Since I revived this thread, I decided to let you all know (as I am sure you were on pins and needles wondering what Tyjenks was reading) I have put down Goodkind for Clash of Kings.
It is as simple as Jason put it: great writing. Usually the first one or two hundred pages of books this size is simply setting things up. The first two of Martin’s series feel like we are jumping right into the meat of the tales from page one. He takes care of any background or exposition as we move along as part of the story as a whole.
His style is so…oh, I don’t know…unobtrusive. It really stands out when you go straight from one of his books to someone, who IMO, is not quite as good.
It’s good to see so many other people enjoying this fantastic series. I just about cried when I read A Feast of Crows is now tenatively set for release in 3/03, rather than the earlier fall 2002 that had been predicted. :cry:
Now I know I should pace myself and hold off on the third book until maybe Nov./Dec.
Good luck man. Once I started I simply couldn’t stop reading any of the books. Amazingly they actually seem to get better with each book, and so make it even harder to pace yourself. :D
Yeah, I nearly busted my keyboard when I read that Feast for Crows is due out in March/April. Word is that the Brits will get it a month before us, so you could order from Amazon.co.uk and they’ll ship it across the pond. (I don’t know why they’ll have that month headstart, Martin is American; but the Brits are a more literate society than ours, and I know from being over there that they tend to get stuff before we do.) From what I hear, though, the U.S. version will have an extra map that the Brit version won’t. (The Brits never got the map of Kings Landing in Clash of Kings.)
Word to whoever noted that Martin will spoil you rotten. I cannot read any other fantasy series now… I tried reading Goodkind’s stuff but just couldn’t progress past chapter 2.
My sister’s boyfriend got into Martin’s series on my recommendation, and when he got to Book 3, I told him to hang on for the ride ahead. And like clockwork, he’d stop reading at certain points in stunned disbelief and call me up in shock. I have heard from a lot of people who have literally been heartbroken several times reading through Book 3. Some almost threw the book at the wall in disbelief.
I’ve been recommending the series to my other friends… telling them that it blows the doors off anything they’ve read in terms of fantasy. It’s like Lord of the Rings for grownups, with tons of gratuitious sex and violence. Oh yes, TONS of sex and violence and intrigue and excellent characters and everything you could ask for.
What I like is that it’s not a typical Middle Earth-type fantasy. Very Lancastrian England/War of the Roses setting; the empahsis is on swords, not sorcery (although those who have read it know the reasons why for that). And what I like is that there is so much vital information to the story that is just unexplained and lurking out there… like what the hell The Others are.
Needless to say, I’m hooked bad. If you want to share with a ton of other Song of Ice and Fire fanatics… this is a great board. Tons of spoilers, too, if you want to spoil it (and personally, I don’t, cause these books are the real deal).
Oh yeah, wanted to add that if you like the books, make sure to pick up Silverberg’s Legends anthology, cause there’s an excellent Song of Ice and Fire story in it called The Hedge Knight that George R.R. Martin wrote. It’s set about 100 years before the series kicks off, and it’s a pretty darn good story about the land of Westeros. Be careful to pick up the right edition of Legends though, because there are a ton of different versions floating around (Legends was published in three parts, and then later rebound into a single volume); so make sure you pick up the one with the George R.R. Martin story in it.
Oh yeah, part 2.
Tyrion, the Giant of Lannister, has got to be the best character in all the books, hands down.
Roaring Studios (http://www.roaringstudios.com/) will publish a graphic novel based on The Hedge Knight later this year. Some excellent preview drawings on their web site.
George R.R. Martin’s has said that he will notify us on his web site (http://www.georgerrmartin.com) as soon as Book 4 is done and packed off to his editors.
A Waldenbooks nearby has the hardback copy of Legends in the discount section for $5.99. I recommend it for The Hedge Knight alone but there are some other great stories in there as well.
A friend said another title to the third book could have been “Dropping like flies”.
Great summation by kale about what makes this series so awsome. I’ll second the setting too. The world and characters just feel so real, not just standard cookie cutter D&D character types you see in so much of the mass market fantasy you see today.
Another good epic fantasy writer out there is a Canadian named Steven Erickson. His series is called The Malazan Tales of the Fallen. First book is called Gardens of the Moon. Excellent stuff–like Martin, he immediately throws you into the thick of things without wasting chapters setting up the world first. His characters are all shades of grey. Even supposed villains aren’t entirely what they first seem to be. Best of all, he can write.
The drawback to all of this is that the books haven’t been printed in the US (yet). I got mine as imports from Amazon UK.
I just re-read A Storm of Swords, to get pumped up for the next book coming in April, and it just blew me away again. As much as I liked the first two, ASoS is the best book so far. There are several bits in Book 3 that just make every other current fantasy series look like a completely weak sister: The Trial by Combat; The White Book; Arya & The Tickler; The Red Wedding; Joff’s Wedding; and of course, Tyrion & Tywin in the end.
I have been to the spoiler board recently and now i am full of idle speculation, and foolish theories :). I need a new fix! I need MORE MORE ASoIaF!! Aaaaaaaaaaah!!
On a different note, if you want some very intelligent, very different fantasy then I highly recommend two newish books by China Mieville: Perdido Street Station and The Scar. They are not at all like most current fantasy (they are a weird steampunk/fantasy/scifi/gothic fusion) but they are very very good. Good in the way Martin’s books are: they are deep, and layered, and political, and yet with lots of great action bits.
Yeah, Martin himself said that he couldn’t bear to write the Red Wedding, so he wrote it last. You can tell because there’s a minor continuity error shortly after the Red Wedding in one of Lord Tywin’s quotes, which I won’t reveal because it could easily spoil it.
I just read the Melville books as well. Really found them to be great reads with a grittiness to the environments that was really cool. And I loved the SteamPunk/Magic of the world. The isle of the mosquito women was incredible.
Stop bumping up this thread!! I was going to put off my first reading of SoS until the first of the year. I hated to tear through all three and then have to wait 8 or 9 mos. for number four. I had done well, avoiding bookstores and only picking stuff up used.
Now I do not know if I can take it. I have started on the second chronicle of Thomas Covenant which I have never read. Very refreshing after a couple of snoozers, but this malignant thread has adhered to my brain.
Well, I do enjoy the books, but they aren’t really great. I like a bunch of the characters, and several of the plot threads, but others are painful to me. For grittyness mixed with fantasy, I prefer Glen Cook, who I think is a less pretentious but quite possibly better writer (at least he’s more consistently entertaining) – though I admit that Cook has a few odd writing quirks, and that some of Martin’s other books have had better writing.
IMO, this series is far too consciously written in the standard fantasy-blockbuster style, with the large number of independent character viewpoints more or less alternating, the repeated views of the same events from different sides, and some plot lines that for several books in a row are utterly unconnected – lots of ways to unnecessarily pad book size to get to the big-and-bulky shape that marketing research indicates fantasy-novel-buyers prefer. The fact that Martin shakes things up a bit with an imaginative setting, characters that aren’t quite as obvious as they seem at first, and the deaths of apparently important characters makes the series better than merely conventional trash, but can’t really elevate it out of the rut of its subgenre.
I can’t quite remember it to quote, but I will paraphrase one of the better lines in the Martin series, where some arrogant knight is having all his stuff stolen by some revolting peasants: “Yeah, well, we’re foraging the hell out of you, OK.” If he could just stick to the main military plotline with the (uh, I forget everyone’s names) cynical dwarf character, the ruthless knight character, and the bastard border guard character, it would be much better. I can do without the kids and the dragon people, among others, as well as some of the secondary characters in the main plot lines which could just be dealt with from the PoV of the main characters instead of giving them their own threads.
I guess I will probably buy the remaining books, which I am certainly not doing for the whiny repulsive gits in that horrible interminable Jordan series.
I’ve put off reading the third book until the fourth comes out because I want to read two in a row. It’s getting hard not to read the third one, though.
I checked his webpage and now he’s adopting a “when it’s done” answer about the fourth book, A Feast of Crows. He told fans to stop emailing him about it, ha ha.
