viewpoint characters. Set in the Seven Kingdoms on the fictional continent called Westeros, the principal storyline chronicles a many-sided power struggle for the Iron Throne after the king's death in the first book. The second storyline takes place on the extreme northern border of Westeros, where a huge wall of ice and gravel is to guard the kingdom against mythical creatures living beyond the wall. The third storyline is set on a huge eastern continent named Essos and follows the adventures of a king's daughter from a previous dynasty, laying claim to the Iron Throne.
A Game of Thrones begins with Robert of House Baratheon ruling as King of Westeros. After his death midway through the first book, his son Joffrey claims the Iron Throne with the support of his mother's powerful family, House Lannister. When Lord Eddard Stark, King Robert's "Hand" (chief advisor), finds out Joffrey and his siblings were in fact not sired by Robert, Robert's younger brothers Stannis and Renly individually lay claim on the throne. Meanwhile, several regions of Westeros seek to return to self-rule: Eddard Stark's eldest son Robb is proclaimed King in the North and Balon Greyjoy (re-)claims the ancient throne of his own region, the Iron Islands. This so-called War of the Five Kings is in full progress by the middle of the second book, A Clash of Kings, with more people gradually joining the struggle for power.
Meanwhile, winter befalls Westeros from the north. A huge wall of ice and gravel, constructed on the extreme northern border of Westeros many thousands of years ago, is to defend Westeros from the northern threat of the Others, a race of mythical creatures not seen in over 8,000 years. The Sworn Brotherhood of the Night's Watch, who maintain the Wall, spend most of their time dealing with the human wildlings living beyond the Wall when the first Others appear at the beginning of A Game of Thrones. The Night's Watch storyline is told primarily through the eyes of Jon Snow, bastard son of Eddard Stark, as he rises through the ranks of the Watch and learns the true nature of the threat from the north. By the end of the third volume, A Storm of Swords, this storyline becomes entangled with the civil war to the south when Stannis, the sole survivor of the original five self-proclaimed kings, has moved to the Wall to protect the realm from the threat of invasion and simultaneously win the favor of the northern strongholds. In the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, Joffrey's younger brother Tommen holds the Iron Throne, with his mother and later his uncle serving as his regents as the first snowflakes reach the king's capital.
The story of Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen and another claimant to the Iron Throne, is pretty much separated until more POV characters join her in A Dance with Dragons. Living in exile on the continent of Essos, Daenerys's adventures showcase her growing ability as she rises from a pauper sold into a dynastic marriage to a barbarian warlord to a powerful and canny ruler in her own right. Her rise is aided by the birth of three dragons, creatures thought long extinct, from fossilized eggs given to her as wedding gifts. Because her family standard is the dragon, these creatures are of symbolic value before they have grown big enough to be of tactical use for her stated goal to reclaim the Iron Throne.
Publishing history
Overview
All page totals given below are for the US paperback edition and hardcover editions. The Ice and Fire series has also been translated into more than 20 languages.[3]
| # | Title | Pages | Chapters | Audio | US release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | A Game of Thrones | 807 (704 hardcover) | 77 | 33h 53m | August 1996[4] |
| 2. | A Clash of Kings | 969 (784 hardcover) | 70 | 37h 17m | February 1999[5] |
| 3. | A Storm of Swords | 1128 (992 hardcover) | 82 | 47h 37m | November 2000[6] |
| 4. | A Feast for Crows | 976 (784 hardcover) | 46 | 31h 10m | November 2005[7] |
| 5. | A Dance with Dragons | 1136[8] (959 hardcover) | 73 | 48h 56m | July 2011[9] |
| 6. | The Winds of Winter[10] | (Forthcoming) | |||
| 7. | A Dream of Spring[11] | (Forthcoming) | |||
Three novellas based on chapter sets from the books were released between 1996 and 2003:
- Blood of the Dragon (July 1996),[12] taken from the Daenerys chapters in A Game of Thrones.
- Path of the Dragon (December 2000),[13] based on the Daenerys chapters in A Storm of Swords.
- Arms of the Kraken (March 2003),[14] based on the Iron Islands chapters from A Feast for Crows.
First three novels (1991–2000)
George R. R. Martin was already a successful fantasy and sci-fi author and TV writer before writing his A Song of Ice and Fire book series.[15] Martin published his first short story in 1971 and his first novel in 1977.[16] By the mid-1990s, he had won three Hugo Awards, two Nebulas and other awards for his short fiction.[17] Although his early books were well received within the fantasy fiction community, his readership remained relatively small and Martin took on jobs as a writer in Hollywood in the mid-1980s.[17] He principally worked on the revival of The Twilight Zone throughout 1986 and on Beauty and the Beast from 1987 through 1990, but also developed his own TV pilots and wrote feature film scripts. Growing frustrated that none of his pilots and screenplays were getting made,[17] he was also getting tired of TV-related production limitations like budgets and episode lengths that often forced him to cut characters and trim battle scenes.[18] This pushed Martin back towards writing books, his first love, where he did not have to worry about compromising the magnitude of his imagination.[17] Admiring the works of J. R. R. Tolkien in his childhood, he wanted to write an epic fantasy but did not have any specific ideas.[19]
When Martin was between Hollywood projects in the summer of 1991, he started writing a new science fiction novel called Avalon. After three chapters, he had a vivid idea of a boy seeing a man's beheading and finding direwolves in the snow, which would eventually become the first non-prologue chapter of A Game of Thrones.[20] Putting Avalon aside, Martin finished this chapter in a few days and grew certain that it was part of a longer story.[21] After a few more chapters, Martin perceived his new book as a fantasy story[21] and started making maps and genealogies.[15] However, the writing of this book was interrupted for a few years when Martin returned to Hollywood to produce his TV series Doorways that ABC had ordered but eventually never aired.[18]
Martin resumed work on A Game of Thrones in 1994, selling the novel as part of a trilogy to his agent,[18] with the novels A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter following.[22] Shortly afterwards, while still writing the novel, he felt the series needed to be four and eventually six books,[18] imagined as two linked trilogies of one long story.[23] Martin, who likes ambiguous fiction titles because he feels they enrich the writing, chose A Song of Ice And Fire as the overall series title: Martin saw the struggle of the cold Others and the fiery dragons as one possible meaning for "Ice and Fire", whereas the word "song" had previously appeared in Martin's book titles A Song for Lya and Songs of the Dead Men Sing, stemming from his obsessions with songs.[24]
The finished manuscript for A Game of Thrones was 1088 pages long (without the appendices),[25] with the publication following in August 1996.[4] Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan had written a short endorsement for the cover that was influential in ensuring the book's and hence series' early success with fantasy readers.[26] Released for pre-release publicity, a sample novella called Blood of the Dragon went on to win the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novella.[27]
The second book called A Clash of Kings was released in February 1999 in the United States,[5] with a manuscript length (without appendices) of 1184 pages.[25] A Clash of Kings was the first book of the Ice and Fire series to make the best-seller lists,[18] reaching 13 on the The New York Times Best Seller list in 1999.[28] After the success of The Lord of the Rings, Martin received his first inquiries to the rights of the Ice and Fire series from various producers and filmmakers.[18]
Martin was several months late turning in the third book, A Storm of Swords.[17] The last chapter he had written was about the "Red Wedding", a scene notable for its violence two-thirds through the book (see section #Violence and death).[29] A Storm of Swords was 1521 pages in manuscript (without appendices),[25] causing problems for many of Martin's publishers around the world. Bantam Books published A Storm of Swords in a single volume in the United States in November 2000,[6] whereas some other-language editions were divided into two, three, or even four volumes.[25] A Storm of Swords debuted at number 12 in the New York Times bestseller list.[27][30]
Bridging the timeline gap (2000–2011)
After A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, Martin originally intended to write three more books.[17] The fourth book, tentatively titled A Dance With Dragons, was to focus on Daenerys Targaryen's return to Westeros and the conflicts that creates.[23] Martin wanted to set this story five years after A Storm of Swords so that the younger characters could grow older and the dragons grow larger.[31] Agreeing with his publishers early on that the new book should be shorter than A Storm of Swords, Martin set out to write the novel closer in length to A Clash of Kings.[25] A long prologue was to establish what had happened in the meantime, initially just as one chapter of Aeron Damphair on the Iron Islands at the Kingsmoot. Since the events in Dorne and the Iron Islands were to have an impact on the book, Martin eventually expanded the Kingsmoot events to be told from three new viewpoints since the existing POV characters were not present in Dorne and the Iron Islands.[32]
In 2001, Martin was still optimistic that A Feast for Crows might be released in the last quarter of 2002.[24] However, the five-year gap did not work for all characters during writing. On one hand, Martin was unsatisfied with covering the events during the gap solely through flashbacks and internal retrospection. On the other hand, it was implausible to have nothing happening for five years.[31] After working on the book for about a year, Martin realized he needed an additional interim book, which he called A Feast for Crows.[31] The book would pick up the story immediately after the third book, and Martin scrapped the idea of a five-year gap.[24] The material of the 250-page prologue for the beginning of A Feast for Crows was mixed in as new viewpoint characters from Dorne and the Iron Islands.[32] As these expanded storylines affected the others, the plot became much more complicated for Martin.[33]
The manuscript length of A Feast For Crows eventually surpassed A Storm of Swords.[31] Martin was reluctant to make the necessary deep cuts to get the book down to publishable length, as that would have compromised the story he had in mind. Printing the book in "microtype on onion skin paper and giving each reader a magnifying glass" was also not an option for him.[25] On the other hand, Martin rejected the publishers' idea of splitting the narrative chronologically into A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two.[1] Being already late with the book, Martin had not even started writing all characters' stories[34] and also objected ending the first book without any resolution for its many viewpoint characters and their respective stories as in previous books.[31]
Since the characters were spread out across the world,[22] a friend of Martin suggested to divide the story geographically into two volumes, of which A Feast for Crows would be the first.[1] Splitting the story this way would give Martin the room to complete his commenced story arcs as he had originally intended,[25] which he still felt was the best approach years later.[22] Martin moved the unfinished characters' stories set in the east (Essos) and north (Winterfell and the Wall) into the next book, A Dance With Dragons,[35] and left A Feast for Crows to cover the events on Westeros, King's Landing, the riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands.[25] Both books begin immediately after the end of A Storm of Swords,[22] running in parallel instead of sequentially and involving different casts of characters with only little overlap.[25] Martin split Arya's chapters into both books after having already moved the three other most popular characters (Jon Snow, Tyrion and Daenerys) into A Dance with Dragons.[35]
Upon its release in October 2005 in the UK[36] and November 2005 in the US,[7] A Feast for Crows went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.[37] Among the positive reviewers was Lev Grossman of Time, who dubbed Martin "the American Tolkien".[38] However, fans and critics alike were disappointed with the story split that left the fates of several popular characters unresolved after the previous book's cliffhanger ending.[39][40] With A Dance With Dragons said to be half-finished,[39] Martin mentioned in the epilogue in A Feast for Crows that the next volume would be released by the next year.[2] However, planned release dates were repeatedly pushed back. Meanwhile, HBO acquired the rights to turn Ice and Fire into a dramatic series in 2007[41] and aired the first of ten episodes covering A Game of Thrones in April 2011.[42]
With around 1600 pages in manuscript length,[43] A Dance with Dragons was eventually published in July 2011 after six years of writing,[18] longer in page count and writing time than any of the preceding four novels.[15][39] The story of A Dance with Dragons catches up on A Feast of Crows around two thirds into the book, going further than Feast,[34] but covered less story than Martin intended, omitting at least one planned large battle sequence and leaving several character threads ending in cliff-hangers.[15] Martin attributed the delay mainly to his untangling "the Meereenese knot", which the interviewer understood as "making the chronology and characters mesh up as various threads converged on [Daenerys]".[40] Martin also acknowledged spending too much time on rewriting and perfecting the story, but soundly rejected the theories of his more extravagant critics that he had lost interest in the series or would bide his time to make more money (see section #Fandom).[39]
Planned novels and future
The sixth book is going to be called The Winds of Winter,[10] taking the title of the originally planned fifth book.[23] In June 2010, Martin had already finished four chapters of The Winds of Winter from the viewpoints of Sansa Stark, Arya Stark and Arianne Martell.[10] In the middle of 2011, he also moved a finished Aeron Damphair POV chapter from the then unpublished A Dance with Dragons to the next book.[44] By the publication of A Dance with Dragons, around 100 pages of The Winds of Winter were completed.[45] After a book tour and several conventions, he intended to continue his work on the long-overdue The World of Ice and Fire about the history and genealogy of Westeros, which he wanted to have finished by the end of 2011. He also intended to work on a new Tales of Dunk and Egg novella that will appear in an anthology called Dangerous Women.[46][45] He announced he would return to writing in January 2012.[15] Releasing a Theon Greyjoy POV sample chapter on his website in December 2011, Martin promised to release a second chapter in the back of the A Dance with Dragons paper-back edition,[47] released in March 2012.[8]
Martin hopes to finish The Winds of Winter much faster than the fifth book.[39] Having gotten in trouble from fans for repeatedly estimating his publication dates too optimistically, Martin refrains from making absolute estimates for book six.[15] A realistic estimation for finishing The Winds of Winter might be three years for him at a good pace,[43] but ultimately the book "will be done when it's done".[22] Martin does not intend to separate the characters geographically again but acknowledged that "Three years from [2011] when I'm sitting on 1,800 pages of manuscript with no end in sight, who the hell knows".[19]
Displeased with the provisional title A Time For Wolves for the final volume,[23] Martin ultimately announced A Dream of Spring as the title for the seventh book in 2006.[11] Martin is firm about ending the series with the seventh novel "until I decide not to be firm",[15] leaving open the possibility of an eighth book to finish the series.[22] With his goal to tell the story from beginning to end, he will not truncate the story to fit into an arbitrary number of volumes.[48] Martin is confident to have published the remaining books before the TV series overtakes him,[19] although he told major plot points to the two main Game of Thrones producers in case he should die.[19] (Aged 62 in 2011, Martin is by all accounts in robust health.)[49] However, Martin indicated he would not permit another writer to finish the series.[39] He knows the ending in broad strokes as well as the future of the main characters,[19] which will have bittersweet elements where not everyone will live happily ever after.[27] Martin hopes to write an ending similar to The Lord of the Rings that he felt gave the story a satisfying depth and resonance. On the other hand, Martin noted the challenge to avoid a situation like the finale of Lost, which left fans disappointed by deviating from their own theories and desires.[22]
Martin does not rule out additional stories set in Westeros after the last book, although he is unlikely to continue in that vein immediately.[50] He is fairly definite about only returning to the World of Westeros in context of stand-alone novels.[32] Having created a huge world in such detail, Martin sees the possibility of more stories to tell there. But instead of a direct continuation of A Song of Ice and Fire, he would write stories about characters from other periods of history.[51] He also wants to finish the Dunk and Egg project.[32] He will see if his audience follows him after publishing his next project. He would love to return to writing short stories, novellas, novelettes and stand-alone novels from diverse genres such as science fiction, horror, fantasy, or even a murder mystery.[21][26] Regarding A Song of Ice and Fire as his magnum opus, Martin is certain to never write anything on the scale of this series again.[32]
Inspiration and writing
Genre
George R. R. Martin believes the most profound influences to be the ones experienced in childhood.[52] He grew up reading H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert A. Heinlein, Eric Frank Russell, Andre Norton,[21] Isaac Asimov,[24] Fritz Leiber, and Mervyn Peake.[53] Martin likes all kinds of imaginative literature and never drew any sharp distinctions between science fiction and fantasy or horror,[53] writing from all these genres easily nowadays.[52] Martin classified A Song of Ice and Fire as "epic fantasy"[43] and specifically named Tolkien and Tad Williams as very influential for the writing of the series.[24][53] Martin's favorite contemporary author is Jack Vance,[24] although Martin considered the series not particularly Vancean.[23]
"[Martin's Ice and Fire series] was groundbreaking (at least for me) in all kinds of ways. Above all, the books were extremely unpredictable, especially in a genre where readers have come to expect the intensely predictable. [...] A Game of Thrones was profoundly shocking when I first read it, and fundamentally changed my notions about what could be done with epic fantasy."
—Fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie[54]
The medieval setting has been the traditional background for epic fantasy even before Tolkien,[23] whose writing still dominates the genre.[39] However, before starting with the Ice and Fire series, Martin felt that many Tolkien imitators were writing "Disneyland Middle Ages" fantasy without grasping the true brutality of those times.[55] Historical fiction appeared much grittier and more realistic to him,[55] fascinating him with the dramatic possibilities of the medieval contrasts such as chivalry co-existing with the brutality of war and great castles looming over miserable hovels.[23] However, where historic fiction leaves versed readers with knowing the historic outcome,[53] original characters may increase suspense and empathy for the readers.[52] Thus, Martin wanted to combine the realism of historical fiction with the magic appeal of the best fantasies,[55] subduing magic in favor of battles and political intrigue (see the section about magic and realism, and politics and society).[17]
Martin is widely credited with taking fantasy fiction into a more adult direction (see the sections about violence and death, and sexuality).[39] Martin's books are part of a cresting wave of "hard fantasy" writing that seeks to ground itself in unflinching portrayals of feudalism and medieval warfare. Martin and other writers in this tradition embrace the fact that readers become more emotionally involved with characters who are actually vulnerable. The reader cannot be sure that good shall triumph.[56] For a Washington Post reviewer, the series feels grounded in the brutal reality of medieval times despite the overtly fantastic elements like dragons and sorcerers.[57] The New York Times said "The series is like a sprawling and panoramic 19th-century novel turned out in fantasy motley, more Balzac and Dickens than Tolkien. Martin writes fantasy for grown-ups."[58] The Guardian said "A Song of Ice and Fire is no magic-and-maidens Tolkien rip-off. Dark and gritty, steeped in sex (some incestuous), it features minimal magic, maximum machiavellian machinations and [...] lashings of violence."[43] Some reviewers have compared Martin's work to that of J.R.R. Tolkien or even William Shakespeare, but LA Times said the truth was a little more complex: "The Song of Ice and Fire novels work so well because the epic fantasy is grounded in a strong horror element and because Martin skillfully conveys the gritty (often bawdy) physicality of the world while moving, with equal effectiveness, between various levels of society. Martin also owes a debt to the dark yet humane cynicism of writers like Jack Vance, even though he cares much more about the inner life of his characters than Vance. [Martin's novels contain] an implied criticism of Tolkien's moral simplicity."[59] CNN found that "A Song of Ice and Fire is thoroughly grounded in the brutality of the age, and the author's descriptions are far more frank than those found in the works of other fantasy authors. Still, mature as the themes sometimes are, they remain true to the story."[50]
World building
Setting out to write something on an epic scale,[50] Martin projected to write three books of 800 manuscript pages in the very early stages of the series.[53] His original contract had one-year deadlines based on his previous literary works in his Hollywood days,[31] but Martin failed to take the new book lengths into account.[31] In 2000, Martin planned to take 18 months to two years for each volume and projected the last of the planned six books to be released five or six years later.[27] However, with the Ice and Fire series evolving into the biggest and most ambitious story he has ever attempted writing,[35] he still has two more books to write as of 2012. He can only immerse himself in the fictional world and write from his own office in Santa Fe, New Mexico.[17] Beginning each day at 10 am with coffee, he first looks at the previous day's work, rewriting and polishing it.[52] Excised material and previous old versions are kept to be possibly re-inserted at a later time.[35] Martin spends all day writing on good days, but may struggle writing anything on bad days.[17] Saying to "enjoy having written", Martin fully embraces finishing a chapter or a book.[33]
Martin has a supernatural or mythic rather than a scientific core to the story,[21] and draws the story rather from emotion than the rationalist side of things.[21] A lot of his writing takes place on a subconscious level, imagining scenes, pieces of dialogue or plot twists in an almost daydreaming process.[60] The story is set in an alternate world of Earth or a "secondary world", which Tolkien pioneered with Middle Earth.[19] Contrary to Tolkien, who created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before writing The Lord of the Rings, Martin usually starts out with a rough idea that he improvises along the way. He sometimes fleshes out his imaginary world only to make a workable setting for the story.[39] The Ice and Fire story can be considered to be set in a post-magic world where people do not believe in dragons and the Others anymore. Coming from an impoverished family background of former wealth, Martin always felt attracted to stories of fallen civilizations and lost empires; Tolkien's Middle Earth was also in decline with the abandoned Mines of Moria and the elves' leaving. The lost empire of Valyria in Ice and Fire was once a high civilization similar to Rome before the Dark Ages. These elements may give the story a poignant sadness.[61]
Martin keeps maps[17] and a cast list that topped 50 pages in the fourth volume, but keeps most of it in his mind.[43] His imagined backstory is subject to change until published, and only the novels count as canon.[35] Unlike Tolkien, Martin does not intend to publish his notes and appendices after the series is finished.[17] Martin was intentionally vague with the size of the Ice and Fire world, omitting a scale on the maps to discourage prediction of travel lengths based on measured distances.[35] The continent of Westeros may be considered of the size of South America though.[39] Complete world maps are deliberately not made available so that readers may better identify with people of the real Middle Ages who were unillumined about distant places.[62] As each new book has added one or two maps, readers may be able to piece together a world map by the end of the series.[62]
Martin drew a lot of inspiration from actual history for the series,[52] having several bookcases filled with medieval history for research.[63] Martin immersed himself in many diverse medieval topics such as clothing, food, feasting and tournaments, to know specific points before needed in writing.[27] The series was in particular influenced by the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, the Albigensian Crusade and the Wars of the Roses (see the section about politics and society),[52][63] although Martin refrained from making any direct adaptations.[52] For an American who speaks only English, the history of England proved the easiest source of medieval history for Martin, giving the series a British rather than a German or Spanish historic flavor.[62] Martin never stops doing research, visiting historic European landmarks to get a feel for a place.[33] The Wall, which Martin believes to be unique in fantasy,[63] was inspired by Martin's visit to Hadrian's Wall in the North of England close to the border with Scotland. Looking out over the hills, Martin wondered what a Roman centurion from the Mediterranean would feel, not knowing what threats might come from the north. The size, length and magical powers of the wall were adjusted for genre demands.[53]
Martin knows the ultimate destination with the principal landmarks, but leaves the smaller things to discover in the writing process, some of the details turning out to be very important.[64] Some of his initial plans have changed along the way, and Martin prefers it that way.[63] However, Martin finds it increasingly difficult to keep track of the plot and subplots, and he is keeping more notes than ever before.[24] Nevertheless, Martin's world has become so detailed and sprawling that the story became unwieldy,[15] and he sometimes makes mistakes which his fans are quick to let him know, like his accidentally changing the sex of a horse or an eye color.[39]
Narrative structure
| POV character | Game | Clash | Storm | Feast | Dance | (Winds) | Sum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bran Stark | 7 | 7 | 4 | – | 3 | 21 | |
| Catelyn Stark | 11 | 7 | 7 | – | – | 25 | |
| Daenerys Targaryen | 10 | 5 | 6 | – | 10 | 31 | |
| Eddard Stark | 15 | – | – | – | – | 15 | |
| Jon Snow | 9 | 8 | 12 | – | 13 | 42 | |
| Arya Stark | 5 | 10 | 8 | 3 | 2 | ≥1[10] | 28 |
| Tyrion Lannister | 9 | 14 | 11 | – | 12 | 46 | |
| Sansa Stark | 6 | 8 | 6 | 3 | – | ≥1[10] | 23 |
| Davos Seaworth | – | 3 | 6 | – | 4 | 13 | |
| Theon Greyjoy | – | 6 | – | – | 7 | ≥1[47] | 13 |
| Jaime Lannister | – | – | 9 | 7 | 1 | 17 | |
| Samwell Tarly | – | – | 4 | 5 | – | 9 | |
| Cersei Lannister | – | – | – | 10 | 1 | 11 | |
| Brienne of Tarth | – | – | – | 8 | – | 8 | |
| Aeron Greyjoy | – | – | – | 2 | – | ≥1[44] | 2 |
| Areo Hotah | – | – | – | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| Asha Greyjoy | – | – | – | 1 | 3 | 4 | |
| Arys Oakheart | – | – | – | 1 | – | 1 | |
| Victarion Greyjoy | – | – | – | 2 | 2 | 4 | |
| Arianne Martell | – | – | – | 2 | – | ≥2[10] | 2 |
| Quentyn Martell | – | – | – | – | 4 | 4 | |
| Jon Connington | – | – | – | – | 2 | 2 | |
| Melisandre | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 | |
| Barristan Selmy | – | – | – | – | 4 | 4 | |
| Prologue/Epilogue | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 7 | |
| Sum chapters (POV) | 73 (9) | 69 (10) | 75 (12) | 46 (13) | 73 (18) | n/a | 336 (31) |
The books are divided into chapters, each one narrated in the third-person through the eyes of a point of view character.[39] Each POV character may act from different locations. Beginning with nine viewpoint characters in A Game of Thrones, the number of POV characters grows to a total of 31 in A Dance with Dragons (see table); the short-lived one-time POV characters are mostly restricted to the prologue and epilogue.[27] The New York Times noted the particular importance of the noble Stark family, the Targaryens, the conniving Lannisters, the mostly conniving Greyjoys, the mixed-bag Baratheons, and the Martells of unclear nature, all of who try to advance their ambitions and ruin their enemies.[65] However, as the reader experiences the struggle for Westeros from all sides at once, every character can be seen as a hero and villain, and every fight a triumph or tragedy.[66] The story weaves through differing points of views "in a skillful mix of observation, narration and well-crafted dialogue that illuminates both character and plot with fascinating style."[50] Each POV character is with its own rhythm, written in its own voice, and each playing off all the others.[66]
Modelled after The Lord of the Rings, the Ice and Fire story begins with a tight focus on a small group (with everyone in Winterfell, except Daenerys). After fanning out and splitting into separate stories, the story is to curve and converge again. Finding the turning point has been one of the issues Martin has wrestled with,[19] slowing down his writing with the long and complex series.[22] Martin believes to have reached the turning point at A Dance with Dragons,[22] but said in another interview the point of turning around and start delta-ing in has not quite been reached in the books.[67] The series' structure of multiple POVs and interwoven storylines was inspired by Wild Cards, a shared universe book series edited by Martin since 1985. Whereas Wild Cards is written by many authors, Martin writes all POV parts as the sole author.[68] With each new book, Martin begins with an outline of the chapter order, but he does not necessarily write the individual chapters in the order of appearance in the books. Before publication, he usually rearranges the chapters two dozen times to optimize character intercutting, chronology and suspense.[27] All POV characters are written to be interesting so that readers will not skip those chapters not holding his interest.[53]
Influenced by his television and film scripting background, Martin tries to keep readers engrossed by ending each Ice and Fire chapter with a moment of tension or revelation, a twist or a cliff hanger, similar to a TV act break.[69] Dividing the continuous Ice and Fire story into books is much harder for Martin. Each book shall represent a phase of the journey that ends with some closure for most characters. A smaller portion of characters is left with clear-cut cliffhangers to make sure readers come back for the next installment, although A Dance with Dragons had more cliffhangers than Martin ideally would have liked.[19][27] Both one-time and regular POV characters are designed to have full character arcs ending in tragedy or triumph.[27] Main characters are killed off so that the reader won't rely on the hero to come through unscathed and instead feel the character's fear with each page turn.[26]
With the larger narrative arc remaining unresolved, readers are encouraged to speculate about what might ultimately happen.[39] Much of the key to Ice and Fire's story future lies sixteen years in the fictional past, with each volume revealing a little more of the back story.[17] Martin forshadows events planned from the beginning, but he does not want the developments to appear predictable.[67] The POV characters may clarify or provide different perspectives on past events,[70] but Martin employs unreliable narrators within his point of view structure.[22] Two different characters may therefore remember an event in two different ways,[22] and what the readers believe to be true may not necessarily be true.[17]
Character development
Martin planned the epic Ice and Fire fantasy to have a large cast of characters and many different settings from the beginning.[22] A Feast for Crows has a 63-page list of characters,[1] with many of the thousands of characters mentioned only in passing[39] or disappearing from view for long stretches.[57] Martin drew inspiration from history but does not do one-for-one kind of translations.[17] He based the characters largely on his own experiences, but he made observations of friends, people he met or personalities in the news.[24] Each character should have his or her own internal voices[27] although all Ice and Fire characters are written with moral ambiguity (see section #Moral ambiguity).[27] The LA Times remarked that "Martin's devotion to fully inhabiting his characters, for better or worse, creates the unstoppable momentum in his novels and contains an implied criticism of Tolkien's moral simplicity."[59]
The huge number of genealogies in the appendices grow with each book. When making a new family genealogy, Martin begins with listing the children of a particular lord and lady. Martin has some secret in mind about their personality or fate, but their backstory remains subject to change until written.[35] The style varies to fit each character and their setting; Daenerys's exotic realm may appear more colorful and fanciful than Westeros, which is more based on the familiar medieval history of Europe.[27] Martin deliberately ignored the writing rules never to give two characters in a story a name starting with the same letter. Instead, he assigned the same names within families similar to European histories, where even the secondary families used the same names repeatedly and particular names were associated with particular houses. Martin was confident that readers would pay attention and used similar techniques for Ice and Fire as modern times do to keep the Davids, Stevens, and Brians straight.[35]
The Atlantic pondered whether Martin ultimately intended the readers to sympathize with characters on both sides of the Lannister-Stark feud long before plot developments force them to make their emotional choices.[71] In place of the cardboard-cutout, can't-lose protagonists common to the most conventional epic fantasies, Martin and other writers in this tradition embrace the fact that readers become more emotionally involved with characters who are actually vulnerable. The effect of this is that nobody in these stories, as in life, is safe. The reader cannot be sure that good shall triumph, which makes those instances where it does—even partially—all the more exulting.[56] Martin gets emotionally involved in the characters' lives during writing, which makes the chapters with dreadful events sometimes very difficult to write.[27] Seeing the world through their eyes requires a certain amount of empathy, even with the villains.[52] Martin found some of the characters to have minds of their own during writing that sometimes took him off in different directions. Martin returns to the intended path if it does not work out, but sometimes these detours prove to be the more rewarding path for him.[35]
Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen generate the most character feedback.[72] Tyrion is Martin's personal favorite as the greyest of the grey characters, with his cunning and wit making him the most fun to write.[53] Bran Stark is the hardest character to write. As the character most deeply involved in magic, Bran's story needs to be handled carefully within the supernatural aspects of the books. Bran is also the youngest viewpoint character[27] and has to deal with the series' adult themes like grief, loneliness and anger.[69] Martin set out to have the young characters grow up faster between chapters, but as it was implausible for a character to take two months to respond, a finished book represents very little time passed. Martin hoped the planned five-year break would ease the situation and age the children to almost adults in terms of the Seven Kingdoms, but he later dropped the five-year gap (see section #Bridging the timeline gap).[19][27] Finally, Martin sees the characters as the heart of the story,[73] loving even the villains as if they were his children.[53][73]
Themes
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Magic and realism
Wrestling over the amount of magic to include in A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin initially considered writing an alternative historical novel without any magic before opting for one of the most magical alternatives.[32] However, he believes in judicious use of magic in the epic fantasy genre,[18] where magic is kept subtle and the readers' sense of it growing.[74] Literary effective magic needs to represent strange and dangerous forces beyond human's comprehension,[46] not advanced alien technologies or formulaic spells. Magic needs to be magical by definition, not by its frequent display of power.[74] Martin realized fantasy in Ice and Fire in the shown imaginary places in avoidance of overt fantasy elements.[74] The amount of magic gradually increases from the start, but the series is to end with less overt magic than many other fantasies have.[27] Martin tries to slowly reveal in how far the many different kinds of magic in the Ice and Fire world may be manifestations of the same mysterious supernatural forces.[46]
The characters understand only the natural aspects of their world, but the magical elements like the Others are not within their understanding.[65] One of the most conspicuous aspects of the world of Westeros is the long and random nature of the seasons.[21] Fans have developed lengthy scientific theories for the seasons, but Martin insists there is a supernatural fantasy explanation instead of a scientific one.[21] Martin rather enjoyed the symbolism of the seasons, with summer as a time of growth and plenty and joy and winter is a dark time where you have to struggle for survival.[17] As for another magical element, Martin never wanted to do talking dragons because he wanted them to differ from humans.[74] Martin sees the dragons as the nuclear deterrent, making Daenerys as the sole owner the most powerful person in the world. Comparing the situation to modern-day states with nuclear arsenals, Martin tries to explore whether weaponry power not only bestows the power to destroy, but also to reform, improve, or build.[46]
Since all fiction is essentially untrue, Martin believes it needs to reflect reality at least in its core. He agrees with William Faulkner's statement in his Nobel Prize speech that "the human heart in conflict with itself" is the only thing worth writing about, regardless of the genre.[45] He thus tried to give the story a little more historical fiction feel than a fantastic feel like previous authors' books, with less emphasis on magic and sorcery and more emphasis on swordplay and battles and political intrigue.[17] The Atlantic noted that the series attempts to mash together fantasy and realism as two seemingly contradictory genres of literature,[71] and Martin's books are generally praised for their realism.[65] The Atlantic saw the realist heart of the Ice and Fire books in that "magic lingers only on the periphery of the world in which the characters dwell, and is something more terrifying than wondrous. Rather than being about an epic, glorious battle between good and evil, this is a story about lives being crushed by the feudal system they are born into. [...] It's a fantasy story that defies expectations by ultimately being less about a world we'd like to escape, at times becoming uncomfortably familiar to the one we live in."[71]
Politics and society
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The Daily News found the story focus "more on Machiavellian political intrigue than Tolkien-esque sword and sorcery".[47] Since Martin drew on historical sources to build the Ice and Fire world, The Guardian saw a startling resemblance between Westeros and England in the period of the Wars of the Roses, where "One throne unifies the land but great houses fight over who will sit upon it. With no true king the land is beset with corrupt, money-grubbing lords whose only interest is their own prestige. Two loose alliances of power pit a poor but honourable North against a rich and cunning South. And the small folk must suffer through it all, regardless of which side wins."[75] Like in the Middle Ages, the characters define their alliances by their home towns or kinship, not by modern-day concepts like countries or nationalism. The king was seen as an avatar of god so that the legitimacy of kingship was very important.[53] Martin wanted to show the possible consequences of the leaders' decisions, as general goodness does not automatically make competent leaders and vice versa.[55]
The novels are also to reflect the frictions of the medieval class structures, where people were brought up to know the duties and privileges of their class.[55] The Atlantic regarded A Song of Ice and Fire as "more a story of politics than one of heroism, a story about humanity wrestling with its baser obsessions than fulfilling its glorious potential" where the emergent power struggle stems from the feudal system's repression and not from the fight between good and evil (see section #Moral ambiguity).[71] The Guardian saw Martin's strength in "his compendious understanding of the human stories driving the grand political narrative. There does not seem to be a single living soul in the land of Westeros that Martin does not have insight into, from the highest king to the lowest petty thief. [...] It is a world of high stakes, where the winners prosper and the losers are mercilessly ground under heel. Against this tapestry every one of Martin's characters is forced to chose between their love for those close to them and the greater interests of honour, duty and the realm. More often than not, those who make the noble choice pay with their lives."[75]
Moral ambiguity
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A common theme in the fantasy genre is the battle between good and evil, although Martin deliberately defied the conventions and assumptions of neo-Tolkienian Fantasy. After The Lord of The Rings had succeeded with villains dressed in ugly black clothes, Martin felt that Tolkien's imitators oversimplified this struggle into a major cliché by externalizing it into stereotypes.[23][55] Martin has always been attracted by gray characters instead of orcs and angels, regarding the hero as the villain on the other side.[76] Martin believes the battle between good and evil to be thought largely within the individual human heart and by the decisions that people make. He has always taken it as a code William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech from the early 1950s, where he said that the human heart in conflict with the self was the only thing worth writing about.[55] Thus, Westeros teems with moral ambiguity whereas a brave young hero triumphs over evil in the traditional fantasy narrative.[76] A Song of Ice and Fire progresses from a relatively clear scenario of Good (the Starks) fighting Evil (the Lannisters) to a much more ambiguous one, in which the Lannisters are much better understood, and moral certainties are less easily attainable.[23] Characters who initially seem likable commit reprehensible acts, and apparent villains become sympathetic over time.[39] The same was said to be true with the television adaptation. Game of Thrones does not present the viewer with a easily identifiable hero, but with an ensemble of characters with sometimes sympathetic, often imperfect motives.[56] Noble characters doom the ones they love best, the innocent often suffer horribly and evildoers flourish.[76]
"What [marks Martin] as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. [...] Martin's wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more."
Martin looks for ways to make his characters real and human, well-mixed in their natures.[27] Martin made the characters real so that people invest in them emotionally and identify with them. He regards universally adored or hated characters as too one-dimensional, because in real life there is no one that everybody loves or everybody hates.[27] In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.[23] He wants to readers to think about the characters. Just like the darkest villains in real-life had some good things about them, the greatest heroes had weaknesses and flaws.[27] The villains in other fantasy are often shown without redeeming qualities, but all people in the real world have the capacity for good and for evil. Martin explores the questions of redemption and character change.[77] While the battle between good and evil is valid, the battle is much more interesting in real life than in fantasy for Martin. Martin deliberately pulled a twist on these stereotypes with the Wall's Night's Watch, which he described as "criminal scum [who] are also heroes and they wear black". History has always had people like knights assigned to protect the weak, but the peasants often needed the most protection from their own protectors. Martin believes this to be a powerful story and said the same happens in Westeros.[53]
Whereas the villains rarely provide their viewpoint in a lot of fantasy, Martin sees it as much more rewarding to explore characters from many sides.[50] GamePro said that "Martin does not tell his reader who to cheer for, and good and bad did not come in stark black and whites, but bloody reds, drab browns, and laughing blues. Through a well-orchestrated character point-of-view chapter system, Martin challenged readers to make up their own minds about good and evil and the perception of these ideas through actions and politics."[32] Having multiple viewpoints is crucial to the grayness of the characters. The struggle has to be seen from both sides because real human beings in a war justify their deeds as the right thing. Those struggles appear in the real-world throughout history, where both George Bush and Osama bin Laden believe they are right and think of the other as the bad guy. Only a multiplicity of viewpoints can present conflicts beyond cartoony ones.[31]
Violence and death
The New York Times praised Martin as "unapologetically coldblooded", saying the book series was no children's literature with "a boy being thrown off a balcony, a woman having her face bitten off, a man having his nose cut off, a girl having her ear sliced off, multiple rapes, multiple massacres, multiple snarfings of people by animals [and] multiple beheadings".[65] Entertainment Weekly saw Martin's ruthlessness about killing beloved characters as a hallmark of the series, leading "fans to throw their books across the room — only to go pick them up again".[15] The Washington Post said that the characters' vulnerability and possibly impending death "lends a welcome sense of uncertainty to the proceedings and helps keep the level of suspense consistently high throughout".[57]
Although fantasy comes from an imaginative realm, Martin sees an honest necessity to reflect the real world where people die sometimes ugly deaths, even beloved people.[27] The deaths of supernumerary extras or orcs have no major effect on readers, whereas a friend's death has much more emotional impact.[67] Martin kills off main character because he finds it really irritating to know early in the story who as the hero will come through unscathed. Martin dislikes this lack of realism, comparing the situation to a soldier scared the night before a battle. Martin wants his readers to feel that fear that no one is safe as they turn the page.[26] Martin, who credits Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings with inspiring him to stun readers with character deaths,[15] prefers a hero's sacrifice to say something profound about human nature,[19] and points readers not wanting to get upset or disturbed to the plenty of books for comfort reading.[19]
"There is an inherent dishonesty to the sort of fantasy that too many people have done, where there's a giant war that rips the world apart, but no one that we know is ever really seriously inconvenienced by this. [...] The heroes just breeze through [devastated villages], killing people at every hand, surviving those dire situations. There's a falsehood to that that troubles me."
—George R. R. Martin in an interview with Science Fiction Weekly[27]
When picking characters to die in battle scenes, Martin chooses secondary or tertiary characters from the character lists without giving much thought, as he sees these characters as hardly developed and in some cases just as names.[48] However, the death and time of death of many major characters have been planned from the beginning, although these scenes may not always be easy to write.[48] A wedding sequence called the "Red Wedding", which occurs about two thirds through A Storm of Swords and leaves several major characters dead, was the hardest scene Martin had ever written. He repeatedly skipped writing the chapter and eventually wrote it last for A Storm of Swords.[29] Readership response ranged from praise to capitulation, but Martin said the chapter "was painful to write, it should be painful to read, it should be a scene that rips your heart out, and fills you with terror and grief."[26]
War is central to a lot of fantasy, going back to Tolkien and beyond, but in most modern fantasy, it is very much the good guys fighting the bad guys. The wars in the novels are much more morally complex than a fight between good and evil.[33] The novels are to reflect that wars have substantial death rates.[53] The novels' attitude toward war is shaped by Martin's experiences with the controversies of the Vietnam War.[33] Being against the Vietnam War, the books reflect some of Martin's views on war and violence and their costs. However, he hates to think that the voice of the author comes through like in the Barefoot Septon's anti-war speech in A Feast for Crows, as he wants to remain an invisible puppeteer.[67]
Among the plot twists are the death of apparently crucial characters and the reappearances of believed-to-be dead characters.[78] However, The Atlantic said that Martin's penchant for unpredictability may make the reader grow increasingly skeptical of apparent deaths, alluding to Jon Snow's fate in A Dance with Dragons.[22] Martin believes that bringing back a dead character necessitates a transformative experience of the character. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they have lost something. Martin never liked Gandalf the Grey's return as Gandalf the White in The Lord of the Rings, believing it to have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead. The Ice and Fire characters who come back from death are worse for wear or in some ways are not even the same characters anymore. One of the characters who has come back repeatedly from death is Beric Dondarrion, The Lightning Lord, and what has happened with him echoes with some of the other characters who have come back from death. Bits of his humanity and his past live are lost every time he comes back from death, his flesh is falling away from him, but he remembers the mission he was sent to do before death.[79]
Sexuality
The fantasy genre rarely focuses on sex and sexuality as much as the Ice and Fire books do,[27] often treating sexuality in a juvenile way or neglecting it completely in Martin's eyes.[52] Even Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings abstracts away from featuring women, sex or romantic love.[27] Considering sexuality an important driving force in human life that should not be excluded from the narrative,[77] Martin equipped many of the Ice and Fire characters with a sex drive to make the books truer.[52] Martin was also fascinated by medieval contrasts where knights venerated their ladies with poems and wore their favors in tournaments while their armies mindlessly raped women in wartime.[27]
The inexistent concept of adolescence in the Middle Ages served as a model for Daenerys's sexual activity at the age of 13 in the books. Many high-born women were married at or below that age because the onset of sexual maturity turned children into full adults.[69][19] With the Targaryens, the novels also allude to the incestuous practices in the Ptolemaic dynasty of Ancient Egypt and the European monarchies to keep their bloodlines pure. However, Martin also saw a sociopathic element in the incestuous relationship of the twins Cersei and Jaime Lannister, whose strong bonding inhibits their pairing with others whom they regard as inferior.[80]
Martin aims to let the readers experience the novels' sex scenes, "whether it's a great transcendent, exciting, mind blowing sex, or whether it's disturbing, twisted, dark sex, or disappointing perfunctory sex".[77] However, he blaimed the American puritanical attitudes towards sex for some readers' offense with the novels' sex scenes.[81] Martin believes only a strong double standard can explain the lack of objections to an axe going through someone's head, while a penis going into a vagina causes aversion.[52] Accusing the novels of gratuitous sex is inseparable to accusing them of gratuitous violence, feasting or heraldry, as neither advance the plot. Providing sensory detail for an immersive experience is more important than plot advancement for Martin.[22]
Because of child pornography laws, the television adaptation was forced to either extenuate the sex scenes for the younger characters or age up all characters. HBO valued the sex scenes so much to opt for the latter,[19] adding some sex scenes to the TV series while leaving out others from the books.[22] The premiere of Game of Thrones was followed by many debates about the depiction of sex, rape, and female agency in the franchise.[22] USA Today's assessment that HBO added "so many buxom, naked prostitutes that TV's Westeros makes Vegas look like a convent" earned Martin's reply that there were many brothels in the Middle Ages.[76] Amber Taylor of The Atlantic saw the depiction of sex as one of the show's most distinctive aspects, "cheesy only insofar as sex is fundamentally absurd". Despite HBO's freedom to titillate viewers with sex and nudity, none of the show's sex scenes felt superfluous for her; some of Daenerys's TV scenes "make her vulnerability more real than any political exposition". Taylor also lauded HBO's "admirable choice [...] that its nonconsensual sex scenes are deeply unarousing, in marked contrast with shows on other networks that use a historical setting as window dressing for prurient depictions of rape".[56] Some critics also analyzed sexuality in the light of women's powers (see section #Feminism).
Feminism
Martin provides a variety of female characters to explore some of the ramifications of the novels being set in a patriarchal society.[67] Writing all characters as human beings with the same basic needs, dreams and influences,[16] his female characters are to cover the same wide spectrum of human traits like the males.[67] Martin can identify with all point-of-view characters in the writing process despite significant differences to him, be it gender or age.[16] He sees himself neither as misogynistic or a paragon of feminism, although he acknowledged that some values inoculated with in childhood can never be fully abandoned, even those consciously rejected.[19] He appreciates the discussions whether the series is feminist or anti-feminist,[19] and is very gratified of the many female readers and how much they like at least some of the female characters.[67] He does not presume to make feminist statements in either way though.[67]
The Atlantic noted that Daenerys and Queen Cersei share the parallels of being forced into marriage, having strong strengths of will, and being utterly ruthless toward their enemies.[82] As bloodline and succession are the quickest and surest way to assert strength in Westeros, Cersei takes advantage of motherhood by procreating with her brother Jaime, thereby leaving her hated husband Robert without a true heir in revenge.[82] Martin said that Cersei's walk of public penitence in A Dance with Dragons may be read as misogynistic or feminist. Jane Shore, mistress of King Edward IV, was punished similarly after Edward's death. Cersei is defined by her pride, and this punishment was directed at women to break their pride, but was never inflicted on men.[83]
Critics addressed the series' portrayal of women after the Game of Thrones began airing in 2011. Ginia Bellafante wrote in a The New York Times piece that the series was "boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population's other half" and considered it a "true perversion" that "all of this illicitness [in the TV series] has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise". Although there may be women who read books like the Ice and Fire series, Bellafante said to never have "met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to The Hobbit first".[84] The article received so many responses that the New York Times had to close down the comments section.[85]
Ilana Teitelbaum of The Huffington Post responded in an article called "Dear New York Times: A Game of Thrones Is Not Just for Boys",[86] claiming that Bellafante's piece was not only rife with inaccuracies, but also patronizing to female readers. Teitelbaum defended the many sex scenes in the TV series because the books as a source sprawl with them. She encouraged discussion of the Ice and Fire books and the fantasy genre from a feminist perspective, but rejected Bellafante's point that only men are interested in fantasy, considering Bellafante's characterization of fantasy as "boy fiction" as a promotion of gender stereotyping offensive to the genre as well as to women.[86] Scott Meslow of The Atlantic noted the need to differentiate between depicting misogyny and endorsing misogyny, as the series is set in a world in which sex is the primary means by which women can assert their power. Although the TV series may sometimes toe the line between Skinimax-style exploitation and genuine plot advancement, the sexual scenes also invite the viewers to sympathize with the series' women.[87]
Religion
Unlike Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the novels address religion in some detail,[19] and portray several competing religions.[67] More than any other novel in the series, A Dance with Dragons explores the different religions of Westeros and Essos. Each of the religions reflects its culture’s temperament. Martin based the series' faiths on real religions, tweaking or expanding them a little. The Faith of the Seven is based on the medieval Catholic church and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Seven consist of the Father, Mother, Maiden, Crone, Smith, Warrior, and a Stranger (Death) instead of Christianity's Father, Son and Holy Ghost.[79]
According to Time magazine, no religion is presented as the true faith, although there are eerie displays of power on many sides, nor do any have a monopoly on virtue.[40] Readers remain free to wonder about the validity, teachings and supernatural power of the competing religions in Ice and Fire. Martin regards any religion's claim to truth with suspicion, as he does the claims of real religions. The series' gods, he said, are unlikely to appear deus-ex-machina in Westeros.[67] Considering himself a lapsed Catholic with atheist or agnostic streaks, Martin is fascinated by religion and spirituality, but has never been satisfied by standard answers to questions like how a benevolent God allows for a world full of rape, torture and pain.[19]
Food
Food is such a central element in the Ice and Fire series that some critics have accused Martin of "gratuitous feasting".[88] By fans' count, the first four novels name more than 160 dishes,[89] ranging from peasant meals to royal feasts featuring camel, crocodile, singing squid, seagulls, lacquered ducks and spiny grubs.[88] Adam Bruski of The Huffington Post said the vivid descriptions of food do not just lend color and flavor to the fictional world but almost appear as a supporting character. Some dishes have a foreshadowing nature or are particularly appropriate to the mood and temperament of their diners. Much of the realism of Martin's cultures comes through their unique foods and tastes.[90] The meals signal everything from a character's disposition to plot developments, but also forebode the last profitable harvest before the coming winter.[89] Inedible-sounding food was eaten at the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords, preparing readers for the nauseating circumstances to come.[89]
Fans seeking to immerse themselves deeper in their favorite fictional worlds have started cooking dishes from the books. The culinary fan blog "Inn at the Crossroads" received over a million hits. Martin, who is "very good at eating [but] not too much of a cook",[88] received repeated requests to write a cookbook over the years. Two rival cookbooks based on the series are announced,[88] with A Feast of Ice and Fire being released in May 2012.[91]
Reception
Critical response
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Science Fiction Weekly said in 2000 that "few would dispute that Martin's most monumental achievement to date has been the groundbreaking A Song of Ice and Fire historical fantasy series".[27] A Song of Ice and Fire, which Weird Tales called a "superb fantasy saga" in 2007,[21] has raised Martin to a whole new level of success. Critics and fans alike agree it is one of the best fantasy series ever written.[21] The reviews for the series have been "orders of magnitude better" than Martin's previous works, and many readers have told Martin that his tale is the greatest fantasy story of all time.[39] After the fourth volume came out, Time anointed Martin "the American Tolkien",[38] a term picked up by the New Yorker[39] and The Globe and Mail.[2] The New York Times even said Martin was "much better than that".[58]
The series has turned Martin into a darling of literary critics as well as mainstream readers, which Daily News called "rare for a fantasy genre that's often dismissed as garbage not fit to line the bottom of a dragon's cage".[47] The complex epic had already made Martin a star within the confines of a genre often dismissed by literary critics. But the immediate success of HBO's Game of Thrones is pushing him toward J.K. Rowling territory.[29] The Washington Post was sure in 2011 that "no work of fantasy has generated such anticipation since Harry Potter's final duel with Voldemort".[57]
Time said in 2011 that "A Dance with Dragons renewed his loyal readers' faith in its continuing powers. The artistry and savagery of Martin's storytelling are at their finest: he has seized hold of epic fantasy and is radically refashioning it for our complex and jaded era, and the results are magnificent."[92] He landed a spot on Time magazine's coveted 2011 100 List.[29]
Sales
Martin's publishers initially expected A Game of Thrones to be a best-seller,[15] which generated a fierce bidding war in the UK that HarperCollins eventually won for £450,000 in 1994.[94] However, the book turned out to be a disappointment saleswise,[15] which left Martin unsurprised as it is "a fool's game to think anything is going to be successful or to count on it".[73] However, the book slowly won the passionate advocacy of some independent booksellers, who recommended it to their customers, who in turn recommended it to their friends by word of mouth.[39] The series' popularity skyrocketed in subsequent volumes,[15] with the second and third volume making the The New York Times Best Seller lists in 1999[28] and 2000,[30] respectively. The series gained Martin's old writings new attention, and Martin's American publisher Bantam Books was to reprint his out-of-print solo novels.[27]
The fourth installment, A Feast for Crows, went straight to No. 1 on the best-seller list when it was released in 2005,[15] which for a fantasy novel suggested that Martin's books were attracting mainstream readers.[43] The paperback edition of A Game of Thrones reached its 34th printing in 2010, surpassing the one million mark.[95] HBO's Game of Thrones boosted sales of the book series before the TV series even premiered, with Ice and Fire approaching triple-digit growth in year-on-year sales. Bantam was looking forward to seeing the tie-ins boost sales further and reported in early 2011 that 4.5 million copies of the first four volumes were in print.[42] The four volumes re-appeared on the paperback fiction bestseller lists in the second quarter of 2011.[93][96]
Martin had sold more than fifteen million Ice and Fire books worldwide by April 2011,[2][39] with the series translated into more than 20 languages.[3] At its point of publication in July 2011, A Dance With Dragons was in its a sixth print with more than 650,000 hardbacks in print[97] and reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list.[1] Unlike most other big titles, the fifth volume sold more physical than digital copies.[49] As of May 2011, A Dance With Dragons has sold more than six million copies in North America.[98] Barnes & Noble buyer James Killen predicted an uptick in sales for similar novels, saying "Recently, much of the focus in fantasy has been fixed on vampires and werewolves, urban fantasy or paranormal romance. I think the dark medieval fantasy of Game of Thrones has the potential to revitalize interest in ambitious heroic epics."[42]
Fandom
| It has been suggested that this section be split out into another article titled A Song of Ice and Fire fandom. (Discuss) (February 2012) |
Starting out as a fan himself, Martin visited his first convention in 1971 after selling his first story.[99] During his years in television, Martin's novels slowly earned him a reputation in science fiction circles,[100] although he said to only receive a few fans letters a year in the pre-internet days.[52] The publication of A Game of Thrones caused Martin's following to grow, with fan sites springing up and a Trekkie-like society of followers evolving that meet regularly.[100] By 2005, Martin received tons of fans e-mails and was about 2000 letters behind that may go unanswered for years.[52] Fan mail occasionally includes photos of children and pets named after his characters,[100] which Martin displays on his website.[1] Since there are different types of conventions nowadays, he tends to go to three or four science-fiction conventions a year simply to go back to his roots and meet friends.[99] He attends the gatherings of the Brotherhood Without Banners on his travels, an unofficial fan club operating globally whose founders and other longtime members Martin counts among his good friends.[39] Martin is committed to nurturing his audience, no matter how vast it gets. He administers a lively blog with the assistance of Ty Franck.[39] He does not read message boards anymore though, so as not influence his writing by fan foreseeing twists and interpreting characters differently than Martin intended.[99]
A Swedish-based fan of Cuban-American decent, Elio M. García, Jr., runs one of the main Ice and Fire fansites named Westeros.org, which he had established with his girlfriend in 1999. The site had about seventeen thousand registered members in 2011. Although García's participation in Westeros.org is voluntary, his involvement with Martin's work has become semi-professional. García is a paid consultant to licensors creating tie-in merchandise and to write text for a video game based on the series, but he also maintains an official presence for Martin on Facebook and Twitter. García's knowledge of the Ice and Fire world is so vast that Martin referred HBO researchers seeking information regarding the production of Game of Thrones to García. Martin himself sometimes checks with García when he is not sure about a fictional detail. García and Martin are collaborating on a comprehensive guide to the books, The World of Ice and Fire.[39]
"After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don't want me to 'pull a Robert Jordan' on you and deny you your book. Okay, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A Song of Ice and Fire. Ever. (Well, maybe it's okay if I take a leak once in a while?)
—George R. R. Martin on his blog[101]
Martin called the majority of his fans "great" and said he has more interaction with fans than any author he knows. He is largely nice to them.[19] However, some of Martin's fans turned against him angered by his taking his time with releasing A Dance With Dragons.[39] A renegade movement of disaffected fans called GRRuMblers formed in 2009, harassing Martin with sites such as Finish the Book, George or Is Winter Coming?.[2][39] It is not uncommon for Martin to be mobbed at book signings either.[100] The New Yorker called this "an astonishing amount of effort to devote to denouncing the author of books one professes to love. Few contemporary authors can claim to have inspired such passion."[39]
When fans' vocal impatience for A Dance with Dragons peaked in 2009, Martin issued an angry statement called "To My Detractors"[101] on his blog to stem a rising tide of anger.[102] Author Neil Gaiman backed Martin on his own blog, replying to a fan's inquiry about Martin's tardiness that "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch."[39][103] Martin sees it a right to withdraw anytime and enjoy his leisure times as he chooses.[19] Martin believes of himself as being bound by an informal contract with his readers; he feels that he owes them his best work. He does not, however, believe that this gives them the right to dictate the particulars of his creative process or to complain about how he manages his time. As far as the detractors are concerned, Martin's contract with them was for a story, their engagement with it offered on the understanding that he would provide them with a satisfying conclusion.[39]
Awards and nominations
- A Game of Thrones (1996) - Locus Award winner, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards nominee, 1997[104]
- A Clash of Kings (1998) - Locus Award winner, Nebula Award nominee, 1999[105]
- A Storm of Swords (2000) - Locus Award winner, Hugo and Nebula Awards nominee, 2001[106]
- A Feast for Crows (2005) - Hugo, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards nominee, 2006[107]
Derived works
Tales of Dunk and Egg
Martin wrote three separate novellas set ninety years before the events of the novels. These novellas are known as the Tales of Dunk and Egg after the main protagonists, Ser Duncan the Tall and Aegon V "Egg" Targaryen. The stories have no direct connection to the plot of A Song of Ice and Fire, although both characters are mentioned in A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows, respectively. The first two installments, titled The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword, were published in the 1998 Legends and 2003 Legends II anthologies.[32] They are also available as graphic novels.[108] The third novella, titled The Mystery Knight, was first published in the 2010 anthology Warriors.[109] A fourth novella is to appear in the anthology Dangerous Women after the publication of A Dance with Dragons.[46] Up to eight further Dunk and Egg installments are planned.[48]
TV series
The growing popularity of the series led to its being optioned by HBO for development of a television adaptation, Game of Thrones, after the first novel.[41] A pilot episode was produced in 2009 and a series commitment for nine further episodes was made in March 2010. The series premiered in April 2011 to great acclaim and ratings, and two days later the network picked the show up for a second season.[110] Shortly after the conclusion of the first season, the show received 13 Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Supporting Actor.
Other works
There are board games[111] and tabletop role-playing games[112] based on the available novels, as well as two collections of artwork based on and inspired by the Ice and Fire series. The French video game company Cyanide is creating a video game adaption of the books, entitled A Game of Thrones: Genesis.[113] There are licensed full-sized sword and war hammer reproductions available; paintable white metal character miniatures; larger resin cast character busts; Westeros coinage reproductions; a forthcoming series of graphic novel adaptations of the "Ice and Fire" series; and a large number of gift and collectible items from HBO based on their cable television series. In 2011, A Game of Thrones was adapted as a monthly comic. A companion guide entitled The World of Ice and Fire is in development by George R. R. Martin, Elio M. García, Jr. and Linda Antonsson.[39]
References
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{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ Martin, George R. R. (October 6, 2010). "Odds and Ends and More Odds". grrm.livejournal.com. Retrieved 2012-01-21.
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External links
- George R. R. Martin's Official Website
- So Spake Martin, Collection of statements, correspondences and interviews by George R. R. Martin.
- A Song of Ice and Fire at Curlie
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