Quote:
Originally Posted by Andsigil
- Westeros is as depressing as Oceania in 1984. It's even worse than Ohio.
I'm going to go read Cormac McCarthy's The Road to cheer up now. |
My problem with A Song of Ice and Fire or something like The Wheel of Time is that any message they have is drowned in words. Using human misery as a theme is entirely valid, in my view, but compare A Song of Ice and Fire to something like
Nineteen Eighty-Four or
The Road. One volume, maybe one hundred thousand words or less? And they each make a devastatingly effective point. You don't need six-to-ten one-thousand-page paperbacks to do that. Even
The Lord of the Rings, in three volumes as it is, can be considered one work of about a thousand pages, not unlike say
Ulysses in terms of size.
Credible literature doesn't need multi-volume epics. I think one of the reasons Fantasy struggles to break into the space of such credibility is for the very reason of its enormity. People praise Martin for being 'the new Tolkien' or something to that effect but in my opinion he's substantially complicit in the culture which is holding that kind of Fantasy back.