Is a Song of Ice and Fire better than Lord of the Rings?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Also he has been working on this series for decades now. Over the course of that time he has changed as a person and as a writer, and as a writer in my opinion he has gained skill in creating detail and lost greatly in plot advancement.

This seems to be a condition which afflicts so many Fantasy authors, terminally in the case of Robert Jordan, with his series finished by Brandon Sanderson - and his massive The Way of Kings is meant to be the first in a ten-volume series! Why? Why do they have to be so long? I also think it has the unfortunate side effect of making Fantasy look less 'credible' because the long series' look more 'commercial', whether they are or not, but I confess to being skeptical that a lot of these series' really need to be longer than À la recherche du temps perdu or something of its ilk. At the risk of generalisation most modern genre fiction across various media seems in my mind to be concerned primarily with the two As, Action and Angst, and I'm rarely convinced that what they have to say cannot be expressed without a series of numerous thousand-page volumes.

I apologise if this comes across as curmudgeonly, but it's something that puts me off most modern Fantasy, with authors churning out book after book, usually into an enormous series or two, to little apparent purpose - apart from making a living, of course, but I find it curious that readers are content with reading more and more of the same matter as well. I think verbal diarrhea is something which many Fantasy authors struggle with, and I do believe that one of the strengths of The Lord of the Rings is that despite the nature of its publication it is fundamentally one long book written across a decade (and then some). I think the tension between Professor Tolkien's prolixity and his perfectionism is an interesting one: without the former, there might be no Unfinished Tales or History of Middle-earth and without the latter there might be a truly definitive Silmarillion - but it wouldn't really be Tolkien without both elements, would it?

Having just read Volsungasaga, which has all that juicy incest and murder which Martin and his peers love, but is much more brief, I think there's a curious disparity between this idea that a Fantasy, in the vein of its traditional literary forebears (sagas, heroics, epics and the like), must be grandiose, and the fact that this was traditionally, in some cases at least, accomplished in a much more concise form.

I am, however, reminded of Professor Tolkien's own remark in the Foreweord to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings: that of any deficiencies in the text, he would "pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short."
On the one hand I feel as if I agree with him; I feel as if the momentous events surrounding the Fall of Sauron, diabolus of the later Ages, are far too significant to primarily take place over the brief six months in which the major action of the story takes place, that the War of the Rings has too few battles, and that events generally move too swiftly: this may be what he meant. If he meant that it needed more detail, or characterisation or what have you I can appreciate this as well. On the other hand, however, I'm not convinced that these things were necessary, and that the relative brevity of the book works in its favour especially in terms of overall subtlety and pacing, especially in comparison to your average modern-day Fantasy colossus.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

This seems to be a condition which afflicts so many Fantasy authors, terminally in the case of Robert Jordan, with his series finished by Brandon Sanderson

-and-

but it's something that puts me off most modern Fantasy, with authors churning out book after book, usually into an enormous series or two, to little apparent purpose

It does seem to have become more science than art in recent years.

It puts me in mind of this thread from the golden days of yore on this site.

Unfortunately, the commercialization of writing I think is something we will have to live with.

On the other hand, however, I'm not convinced that these things were necessary, and that the relative brevity of the book works in its favour especially in terms of overall subtlety and pacing, especially in comparison to your average modern-day Fantasy colossus.

I agree with you on that. There needs to be a balance between world building and advancing the story, and over all in the tale itself it is best to advance the story. I say this as somebody who loves world building. I think Tolkien did it right in putting much of his world building into the appendices.

Then of course there are volumes of his work that also do a lot of world building that were published after his death.

[Aganzir]

ASOIAF is for people who enjoy certain kind of literature, Tolkien for those who appreciate another kind. Still, if people who have read both had a vote, I'm pretty sure Tolkien would come out on top. GRRM is enjoyable, true, but Tolkien is the one you go back to time and again.

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

As for me, of Martin's series I've only read A Game of Thrones, and I found it quite disappointing. The prose was rather poor, I thought, and the practically pornographic material was off-putting.

I found A Game of Thrones disappointing too, enough so to put me off the series for a year until the HBO series came out and I picked up the second part. The latter books (with the exception of the last one) are much better.

I tend to enjoy profanity, adultery and porn, but Martin doesn't write sex well. It's sometimes so detailed and naturalistic that he sounds like a teenager who has just discovered there's something between his legs, if you excuse the metaphor, and it lacks style. Mith put it quite well already, though.

When it comes to moral ambiguity, Tolkien does it in fact better. I feel Martin needs to spell everything out, and although his characters may do conflicting things, there's more poise in Tolkien's characters. What allows Martin to have such morally ambiguous characters is that they fight each other so you can see both sides, unlike Tolkien who has an ultimate villain in the story. But there's little of Tolkien's internal struggle in Martin's characters.

Also, while Tolkien has few female characters, Martin's writing is at times plain sexist. Just sayin'.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Martin also wastes countless pages on pointless derping around and travelling in crisscrossing circles. Tolkien does a fair bit of travel-writing, but it's always to a point.

[Snowdog]

Being I only managed 7 chapters into Game of Thrones after several attempts in reading it, I have to say no.

SIF was written to make a decent TV mini-series. No need to read it.

that said, I think that the mini-series treatment of Lord of the Rings would have been better than those PJ abominations.

[Firefoot]

Agree with what everyone else is saying here with an addendum:

All of the characters I liked in the first book (and kept me reading through the parts about characters I didn't) either have since died or their plotlines have faded into unimportance or seeming irrelevance (Arya, Bran). A handful of characters have gotten more enjoyable for me to read about (Jaime) but for the most part I have just stopped caring. I finished reading all of the currently out books maybe a year and a half ago? but have no intention of reading the new ones that come out. Maybe a plot synopsis because there is a part of me that would like to know who ends up winning, if only because I invested so much time into getting to this point.

A lot of people like the series because it's gritty and realistic but I find it really dull to read hundreds of pages about characters I don't like. And after a point, the sorrow of a character I liked dying started to become something more like, "Are you kidding me? He killed off xxx too?" and none of it was ever matched by the utter devastation I felt when I thought Frodo lay dead in the Pass of Cirith Ungol.

So I guess that comes back to what other people have been saying. For me, Game of Thrones completely lacks the beauty of LotR that really made me fall in love with it.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Firefoot

For me, Game of Thrones completely lacks the beauty of LotR

I think that is part of the point - and part of the reason some people really love Martin's epic.

One of the reasons I'm personally still willing to also defend tSoIaF to an extent is exactly the point that the characters you like or whose stories look interesting end up dead and their stories don't continue, while some others you have barely noticed before come to the forefront by time. So you can't take the stance in the beginning that "well, this is Ned Stark, the good guy I'm going to relate to, and who will prevail through all the hardships the author will throw on his way".

One could say it is breaking the obvious traditional narrational rule that you build up those characters you are going to make the heroes (or villains) of the story and leave the statists to their places (look at any old adventure or war-movie and you can tell from the introduction who will die and who will live through the ordeals).

That said, I fully agree that Martin can be boring at times (Arya's wanderings, Brienne's mission to find Sansa!) and that he has lost the grip of the story a long time ago... it was a mission impossible from the very beginning I'd say, but a brave try.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Firefoot

but for the most part I have just stopped caring.

A stinging condemnation of a series if ever there was one.

I think that is the fundamental problem with a lot of these newer, darker series. If everything is continually dismal all the time sooner or later readers will grow apathetic about the outcome of the story, especially if you kill off the beloved characters in the story to the point where there are only characters that people hate left.

One could say it is breaking the obvious traditional narrational rule that you build up those characters you are going to make the heroes (or villains) of the story and leave the statists to their places (look at any old adventure or war-movie and you can tell from the introduction who will die and who will live through the ordeals).

When reading contemporary fantasy I have reached the point of assuming that anybody who is built up to be likable or a hero type figure that A) they will die, B) horrible things will happen to them before they die, C) there is a better than even chance they will renounce all they orginally stood for, and D) they will die horribly. So in my opinion, it’s not so much a matter of you can't tell who is going to die, it’s just that the more likable characters will.

In a slight aside, GRRM gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly that was released after the show last night.

Most of it was stuff that is widely available but the interviewer asked one very interesting question. Robb was never a POV character and Cat was as stupid as a bucket of dead fish. So then why were people so upset when they were killed? I don't think too much of GRRM's non-answer to the question. I think a lot of it has to do with the underlying brilliance of the idea as part of the story. More than the characters I think people were invested in the Stark family's quest for revenge. The typically expected mode for this revenge quest to be accomplished was gone when the Red Wedding happened and everything went pear-shaped. As far as actually wiping out the Lannisters goes, that option is still on the table. So it was really more a matter of GRRM messing with his audience from a story perspective and not a character perspective that made it all too shocking!