Is there any further word on when book 6 will come out?
When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. Then Book 6 will come out, and not before.
And I have no issues with that; my problem is, why are we waiting until this far along in the story to learn about that plot / effort? Give us SOMETHING prior to Book 5 to let us know this is happening. It feels shoehorned in, and is jarring, in my opinion.
You mean 3 books that “firmly established your plot, scope, and direction” and if you’ll note that the end of the 3rd book everything is devastated in terms what people thought was the plot, scope, and direction (I don’t believe that’s a spoiler considering the OP).
For the character you are talking about, it serves multiple purposes - it indicates the motivation of other characters and it serves as a red herring. One of Martin’s goals was to subvert traditional fantasy tropes. FWIW, I think you also have a strange definition of “a big part of book five” - its 5 or 6 chapters, I believe, out of 73.
We were busy dealing with something else to care about that storyline. Namely the Starks & Baratheons vs. Lannisters.
Just finishing book 5 and it is a grind. The impression I get is that Martin likes to create characters, he doesn’t much like telling extended, coherent stories about them. Each chapter picks one of the hundreds of characters in the books and advances that character one inch forward while introducing a dozen more characters around him or her. At this point, I can’t keep all the characters straight and he is introducing more on every page. Plus, each person has a nickname or two, or three, to keep track of. When he gets tired of writing about a character he may be polite enough to kill them off or he may just never mention them again.
I will think long and hard before I bother with book 6, should it ever appear.
I agree that there is simply not enough progression in books 4 and 5. Do things happen? Sure. But a lot of them seem to have no payoff.
I’d liken it to watching a season of a TV drama. Say, for instance, the X-Files. You have episodes that are meant to move the overarching storyline(s) (mythology) forward. You also have self-contained episodes (monster of the week) that may even be bottle episodes, where all the action is contained to permanent sets. The viewer does not expect a character or problem in a self-contained episode to matter later. There’s a whole shorthand of “Hey, remember this” the viewer is given as a “Previously on…” start, generally as part of the cold open.
Now, things can happen in a self-contained episode. New insights into the characters, a view of the larger world, even a bit of comedy or a way to fake out the viewers. But it generally always resets overall. So say the writers bring in a new character for several episodes. It’s expected that something new and important will actually pay off as a result of all the time spent on this new character. If nothing of importance happens then viewers will grumble.
So, yes, maybe Martin has some great plan for the effects of the new viewpoint characters. But I think it hurts him with readers that so far it appears that he’s had two whole books with minimal payoffs and large gaps in-between.
Do we have anyone in this thread who waited all that time for King to finish The Dark Tower? I didn’t start reading it until after Wizard and Glass was released, but it sure seemed like books 4 to 7 were terrible compared to 1 to 3 and for similar reasons. The difference is that King started bringing in all of his other works while Martin has just created new characters.
There were lots of hints about a special relationship between this house and the Targaryens, going all the way back to Aegon’s conquest. The plot made perfect sense to me given the background we had in books 1-3.
Raises hand
I finished books 1-3 of DT about 4 years before book 4 came out. Book 4 was entirely different than what came before, but it was AWESOME. I didn’t care that it didn’t progress the story much from the first 3 books, it was a fascinating backstory for Roland.
Books 5 and 6 I thought were awful. Book 7 was a bit better, but I consider book 4, Wizard and Glass, the pinnacle of the series.
This blows my mind that you’re arguing a lot happened in AFFC. Dorne in particular.
At the beginning there’s agitation for way. A thousand pages later… there’s agitation for war. At the beginning of Briene’s story she’s searching for Sansa. One thousand pages later… she’s searching for Sansa. Dany is bogged down having trouble ruling Mereen, a thousand pages later… At the beginning of Game of Thrones the seven kingdoms are in a period of peace with a slight change in administration. At the end the king and main character are dead, there’s the beginning of civil war, magic is reborn into the world, zombies are attacking. It’s miles and miles more in plot movement. Not even close
I think my ratio of triple the plot development in Storm of Swords compared to books 4 and 5 might be a little much, but only slightly.
And can you understand why that would seem to many readers to be a very disjointed way to tell a story?
I have no issues with red herrings (or Weddings, for that matter); I do have an issue with an author seemingly sending me (the reader) on multiple pointless tangents deep into his story. I’m having to invest a huge amount of time and effort to keep all the characters straight that he’s ALREADY introduced (and, for some, killed off – seriously, George, if the list of characters and locations at the back of your book is longer than the U.S. Constitution, it’s time to reexamine your story); bringing more into the story just to kill them off seems bloated and pointless.
I haven’t read the thread so sorry if I’m repeating anything.
I read Book 1 a few months after it came out and Book 2 / 3 I awaited anxiously for their release and literally was at the book store as they unpacked them (ah the 90s when I bought books in stores.)
A Feast for Crows may be one of the singular most disappointing book experiences I’ve ever had. For a few reasons:
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The extreme long wait lead me to believe GRRM was “Robert Jordaning” meaning he had lost any ability to finish his work.
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The book when released was bad, it’s not fun to read and it’s a mess. My understanding is GRRM’s intention was to do a five year “leap” in the storyline from the end of book three to book four, as he felt this needed to happen to develop things and he didn’t think there was good storytelling in getting into the details of those years.
Instead as he wrote for two years he suddenly realized “I need to actually write the entirety of these five years, because I’m just constantly flashing back to them to explain things that weren’t shown to the reader since we skipped forward five years.” I think this is why the book is so bad, I think it’s a mash of stuff he wrote with the intention of the five year skip, then slapped together with the fill in stuff so he wasn’t actually doing that five year skip, then pushed to early publication because it’d been too long since he’d made a lot of money from a book and he wanted to be able to do what he loves most which is fly around the country going to book signings. So when he does release the mess that is Book 4 it’s really only covering (in detail) half of his universe which is going to alienate anyone interested in the other half or anyone who doesn’t want to only read about what part of his story.
- One more real specific problem, GRRM as you know kills off a lot of characters. I can get behind that, but if you’re going to keep the novels going on and on, you need to fill those gaps left by the dead characters. I don’t feel any new characters he has introduced in book four are as good as the characters we start with.
I’ll be honest as someone who has read hundreds of fantasy novels I don’t think GRRM will finish his series well. I think HBO will probably do a good job of making something entertaining out of it but the books themselves will suck. I’ve read enough extended fantasy series to see when things have soured, and I’ve mostly learned to abandon them at that point. GRRM’s series hits that point at book 4.
You’re absolutely right in that if the series is to succeed GRRM needs to seed new characters and stories, and not over-extend the Stark - Lannister theme which has reached the end of its natural lifespan. He’s certainly tried to do this, without any great success IMHO, but he has tried.
Steven Erikson had a diametrically opposed approach to maintaining dramatic impetus in the Malazan books - N.E.R.D (No one ever really dies). Not the best way to maintain a credible narrative voice tbh, but he made it work to an extent - helped enormously by his machine-lie productivity keeping the series moving in the right direction.
Out of interest Martin - can you name an extended fantasy series that doesn’t shit the bed at some point? I would guess they all go through their wobbly phases - it is next to impossible to grow a grand story across many books without developing structural weaknesses.
Those Malazan books that I just mentioned are a good example of someone nearly succeeding, IMO. They wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but within their universe they work effectively - yet the author still runs aground badly at some points (Erikson was actually very effective at re-fueling the series with good material, but he struck out on book 8 - really bad timing for the weak link in the series).
I’d say obviously LotR, largely because of the way it was written. It’s not my “favorite” fantasy novel of all time but I basically think it was done by a guy who wasn’t really in it for money or anything and who was just doing it in his spare time (as JRR was a full time English professor) he basically took a lot of time to make sure he had the full story planned out before he really wrote it. Most fantasy authors end up changing their broad outlines as they work through a series.
Other than LotR, the entire Black Company series of books, in my opinion, has not soured. I think in part that’s because Glen Cook segments them well and some of the books really just stand alone.
I’ve always wanted to try Malazan again, as I’ve heard it gets really good. My problem with that so far is Gardens of the Moon is a book I’ve tried to read twice, and both times I just struggled in the middle. I lose interest, I can tell there’s a massive universe this guy has created but I don’t know enough about it yet to really understand what he’s talking about at that point. I end up picking it up less and less frequently until finally it just starts to gather dust and I basically forget most of what I’ve read so I’m faced with having to re-read it if I want to resume it again.
The Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman never gets bad, it’s great from start to finish.
I think the first Sword of Shannara Trilogy does decently without going of the rails anywhere.
Mostly note I’m talking about shorter series here, I do think once you go beyond ~4-5 books things start to get bad for most authors. That’s also about when Robert Jordan’s books got to be troublesome to read, I sailed through his first four and even enjoyed five but I had started to notice some cruft of boring side stories…a few books later it’s a nightmare mess.
There’s a newer author, David B. Coe, that did a trilogy called the LonTobyn Chronicle that I liked (from people I’ve recommended it to I’ve found people either also like it or really hate it–it’s not the best of the best fantasy it’s more in the category of a light/fun read.) Anyway he later wrote a 5-part series called Winds of the Forelands that I felt he was able to keep together really well throughout and tie up appropriately. Again, he’s not an “amazing” author, but he’s readable and he got through two series without imploding–something guys whom I consider his superiors in general storytelling/writing (Robert Jordan / GRRM) were unable to pull off.
Nice post - Some good recommendations there. I’d like to read Cook’s stuff - Erikson cites it as a major influence, showed him how to break the twee-ness that underpins a lot of older fantasy.
I thought Gardens of the Moon was the best Malazan book - not a popular opinion, though, I think in general it’s seen as a bit of an outlier in style that doesn’t work for a lot of readers.