Unless the flood of Others is turned back by the 3 dragons perhaps? I’m assuming 3 honking great fire breathing dragons would present somewhat of a challenge to the Others.
The end of this series will be interesting. GRRM wanted to eventually skip ahead about five years from one book to the next, but there just doesn’t seem to be an appropriate way to do that without feeling like we’ve missed a ton of the plot. Matter of fact, I have a hard time seeing this series wrapped up in only two more books. I hope it is, but he’ll have to make a lot more headway in the next book than he has in the last two.
This, by the way, is speculation. It’s not explicitly stated in AFFC, but it seems to fit very well. We don’t know if even Brienne put it together that she (possibly) saw the Hound.
I just started reading this series (I’m almost done “Storm of Swords”), but I realised partway through “Clash of Kings” that I didn’t have to read the Dany chapters – I can always come back and read them later, if I feel the urge. So far I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything. 
Except they’re not that big and Dany has spent three books NOT moving anywhere toward Westeros.
Maybe she’s actually going to get them from behind by going north across the polar ice caps?
Yeah, I know, probably not.
-Joe
I stopped with the series after book three, I read how incredibly negative all the Amazon reviews were for the next two books and haven’t been able to bring myself to muddle through them. Two questions:
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I loved the first three books… are the next two worth it?
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Do you think Martin will ever allow abridged versions of the books to be published? From what articles I’ve been able to read it sounds like after the success of the first two books he started putting on airs and ignoring his editors, and trying to channel Tolkien by just writing as many words as humanly possible to tell the least amount of story.
Wonder if we’ll get a couple of time fades? Skip past a year or 5 between chapters somewhere?
Well, supposedly books 4 and 5 covered a lot of ground Martin originally intended on time-skipping. He was going to fill the reader in on the intervening years using flashbacks, but found that approach unsatisfactory, so we ended up with 2 books with a few very important events but mostly filler. Books 6 and 7 should move at a faster pace than the previous 2 installments, and I think with that assumption we can expect Dany’s quest to progress quickly, once it actually begins.
I think I read somewhere that Dany’s first chapter in book 4 was initially the one where she first rides Drogon away from the fighting pits, and that Martin first wrote that chapter nearly a decade ago.
That just means there is two whole books worth of filler now that were never supposed to be part of the plot and now hes going to have to condense four books into two.
I say yes. I like AFFC and ADWD, but I will admit they stagnate in places. They are good books, but AGOT, ACOK and especially ASOS are amazing books. And for crying out loud, stop reading this thread!
Honestly, I wouldn’t even want abridged versions. I do, however, think these stories would work great as graphic novels, which would of course require significant cuts.
I doubt GRRM added anything major to the plot that he never intended. For example, what happened to Jon was probably his plan all along. I’d rather read two books with a slower pace and some filler than two books that require a multitude of flashbacks to gloss over whatever noteworthy events took place in the span GRRM skipped. I imagine the latter turning out like Jonathan Strange, where the entire book is littered with footnotes to fill us in on the necessary (or usually unnecessary) backstory.
Sure, but how many pages were devoted to Quentyn(?) - a subplot that was a total dead end? The political maneuvering at Sunspear? Or, my (least) favorite time waster, what is going on with the Ironmen?
-Joe
I kinda like that not every plot goes somewhere. Real life has a bunch of dead-ends (recent example: Tim Pawlenty). And Dorne (it seems to me) has always seemed to get the short end of the stick, so it’s consistent that Quentyn’s mission was a total failure.
That said, I too find the Ironborn really annoying. I’d much rather see some more of the Tyrells, especially if they’re Lannisters with flowers as… someone said. (The drunken knight, maybe?)
I know some people wish the books stuck to just Starks and Lannisters and their conflict, but that is over and done with. I WANT to hear about all seven kingdoms, this isn’t a story just about Starks and Lannisters, the whole of Westeros needs to be in complete disarray before the Others and Dany show up.
I agree that it’s all about Westeros. That’s why I deeply resented all that time spent elsewhere in DWD.
Sure, but the point of following them is what? Fiction is not real life.
If Tyrion had fallen off the boat and actually died, that’s kind of what happens in real life too. The difference is that Martin would have owed the audience a resolution to his story because they’ve been following him for three books. He also had tremendous influence on the plot in general and all the other significant characters.
Donny Dragontorch, on the other hand, was inserted into the story just for the sake of going from Point A to Point B and failing to get there. Life sucks in Westeros. Good thing he was there to demonstrate that because the audience hadn’t figured that one out yet.
“Sunspear had a secret marriage pact with the Targaryens but the girl half was killed at King’s Landing during the revolution and the boy half had his head dunked in molten gold by Khal Drogo.”
One line from Varys and we save 75 pages of filler.
-Joe
I suppose, but you didn’t know that Quentyn was going to fail until he did. You probably strongly suspected – I know I did – but Martin’s done a pretty good job at frustrating expectations before.
Before I read ADwD, I read a synopsis for A Storm of Swords (I had recently completed a full re-read of Feast, but realized I needed to go back a little bit farther). The synopsis was somewhere around 50-60 pages; I guess I could have saved myself a thousand pages of “filler” by reading only the synopsis instead of the whole 1000+ page book. Or maybe not… maybe the “journey” is as important as the destination.
The thing is, I didn’t care. Quentyn was boring.
If you’re gonna go adding characters to an already overstuffed cast, they need to either be essential to the plot or compelling in their own right (both would be nice). Quentyn was neither.
People waited five years for this book, and got no resolution on any of the ongoing stuff, and a whole lot of Quentyn. Yeah, they’re pissy about it.
Whether it’s “filler” or not is perhaps debatable. But from my point of view, if there’s minimal interaction between two particular pieces of story, then there’s little benefit in interleaving them.
To make a hypothetical example, I think I prefer the following movie sequence:
[ul][li]Incredible Hulk[/li][li]Iron Man[/li][li]Thor[/li][li]Captain America[/li][li]The Avengers[/ul][/li]To this hypothetical movie sequence:
[ul][li]Movie 1 = 30% of Incredible Hulk, 10% of Iron Man, 5% of Captain America[/li][li]Movie 2 = 10% of Incredible Hulk, 50% of Iron Man, 25% of Captain America[/li][li]Movie 3 = 20% of Incredible Hulk, 5% of Iron Man, 60% of Thor, 15% of Captain America[/li][li]Movie 4 = 5 % of Incredible Hulk, 5% of Iron Man, 10% of Thor, 40% of Captain America[/li][*]Movie 5 = The rest of the four superhero movies + 100% of The Avengers (expected release date in 2020)[/ul]
And what did the “journey” show us? What did we learn about the world? What did we learn about the characters?
-Joe
What did we learn about the world? I’m sure there will be a ton of ramifications for Dorne, and likely for any putative Dorne-Dany alliance. What did we learn about the characters? Well, I learned that Doran Martell, a sort of “master strategist” playing a really, really long “con” to return his family to prominence, really screwed the pooch by betting all his chips on a not-terribly-capable son. And I’m willing to bet that Arianne will have to step up her game as a result, too (which is good, because she was pretty insufferable in AFfC).
Nothing earthshattering, but (a) I don’t think a throwaway statement by Varys would capture any of this [not to mention that you then have to wonder if Varys is peddling bullshit], and (b) I think it adds to the richness of the world. I like Martin for (among other reasons) the various POVs, and I don’t expect all of them to be always important all of the time. If I wanted a simple plot with one (or possibly two) POVs that goes from A to B in a world with absolutely no meat on its bones, I’d go read Terry Goodkind.
That said, I agree that Quentyn was a boring character, and part of me wishes Martin would stop wasting his limited years on dead-end plotlines. After all, the safe bet is that Martin will die before he wraps it up, especially given his plodding pace. I only take comfort in the fact that the IP is too valuable to let languish, so I’m convinced we’ll get an ending.
Exactly. When Q first came to Dany’s court, and was sneered at by Daario as a stupid kid, I half expected that he would vindicate himself in some way. But he turned out to be just a stupid kid.
The whole track with Tyrion and Aegon was another waste of time. Page after page of nothing, and by the end of the book, neither has done anything, except for a brief ride on a pig. And now even the pig is dead.
I get that the journey can be as satisfying as the destination. For example, I very much enjoyed the chapters in AFFC about Littlefinger’s machinations at the Vale. He ended in that book where he had begun, with only a few changes in status behind the scenes, but his chapters were interesting.
But the Tyrion and Quentin tracks of ADWD were not. A short chapter on each would have been more than enough. A fifth of the book was way, way too much.