[Formendacil]

I've been following this thread with some interest, and waffling back and forth on whether I'm in a position to comment. I've never seen the show, and I've read about half the series--in about a week and a half last August, I went through the first two and a half books in a single, fell swoop and then lost all interest and stamina.

That said, thanks to the Internet and an ancient Greek mentality regarding spoilers ("spoiler, what's a spoiler? Everybody knows Oedipus is Jocasta's son--that's what makes watching the play so good"), I know where the series has gone so far, even if I haven't read up to it. Indeed, I've had a fascination/bile relationship with Martin for years, for as long as he's been the reigning King of Fantasy.

Obviously, it isn't Martin's fault that virtually everything anyone ever says about him compares him in some way to Tolkien--that's been the standard trope for the genre since about 1956--but it has been particularly persistent with Martin, and that threw me off reading him initially, because it didn't take very much research at all to realise that "hyper-realistic, fantasy-version of the War of the Roses" is not at all what I think when I think "the next Tolkien."

But I did read him eventually--and, as I said, I burned through two and a half of his voluminous tomes in a week and a half, so there was clearly enjoyment in the process. I think it helped my desire to keep reading that I knew the major spoilers and that I knew it was a work where "everybody dies." This removed the anger that might stem from being hoodwinked, replacing it with the Greek Tragedic curiosity of "well, how did it happen?" This is where Martin's pacing was a real problem, though--and I say this as someone who didn't make it to the books that are said to be the worst in this regard.

That said, I also completely ran out of steam and interest--and I haven't picked the books up since, or been more than very, very slightly inclined to do so--and this loss of interest is tied to the reason the interest held. Reading Martin fired up my own fantastical imagination in a way that nothing has done in years--if anyone remembers that I wrote a fantasy novel last fall/winter, it is worth noting that it grew, almost entirely, out of the massive creative push that reading ASOIAF gave me last September.

But, at the same time, part of the reason I was pushed to write rather than to keep reading was that Martin consistently didn't satisfy my own tastes. In essence, I felt something along the lines of "you got so many things so close to right--but then it didn't work for me." In general, if I try to recapture that fleeting sense of what worked and what didn't, I think the world-building worked almost completely for me. I don't remember a geographical or political fact that I didn't enjoy exploring--to say nothing of the tantalising "otherworldly" hints that crept around the edges: things north of the Wall and the dragons.

This ramble doesn't have a single point, I suppose, except this: as a fantasy writer I do not claim to be anywhere near the league of either Tolkien or Martin, but I do feel indebted to them both, for they both made me want to write. The difference is that I felt pulled to write by Tolkien--his prose and his stories and his mythology had me chasing after it; whereas Martin pushed me to write, which was a rather more divided experience.



All of that said, it occurs to me to add that the popularity of ASOIAF is testimony to the fact that the reading public does NOT desire things simplified or shortened, and I am grateful it does that. However, if he never manages to finish the series (or to do so to the satisfaction of a significant number of his fans), I think we might see the ugly side of a fandom that expects a long set-up to have a great payoff.