There are two Wild Card series, by the way, the original series and then a “Next Gen” series that is set later in time. Most of the series are anthologies, but there’s a few novels, too.
And we can’t ignore Martin’s Tuf Voyaging anthology.
Because Martin is obese, in his 60s, and takes years to write a book there is some worry that he’ll live to complete the saga. There are message boards on whether he has a “secret recipe” for who lives/dies/morphs/rules in a vault somewhere or a designated finisher in the event something happens to him.
Three series, really. Between the original and “Next Gen” there was the “New Cycle” with Card Sharks, Marked Cards and Black Trump.
No we can’t. I’ve got my copy of that nearby too.
Most definitely. Dying of the Light (elegiac sf novel of a world drifting away from its star) and Fevre Dream (vampires along the Mississippi River before the Civil War) are also well worth your time.
I had the pleasure of exchanging some emails with Martin a few years back, and he said he’d really like to write some more Tuf stories one of these days. Hope he will!
A fairly short while…I like the series, but they’re pretty light reading, and not terribly long.
To me books 4 and 5 strongly suggest someone who has lost control of his overarching plot and doesn’t have a clear direction. At this point I am hoping that HBO has the rights to deviate from the books because I can’t see viable TV seasons from these books in their current shape.
I can’t imagine HBO filming Game of Thrones without having an end-game planned out. Either Martin has given them a summary of what he plans for the series or they have the right to move in their own direction creating their own ending if necessary. Like I said at this point I am hoping for the second. The first three books are great but after that I trust HBO more than I trust Martin.
Since book four, A Feast for Crows, seems to be widely panned and also focused on secondary characters, is it reasonable to skip it? Could I just go from book three to book five and still understand what’s going on?
I’m only half way through Book 1 and haven’t seen the HBO series (yet). I figure if I keep on my current pace, I should get to the end of the series right around the time he’s finished writing it.
Almost certainly. That said, I was very let down with AFfC when it first came out, but then I reread it right before book 5 came out in preparation, and enjoyed it way more than I expected to. So maybe the trick is to have super low expectations.
Not at all.
“Almost certainly” and “not at all.” Hmmm. This could be tricky.
I liked AFfC, so I’d recommend reading it (and I don’t really agree that it focuses on secondary characters). But if you want to skip it you can probably get most of the major developments by just reading the wikipedia page.
Honestly, I don’t think the series really has a central story, so “what happens” at the end is kind of irrelevant. After the first book or two, its basically become a series of inter-related vignettes that take place in the same world.
The trouble is: that all depends upon the next book. LOL! We won’t know whether those characters are truly “secondary” until we know what happens next. I suspect the focus will change dramatically.
Books four and five are the same time period told through the POV of different characters. They would have been one large tome, but it just got unwieldy so he divided them up. So the people who like the characters who remained in book four loved it (raises hand) but the people who were dying to hear what was next for the left-out characters were understandably chagrined. It then becomes difficult to read five while keeping in mind that time has not yet advanced.
I think you could skip it. I remembered nothing from Crows before reading Dragons, so it was like I hadn’t read it at all, and I enjoyed Dragons. Martin does a good job in each book, refreshing your memory about events from the prior books.
I wouldn’t skip anything from ASOIF. You never know where it will all fit by the end, and it’s more about the journey than the destination anyway.
There are also the Dunk and Egg stories - beware, some spoilers past the first paragraph: Tales of Dunk and Egg - Wikipedia
You could skip it and just read the episode summaries but your reasons for doing so are wrong. It was widely panned by people with over half a decade of expectations to live up too, and who wanted to hear from their personal favorite characters as opposed to the overall story. It is not a bad book at all, the things that happen are just as interesting as the things that happen in the other books, they just happen to other people. A song of fire and ice is an epic story involving the whole world, not just a few select characters, you will miss out on lots of background and world building just because the book was not quite as good as the others.
I would not recommend skipping AFfC. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s not as good as the first three books, but it is still an awesome book. As **DigitalC **said, the people who hated it were waiting years and years for the story to make progress. If you’re reading the books now, you don’t have that problem.
IMHO AFFC is a tough slog and I would encourage you to skip any chapters with characters you just don’t care about.
When I re-read the series when Dance with Dragons was released, I skipped all of the chapters not featuring one of the following:
Arya
Brienne
Cersei
Jaime
Sam
This meant I skipped all chapters featuring Sansa, Dornish people, or Iron Islanders. Nearly half the book.
Afterward, read the “Cliff’s Notes” here:
[spoiler]
http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/A_Feast_for_Crows[/spoiler]
I read all five books in quick succession recently and was duly warned about how dull AFFC was by everyone everywhere. And I guess I can see where they’re coming from. ASOS was full of action and ‘Holy Shit!’ moments, and AFFC has considerably less action. But it’s haunting and atmospheric, and IMO, from a literary perspective the best in the series so far. It didn’t deliver what fans had been waiting for for four years and thus was widely panned, but approach it with an open mind and you may end up loving it as much as I did. It’s definitely the one I’m most likely to reread.
So in summary I say don’t skip it.
I seem to remember GRRM once admitting that he’d written himself in something of a corner regarding some of his younger protagonists, whom he intented to do stuff and be important and whatnot in the fullness of time and “cast” as very young. However, he already set in motion the events that would lead these characters to be important, and dispatched some others in such a way that his planned “replacements” are still way too young to be credible in the role. In other words, he killed off people a bit too quickly for his own tastes.
That speaks to someone who hasn’t bothered to hammer out every plot detail before he called his publishers ;).
That being said, I do believe he’s already planned the broad strokes of where it’s all going, yeah. Hopefully he doesn’t develop Alzheimer’s on us before he’s done jotting it all down.