...just wait until you read The Phoenix Guards, 500 Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilanka!

And I’m still reading the Book of Taltos. I liked the first book in it, Taltos, quite a lot.

A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin

This series is hard to pin down. It’s definitely fantasy, as it is a semi-magical speculative fiction of a less advanced tech level. But it’s not like most fantasy.

Most fantasy goes like this: Everyman embarks on a quest to save the world (or possibly conquer it). During quest, Everyman becomes Hero. Hero saves the world (or conquers it).

This basic outline (with embellishments) describes LoTR, TWoT, Prydain, Amber, Narnia, etc.

The thing about Song of Ice and Fire is that there is no hero. If you read the first book, you might start out thinking there is. This is just Martin trying to make you comfortable. It’s just the hook.

What’s different:

Martin tells his story from the point of view of one character per chapter, which he makes obvious by titling the chapters with the POV character’s name. I’ve yet to see two adjacent chapters from the same POV.

Martin isn’t afraid to kill people. And when they die, they stay dead. No one seems to have immunity from this.

Martin doesn’t seem to believe in black and white. In fact, he doesn’t even have shades of grey. His characters each have their own motivations and their own flaws. None of them are perfect. None of them are “The main character”.

Really, the book is kinda like a half dozen or so related but different stories interleaved, each from a different POV.

As the reader, it’s difficult to consistently root for one side in the conflict that spans the book. So many of the characters are so deserving. You kinda have to like them all. But then, they’re trying to kill each other. So that doesn’t work either.


At any rate, I highly recommend this book to those looking for something different from their fiction.

I’ll take your simplification even for my beloved Prydain, but I really can’t take it for Amber.

“Hi, my name is Corwin, and I’m a demi-god. Yeah, I have amnesia, but I’m a freakin’ demi-god. That’s right, thanks, stop calling me Everyman, because I’m stronger than you, I’m faster than you, and I’m smoother with the ladies, too.”

It sounds like more of a “the journey is the reward” kind of storytelling, much like that employed by classic Russian authors like Tolstoy and Dostojevskij. If you’re new to the Russians and like the “kinda-fantasy-but-not-quite” genre, I can highly recommend Mikhail Bulkakov’s “The Master and Margarita”. I’m sure it would pique your intellectual curiosity of the slightly grotesque and appeal to your sense of sarcastic humor.

I got that as a Christmas present last year. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

However, it made “Night on Bald Mountain” play interminably in my head.

Very fitting! :o)

Agreed. Zelazny doesn’t write Everyman stories. His stories are on a slightly higher, or just slightly skewed, plane of myth. All of his main characters are immortal or suicides, for starters…Zelazny is usually, and especially in Amber, writing clash-of-Titans stories, not Everyman bildungsroman.

I just finished that particular Bulgakov gem. I can’t agree enough with your recommendation. It’s the best telling of the Faust story I know, combined with a great Soviet social critique, and I eat those things up like candy. This one even critiques Soviet literary culture in particular!

Martin, period, is just one of the best SF authors to come out of the fourth wave, and one of the few who’s continued to produce good material through the benighted fifth wave. All of his Song books are great, but his earlier science fiction is beautiful too. The characters are deliciously layered, he writes like a poet, and the books often feel like they’ve been constructed less as melodramas or vehicles for a plot than environments in which things happen to be occurring; this is hardly an innovation in literature at large, but most writers in SF seem to feel as though they’re not allowed to write above the fourth-grade level or using literary styles that wouldn’t have flown in late-nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls.

Anyway, my favorite Martin is probably Dying of the Light , one of his late-70s novels set in his vast, post-Fall space opera universe (same one as the Tuf Voyaging and Sandkings stories, and possibly others I don’t know about). It’s a heartbreakingly sad story about lost love, culture shock, and futility set on a planet terraformed for a great Festival and now slowly dying as it flies away into the deep vastness of space. It doesn’t have complexity to rival A Song of Ice and Fire , but it has a poetic beauty he doesn’t touch in his series fantasy.

I think (Felicity) that we may have discussed this before.

I feel that the problem with most SF is the problem with all genres of literature - romances, mysteries, ‘science’ thrillers ala Chricton, horror novels, fantasy, whatever - that have a dedicated following.

If you write a book with the right elements, whether they be torrid kisses and dark-haired strangers, contrived riddles and stupidly quirky characters, ten-page long technical descriptions and mock-gritty faux realism, vampires and blood spatter and EEEEVILL, or elves, dwarves, world-saving magic and EEEEVILL, fans of the genre will buy the damn thing no matter how vomitously bad us pretentious literary types know it is. A book written within a familiar genre is comforting and unchallenging, and if that’s what you want from your reading experience, you don’t really care about whether or not it has literary merit, and a book that’s challenging and novel is going to be threatening and unpleasant.

This isn’t to say that you cannot write a book that falls within one of these genres and is also quality literature; to claim that would be to compare Colette’s bibliography to the Harlequin novels, or Chandler to Braun, or Zelazny to Anthony. But it’s easy to get away with writing a book that falls within one of these genres and isn’t any good at all.

And there’s not a lot of point in writing a book in one of these genres if you want to write a good book—most of the market that is interested in good literature won’t read literature that’s been pigeonholed with a bunch of garbage genre lit, so if you write a piece of SF that also happens to be quality literature, you’re pretty much condemning your wonderful artistic effort to the critical garbage bin. In the last fifty years or so, SF authors who have wanted recognition by literary types have either had to make themselves incredibly obtuse and know a bunch of English professors (like Pynchon), be ultra-topical, very well-connected, and extremely lucky (like Vonnegut), be ultra-topical, completely insane, and wait until ten years after they die (like Dick), sacrifice half the space in your novels you want reviewed to political polemic (like le Guin), or be intolerably, dryly academic but still become such a HUGE FUCKING SENSATION that you can’t not say SOMETHING about it (like Tolkein). And most of them have still gotten less critical attention than they deserve (like that banal assfuck Ellis).

The only solution is to fnord out all the text in Dragonlance novels, Star Trek books, and all long, stupid fantasy series whose authors have better marketing skills than talent for writing prose. After the field becomes that weird and risky to write in, pretentious people will be forced to pay attention to it and good authors will feel more comfortable writing in it.

Yeah. I know I’m being odd by writing sci fi and caring about it. But I just can’t stop myself. For one thing, I like control. They’re my characters, I bleeding want to decide how they grew up, their attitudes, their religion, et cetera.

Another thing is that I’m not so sure there is much non-genre writing anymore. Some of them may not have names, but isn’t “Oprah’s Book Club” and its ilk rapidly approaching genre status?

Plus, genres are bending. Not only do I find it amusing that frickin’ Dom DeLillo writes things that include unrealistic and not-yet-scientifically-possible elements (and lots of other people, too), but people like Neil Gaiman keep blurring the line as well.

I dunno, I’m really sleepy right now, and can’t make a coherent argument, but I feel like I trust I’ll get smart readers for my book if and when…and, frankly, I don’t have any ideas for any “realistic” books. I might be able to think of a historical fiction plot if I tried. But normal people bore me. If I’m not interested by normal people books, how can I write ‘em?

“A Song of Ice and Fire” is probably my favorite fantasy series out right now. What I find most interesting about it is its outlook of relative morality: there are definitely some villians to the series (and every “side” has some characters who have committed atrocities at this point) but because of the changing POV (that Matt was talking about) we at least have the motivations of those characters. By the end of the third book, almost everyone who has been truly (or two-dimensionally) heroic or villainous has been killed off by now (dozens and dozens of important characters die) – leaving many complex characters who are defined not by their moral stance but by their entangling allegiances and, most of all, their capacity to survive.

Unfortunately, the publish date on the fourth book (“A Feast for Crows”) is continually getting pushed back (I’m told George is writing as fast as he can, but I don’t think there’s any doubt it’s going to be a very long, complicated book). Amazon, last time I checked, said it was due out this month, but as I don’t think Martin is even finished writing it, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been biding my time and recently read “Lord of Snow and Shadows” by Sarah Ash, a new book that’s the start of a new series. It’s an interesting fantasy similar to Martin’s series in terms of geo-political wrangling, although a much smaller cast of characters. It stands out for using a Eastern European fantasy setting and a very interesting take on the Dracula/Dragon myth, as well as having a pretty engaging moral dilemma regarding the main character. Maybe it will tide us over until “A Feast For Crows.”

Also, another good fantasy author who has been prolific lately is Robin Hobb – a good first book to read is “Assassin’s Apprentice”. She’s got two three-book series and is two books into a third one, all in the same setting, which have gotten a lot of praise from fans, critics and fellow authors.

While I’m at it, I’d also strongly recommend Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy – “The Golden Compass”, “The Subtle Knife”, “The Amber Spyglass”. Although this series has been marketed as a children’s series in the same vein as Harry Potter, I don’t really understand why – it’s a much more complicated and challenging work than most of the adult fantasy I see these days, and reminds me much more of Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels or Tad William’s Otherland series, and should please fans of either of those series.

Not that I don’t enjoy Harry Potter, as I enjoy enormous 5-lb. gift tins of sweet, crunchy, filthy, filthy caramel corn.

Hey, I can’t help writing SF either. I’m just saying it’s probably a dumb idea.

There may not be much non-genre writing around, now or ever, but some genres have critical attention and some don’t, and some are known for tending to have quality membership, and some aren’t. (Oprah’s Book Club, by the way, is firmly in the ‘don’t and aren’t’ category; I seem to remember a big to-do last year with Franzen refusing to have his book placed in it.)

And genres bend all the time, but if you won’t even read a book with bobbits and ragick in it unless it’s trendy magic realism set in Latin America, you’re not going to notice that.

Well, ok. But you get the point – the structure of the text is that we follow the exploits of a single character on a quest for something.

Corwin may not be Everyman, but the basic structure remains. Song of Ice and Fire departs from that structure, which I find interesting and refreshing.

Yeah, Franzen refused really rudely and his publisher had already started printing the books with the OBC splash on.

Well, Rockstar, I not only can’t help writing SF, I have made it one of my life goals to blur the genre lines yet further. Although, frankly, I prefer “speculative fiction”, as I have done science, and what I write ain’t it. :P

What did you think my acronym ‘SF’ stood for?

:)