Anticipating "A Feast For Crows" by George R. R. Martin (Nov. 9)

the wheel of time is so much better than martin's series its not even worth arguing over

the new yorker article was p lol tho, tbh its hard to feel all that sorry for martin idk

I agree it's better than Wild Cards.

well i guess i do think its worth getting into: jordan wasnt a great writer & his books are often a lot less outright exciting than martin's but over the course of their respective series its p easy to see how much better a plotter & worldbuilder jordan is, & how much more care & considertation he puts into his story. one of the big knocks on jordan is how slow & repetitive his books get but hes never anything less than purposeful whereas martin often feels to be just meandering w/o purpose or design. with jordan its possible to see where all the puzzle pieces fit w/ martin theres just a lot of fat, partic daenyrs & bran.

plus jordan's characters are better developed & more interesting & more dynamic most of the characters in a song of ice & fire are just a couple of ideas lazily glued together. i like both series ok & they both have p major flaws but jordan is really the only one you could say achieved something 'great'

Of all the ways I've heard Jordan defended, I honestly don't think I've ever heard anyone call him a great or purposeful plotter.

That's not meant to be snarky, by the way! I'm legitimately startled.

asoiaf deffo couldve benefited from martin being a more careful planner, stuff like rickon completely vanishing for a thousand pages seems pretty sloppy and probably precipitated by grrm changing his plans multiple times, but i'd say his plotting is very accomplished in more important ways - the twists and turns are rarely predictable (for me, anyway - the series is constantly confounding my natural attempts to extrapolate where it's heading, which i think is great) and he's amazing at building up to big OH HOLY FUCK moments, which is what the series is all about imo.

the characters - not particularly rich & nuanced, but he does do a great job of making sure even the most unsympathetic characters have believable/understandable motivations, and puts them in situations that play off those motivations in interesting ways.

this is my first crack at any kind of epic fantasy and i was thinking of trying wheel of time next, i know there isn't really anything else like asoiaf out there but that's probably all i really want too so ehh

asoiaf deffo

Love this guy's stuff! (Took me a lot longer than it should've to parse this)

Haha same here. Sounds like it should be the sequel to Asterios Polyp.

"and he's amazing at building up to big OH HOLY FUCK moments, which is what the series is all about imo."

Yup. Jordan is tedious as all get out.

http://jezebel.com/#!5792290/in-game-of-thrones-review-new-york-times-explains-women-hate-fantasy-novels

Jesus christ

All The News That's Fit To RONG

so I am about 3 seconds away from ordering HBO for this

I'm not going that far, but I might actually get around to watching this thing at some point. And trust me, that is v. rare when it comes to me and TV in general now.

Should I read these books? I like science fiction/supernatural fiction/world building but haven't read any fantasy in a bazillion years.

read them!!!!!

yeah sure, read them! they're not Great Literature by any means but they are incredibly engrossing w/ complex plots, tons of characters, and lots of intrigue. also there's none of that cliched elves and dwarves and wizards shit, 95% of it is just humans with swords, and the occasional supernatural bits feel more folktale-inspired than Tolkien-inspired to me.

the one caveat is that they are LONG, 4 books in and it's probably 2-3 times the length of Lord of the Rings already

I always end up tearing through these though, despite their length.

Okay. Long, engrossing, complex books that are not great literature and involve ppl with swords sounds pretty good. They are on my list. Thanks!

I was really sceptical of this series when I started reading but I ended up liking them alot. The timeframe reminds me of Wars of the Roses era England.

Ugh @ that Jezebel link. I hate so much when writers do that whole "I talked to three of my sheltered friends who've never heard of this thing/trend/book/film/band, so there is no way that anyone exists out there that could actually enjoy this thing/trend/book/film/band".

Re the Times article: Booooooooooring! Also, wrong.

I was really sceptical of this series when I started reading but I ended up liking them alot. The timeframe reminds me of Wars of the Roses era England.

― brownie, Friday, April 15, 2011 10:19 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

hah, the war of the roses was the exact inspiration for it

Oh damn, I'm really sold now.

Oh God that Times review. :(

it's odd that the heroic fantasy poles have become jordan and martin, jordan representing what the douchebags in the new yorker article think of as trad fantasy and martin the new-school gritty hotness, when like when jordan came out he was the new-school gritty hotness and terry brooks was the trad tired old fantasy dude.

the grittiness escalation race is dangerous, grrm is gonna end up the frank miller of never ending fantasy doorstops and we are going to enter early 90s image comics land. joe abercrombie is nu rob liefeld.

nyer article so annoying, OF COURSE grrm owes his fans what they want. they made his fat ass rich.

dude spent decades editing those awful wild cards books and pushing his c-list short stories. he hits the jackpot with ASOIAF, lives it up and is suddenly too good to hold up his end of the unspoken-but-totally-there nerd-culture-producer/consumer bargain? fuck him.

I think your two posts just outlined why I'm glad I stepped away from all this.

Ha, that Times review. Just imagine sitting in with that book club of hers for a minute. Scarier than Martin's White Walkers imo.

it's odd that the heroic fantasy poles have become jordan and martin, jordan representing what the douchebags in the new yorker article think of as trad fantasy and martin the new-school gritty hotness, when like when jordan came out he was the new-school gritty hotness and terry brooks was the trad tired old fantasy dude.

the grittiness escalation race is dangerous, grrm is gonna end up the frank miller of never ending fantasy doorstops and we are going to enter early 90s image comics land. joe abercrombie is nu rob liefeld.

Glen Cook's Black Company is grittier than both combined; same with C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy from the early 90s.

I found Black Company gritty to the point of comedy, and quit reading it. May try to pick it up again, though.

still haven't read glen cook--is it steven erikson gritty (beleaguered soldiers caught up in a grand sweep of history beyond their control etc etc) or abercrombie gritty (swearing, sex, violence, dark dark dark)?

honestly the main reason i have yet to fuck with cook is that i can only find trade paperbacks. i like my fantasy fiction in mass market form so it's easy to carry and hide. those r scott bakker books were super embarrassing b/c they are huge with sub-games-workshop design.

Erikson gritty. Erikson owes a great deal to Black Co.

Hmmm. Cook is somewhere in between Erickson and Abercrombie, adam. Less of the descriptions of the actual injuries and maiming, but just as much death and darkness. But grander and more imaginative with more sweeping vision, not just the man-on-the-ground viewpoint.

Cook's vehicle for the Black Company's story is that the tale is told by one narrator, so whatever happens outside that person's sight/frame of reference is kinda glossed over. So you're told that the other mercs are out raping and pillaging but you don't have it all described to you around the campfire.

a nook/kindle might resolve people's self-consciousness about what they're seen reading. also, cook's sort of 'weird tales,' too, like a minimalist robert e. howard and hp lovecraft (in hp's lord dunsany mode) hybrid. he brings old resurrected gods and goddesses with revenant minions warring across john ford desertscapes and such. plus i think the perspectival trickery he's up to sometimes via-a-vis his narrator is on par with premium gene wolfe and sam delany

ebooks & audiobooks are a godsend when it comes to crappy cover consciousness.

i was ok with the original mass market grrm covers but the recent editions with the bold colors and cheesy gradient are atrocious. they look like janet evanovich novels.

the hbo tie in reprint is pretty awful too.

cover of the last erikson novel is A+ tho, would totally read in public.

Only problem with the Kindle version is the low-res version of the map of Westeros, but you can pull this up if you need a reference:

http://gameofthrones.net/images/Westeros_Maps/Map_Westeros_Political.gif

I am in portland for this wkend bcuz of a comix festival, are there any pdx fantasy thugz who have HBO and are watching this Sun night? No one I know here seems to have cable...

I just held in my hands the complete uncorrected proofs of Dance of Dragons!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YSI? ;)

HAET U

a guy from works arranged to finagle one! i won't get to read it for a long time tho, i might just wait cuz it looks like it would be annoying to read, all the stuff that supposed to be italics is underlined!

but it exists! that's the important thing! nearly 1000 pages (but on regular office paper, double space and bound like a kinkos type thing)

I do not understand how that got out from under lock and key. Do you know how tight security measures are for high-profile, long-awaited books like that??!??? Protect yourself and don't say a word about what's in it.

I bet it contains... WORDS

I'm about two thirds of the way though the second book now. Love them. Thank u ILX!

continuing from HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - will this be just for nerds? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE), AFFC spoilers ahead

i've read it and i don't know which one he means tbh. but the entire plotline with the brotherhood of the thingummy (i hope this is loose enough to not be considered a spoiler) is at least vaguely concerned with all of that, i suppose -- but in the vague-received-idea-of-robin-hood way, not the how-does-robin-hood-actually-function way

― thomp, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 11:38 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

i meant brienne's pov - fans seem hate it because all she does is ask people where sansa is, but its really a way of spotlighting the human wreckage of the war of the five kings, one of the book's best chapters is the one where the monkbro talks about being sent off to war imo

the brotherhood started out as a merry men kind of thing and turned into something more brutal and unsettling by AFFC

there's also the organization of armed monks that's reinstated towards the end of AFFC but who knows how they'll fit in

Violently, one suspects.