8 ms·

To be fair, both A Song of Ice and Fire and The Kingkiller Chronicles is magnificently inspired and novel writing, more so than most that of some very consisten

by marvin 5y ago

To be fair, both A Song of Ice and Fire and The Kingkiller Chronicles is magnificently inspired and novel writing, more so than most that of some very consistent and prolific authors. I could certainly empathize with them running out of inspiration after some years. I'd rather read the first Kingkiller books for the first time than all of Expeditionary Force, for instance. I'd rather live in a world where Martin and Rothfuss never finished their masterpieces than a world where the unfinished works never even existed. I haven't had many literary experiences that so vividly stimulated my imagination as these. Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. He's both incredibly prolific and for the most part very creative and novel. I guess that's why he was hired to finish Robert Jordan's series. It was certainly a good fit, all things considered. In fact -- has any fan fiction been published that attempts to continue these works? I could imagine that as a genre, but of course it would be a Herculean effort that would unlikely be successful unless attempted by an author that's already world-class.

tsimionescu 5y ago
I don't know The Kingiller Chronicles so I'm not going to comment on that, but I don't think you can call A Song of Ice and Fire a masterpiece until you see it's ending. A lot of the quality is in the intricate plots it implies, but it has yet to resolve the vast majority of them, and if it falls flat, a lot of the majesty of what was started will turn put to have been smoke and mirrors. This is what the Game of Thrones TV show proved: overall the show should not be considered a masterpiece, even though the early seasons seemed good at the time, since the stories they were telling mostly led nowhere. Sure, it had its excellent moments, but that's about it - overall, it was a show about the good guys winning easily, women being irrational and just kinda forgetting, armies fighting without consequences, and so on. The fact that the early seasons made you think it would be a different story was proven an illusion by the end.
- iamsaitam 5y ago
  This is the issue in today's market driven society, there's a big crowd which seems very open to forgetting the pleasures brought up during the development process, when the end comes and is not to their liking. They would all be much more content if they weren't so keen in erasing their own memory.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    This is not a property of the market driven economy, it is a property of storytelling. For example, a story can have certain themes building up and exploring what you think are interesting directions, only for the ending to show a terrible conclusion to that theme. To give an extreme hypothetical example, lots of fantasy stories explore issues of race, and one could imagine a series that builds up a race conflict with complex characters on both sides, with only thinly veiled references to the real wod. If then the book were to end by showing that characters of a dark-skinned race are simply too stupid and evil, with even the moat interesting of them falling prey to his race's tendency for being criminal, readers would justifiably be horrified by the ending, and feel that the apparently interesting direction they were being led on was a lie, retroactively regretting having been nodding along with the author.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Huh. I only watched the show and I felt it was much more guys being idiots, and women tending to be wiser if gender lines must be drawn. I thought the show, despite very poor quality writing for the final seasons, managed its plot lines pretty well. It didn’t bring in all the threads but it finished most of the ones that started. But the tone of things changed quite a bit following the red wedding. The red wedding, and the execution of Ned, were two fairly surprising events. They greatly shifted the arc of the story, and added a lot of drama to the world. After this event I felt everyone started wearing their plot armor heavily. Main characters went off on their adventures and couldn’t plausibly die without making a good deal of the story otherwise pointless to have pre existed. I didn’t feel anyone’s death mattered after those two events, which frankly is also fine. That’s a cool, novel story structure in itself.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Well, of the main female characters, one ends up an isolationist, another is a psychotic assassin who fed a lord his own children, two literally go mad and kill thousands, and only one has any positive development, the most mannish of them. > It didn’t bring in all the threads but it finished most of the ones that started. It finished them in abrupt ways that made all of the build-up irrelevant, and proved all of the thematic elements simple misreadings. Particularly the White Walkers were turned from a world-ending problem that could only be confronted using humanity's entire attention, from which political squabbles were a silly distraction, into a simple horde of zombies that could easily be killed by stabbing their leader with a good weapon, and who couldn't even destroy half of a band of light cavalry facing them in an open field. Also, Daenerys's complex character build-up, with elements of genuine desire to create a new Era of prosperity, but self-righteous belief in her own right to be at the head of that new Era, was made irrelevant as she became a raving genocidal maniac when her father's bad blood got to her seeing the old seat of her family's power. This is all glossing over all of the nonsensical decisions made by characters, the unexamined hypocrisy (to name the most egregious one, Daenerys executing a trusted advisor trying to poison her is presented as abhorrent, while Jon hanging the conspirators who killed him is presented as righteous, even if one of them was a 10 year old child).
    - 5y ago
- fao_ 5y ago
  This is what the Game of Thrones TV show proved: overall the show should not be considered a masterpiece, even though the early seasons seemed good at the time, since the stories they were telling mostly led nowhere. Oh, for only you could provide that wonderful evidence of which you talk about -- that proof for the first half of this quote. If only you could enlighten us all, cast the drapes from our eyes, and elucidate what difference lies between the fact of merely hinting at plots, and having an ending written, versus having the plots written, but the ending languishing in dreams. Sure, it had its excellent moments, but that's about it - overall, it was a show about the good guys winning easily, women being irrational and just kinda forgetting, armies fighting without consequences, and so on. The fact that the early seasons made you think it would be a different story was proven an illusion by the end. Thus, I am to take it that you feel the end of a work invalidates the whole? If I may be so bold as to talk about my experience, I find myself most content to read the latter half of a work, and circle around to the start. While I find myself most humble in hopefully not alluding to presume the minds of others, I do not think that the majority of people who cast their eyes over The Lord Of The Rings do so merely because they wish to find out what happens at the end? Surely, if they do so they must be rather disappointed by all of the videos and movies put forth in the years hence, that describe to one's eyes and culture the most intricate details of the ending in exact terms. It seems rather well documented, indeed -- it has been subsumed into our very culture, that the short of stature hobbits win their restless battle, in the end. That "Good" wins, and "Bad" fails. Alas, what reason is there to read the book now? For you already know the ending, why should one know the journey? Why open a book for which you know in advance the ending? Oh, simply the writer's prose, I suppose. Perhaps even, the skill and wit and deft of description. Merely the entire story and content of those soft white pages, before the last handful. From your perspective, surely you deem such things to be inadequate? After all, since a story only holds merit, if the ending holds merit, how could such things matter! I'll assent, that to be let down by an ending that you feel is shoddy or hastily jotted down by a perhaps all-too-sleep-deprived author, feels like being besmirched by their very hand at a prim and proper dinner party. And I shall even assent that these are all personal feelings, forthwit! What a dull and dreary world you must live in, it makes one sad. I truly pity you, and hope you too one day come to know the pleasure of taking the journey of things, and not just the finality.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  So, what I take from your comment is that the author should simply declare the ending to be open and get a masterpiece status for free now instead of having to think hard about a satisfactory ending that could drag the whole story down!
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Well, an open ending can itself be satisfying or not. The current state of ASOIAF would have about 30 open major plots, most without any discernible relevant theme at their current state, so I would say that no, it would end up in the "irrelevant story with some nice ideas along the way" state if the last two books were truly the end of the story. Note the RR Martin does actually have many sci-fi stories with interesting, frustrating but thematically clear, open endings.
- the_af 5y ago
  > it was a show about the good guys winning easily We must have watched a different show. It was a show about the good guys losing, people who were "right" being killed, people who were "wrong" mostly being in command until very late in the show, and potential heroes being offed in the first season. There was a whole bunch of memes about not getting too attached to a likable "good" character, since Martin was likely to kill him/her.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    And yet, in the end, the good guys won, this is my point. The bad guys had a few temporary wins along the way, but they all lost in the end. Every last bad character died, almost all good characters survived and became the new lords and ladies of Westeros.
    - the_af 5y ago
      Sort of. The good guys won at the very end, and it wasn't easy. And lots of good characters were tortured and died along the way. It wasn't a clear cut "easy" win for the good guys. A major moral character dies in the first season!
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        They won the "Battle for the Dawn" in a few hours only losing half their army or less and only two significant characters mid-way through the season. They then won the final battle with even fewer losses after a few hours of fighting, with no major characters dying, in what would have been a clean victory where they would have been hailed as saviors, had Daenerys not gone insane after the victory. Even she was then easily defeated, with little consequence for her killer or the former prime Minister who publically condemned her, despite the fact that the kingdom was under the control of her fanatically loyal general and his fanatically loyal troops. There were more characters committing what amounted to suicide in the final few season than those who were killed by the horrors of war or scheming enemies. I would call all of this quite easy. Sure, along the way in previous seasons, a lot were tortured and died, but many of them turned out not to matter too much at all in the overall plot (particularly, Rob Stark, and arguably, Jamie Lannister).
- Maursault 5y ago
  I think you're using the term, masterpiece, too loosely. Martin's works are novels filled with stories, but there are not many interpretations of what he is describing. There are not layers upon layers of meaning, but instead, it simply is what it is, and there is little to no argument about what his words mean. J.R.R. Tolkien is a favorite of mine, but I would not talk about his writing skill, and what is fascinating about Tolkien has nothing to do with is writing but the world he created. I think Martin has similarities in this regard. But The Lord of the Rings has many interpretations. A Song of Fire and Ice, not so much. The Renaissance frescoes by Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel is a masterpiece, no one would rationally disagree. In comparison, A Song of Fire and Ice is merely pulp, i.e. popular writing that is generally regarded by academic experts of writing as poor quality. Tolkien influenced academics, and you can study Tolkien in certain lectures. Even Rowling is studied. I seriously doubt any university level professor would pull out A Song of Fire and Ice, or any of Martin's work, and develop a seminar around it, or spend a semester studying it to reveal the levels of complexity and novel style of prose, because it simply isn't there. Martin is very much a two dimensional thinker that writes in one linear dimension, his words have one single meaning, and scratching past the shallow surface of Martin's words doesn't reveal anything below it beyond the story it is telling. I think you should read more Melville, Hemingway, Miller, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Twain, Steinbeck, Salinger, Bradbury and Vonnegut, and many many others, before ever claiming anything by Martin is a "masterpiece." Just try to get out more.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Thank you for assuming my reading level. If you must know, I greatly enjoy (and have extensively read) people like Rushdie, Marquez, Kawabata, Hesse, Wolf and many others who indeed have a very specific and masterful writing style. I do agree that Martin doesn't have a way with words the way the greatest writers do - his writing is quite flat in terms of style. I disagree (tentatively) that ASOIAF is mere pulp - I think it makes some interesting social commentary, particularly on the effects of war and how it leaves everyone, winner or loser, worse off than they were (in his personal life, he was a conscientious objector and is a lifetime pacifist, so I do believe that these themes are likely to be intentional). He also seems to be making a point about how political concerns rightly or wrongly stop the world from acting against ever more clear and imminent threats, with the Long Night probably being an allegory for Global Warming. But, the jury is still out until he actually finishes his work. It may turn out that I'm reading entirely too much into this, and that the ending will be similar to the show, where righteous war wins the day (as long as you don't commit atrocities) and the long night is not a crucial problem to be fixed, but a mere zombie distraction from the important political topics of the day. If we ever got an ending like this (I do not believe we will ever get an ending of any kind), I would then agree with you that this is a work of pulp fantasy with little literary merit. But if the ending makes good on these themes, it may turn out to be a true masterpiece, even if the writing style is quite flat. There are, after all, writers like Balzac, who is still taught and studied and read, even if his writing style (at least in the translations I've read) is just as flat.
Freak_NL 5y ago
> Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. At that point the world has need of another writer on stand-by in case Sanderson's prematurely awoken from the dream.
dageshi 5y ago
Sanderson is on record as saying he wouldn't be able to finish Martin's work. Plus, Sanderson just had a $25 million kickstarter, he's at the point now where finishing others work would frankly be a waste of his time.
barney54 5y ago
Both GRRM and Rothfuss are great beginners of stories, but neither has shown the ability to end a big story. It’s sad. While they don’t “owe” us anything, not finishing shows a certain contempt for the fans.
- burnished 5y ago
  Consider that they have tried and failed. Where is the contempt in that?
- mcphage 5y ago
  > not finishing shows a certain contempt for the fans I think this is a case where Hanlon's Razor applies—why would you assume it's an act of contempt, instead of something simple like "finishing the stories is really hard, and they don't know how"?
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  How entitled one has to be to consider not finishing up a complex creative work "a certain contempt for the fans"? Haven't you ever struggle to finish a creative endeavor? I have tons of unfinished works in my portfolio, there's certainly some truth in that saying about the last 20% of work taking 80% of time - and finishing things up feels much less rewarding than starting something new.
- lupire 5y ago
  Would you rather have a story with a great ending but no beginning? Why not let the fans exercise some creativity and imagine how it would end? How does "end" even make sense when talking about a complex fictional history? 2021 is over but the story didn't "end". Life goes on. Endings are a silly modern invention. The ancient Greeks just killed off the characters to end the story.
cooperadymas 5y ago
> I'd rather live in a world where Martin and Rothfuss never finished their masterpieces than a world where the unfinished works never even existed. We are living in a world where a hundred, a thousand works even more marvelous never even existed, aren't we? > In fact -- has any fan fiction been published that attempts to continue these works Yes, an obscure HBO show titled Game of Thrones attempted it to universal disdain.
- the_af 5y ago
  > We are living in a world where a hundred, a thousand works even more marvelous never even existed, aren't we? I've seen this rhetorical point being used before, in several contexts, and it never makes any sense to me. It can be used to disregard any argument in favor of the existence of something. Let me explain why with an example: "I'd rather live in a world where my wonderful daughter exists, even if she has flaws and throws tantrums, rather her not being born at all". "Well, we live in a world where a lot of potentially wonderful babies were never born, aren't we?" And my answer is: yes, but I am talking about ONE specific baby (or book) who matters to me. Who cares about the others that never existed?
  - cooperadymas 5y ago
    I think you are probably correct, and I was mostly being blithe in my original remark. However, I think the way of the world is that if Martin or Rothfuss or Jordan didn't exist in our reality, two things would happen. One, someone else would have risen up in their place and produced equally or more magnificent works that were as impactful as what we're is being discussed. Read up on Harry Seldon's work for more about this theory. Two, the OP to whom I was responding would have been affected by one of those works in a similar manner to how they were affected by our timeline's original. The idea here being, the work is unique and dramatic, yes, but a person will always find something to cling to and what attracts them is as much about the person as it is about the art itself. It isn't as if the generations that existed before GRRM had no noteworthy literature in their lives.
ubermonkey 5y ago
I disagree. Kingkiller is bog-standard fantasy. I read the first one because it was given to me, and having done so I bear no ill will to Rothfuss because I just don't care what happens. Generally speaking, though, I don't start trilogies or other serieses unless they're COMPLETE. Some SF/F fans go apoplectic when I say this ("You have to buy the early books to ensure there's demand!"), my counter is that I have no interest in fractional stories.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Indeed, I was burned with both Serenity and Dollhouse. From now on I will wait until it’s syndicated thanks.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    TV <> books, though.
- falcolas 5y ago
  > bog standard high fantasy Complete with the OP MC trope. > I don't start trilogies or other serieses unless they're COMPLETE. That's my new rule too. Been burned too many times by favorite authors just dropping series. It gets old reeeally fast.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    I would like to push against this because it results in some very terrible market behavior. You are effectively selecting for less trilogies released because of this, or only the people who publish trilogies are people with enough fan base (aka no debuts). What happens is actually the publisher drops the author! Rarely the author loses interest, more often the publisher sees the lack of sales and drops the author entirely, killing the series.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      I'd argue that the stories should be released as one book then, not three. There's often no need to release a single story as a trilogy, other than to make money. As it stands, there's too many other good authors out there who do either follow through with their promises or release great stand-alone books to waste money and time on incomplete stories.
Maursault 5y ago
> is magnificently inspired and novel writing I like the stories, but personally, I do not see much talent in Martin's writing, and I certainly don't think his writing style is "novel." Not at all unlike Stephen King, George R.R. Martin writes to the lowest common denominator, likely intentionally, to have a wider audience, to more efficiently make a buck. It would be laughably absurd to compare the quality Martin's work with that of, say, James Joyce, Albert Camus or Shakespeare. I don't quite understand those that appreciate the work of modern authors like J.K. Rowling and insist they are great writers. They're not great, they're just popular, and they're popular because anyone with a 4th grade education can enjoy and consume them. I hope I don't come off as snobbish. But we won't know who is a good writer today until we have the perspective of time, which we likely won't live long enough to observe. Although, when Camus was writing, contemporaries knew how good his work was, and this transcended translation from French, and it could not be ignored. The same is true of Joyce. Great writing is not easy to read, necessarily, it is has a certain density, and no matter how many times it is repeatedly returned to, it never fails to lose it's sparkle, to reveal more with the same prose. You can't say that about Martin or King or Rowling. Again, I like Martin's creation, but I am not deluded into believing his writing is novel or compares to any of the Great Works by the Great Authors.
- Maursault 5y ago
  I'm getting downvoted, so I wanted to give a couple examples of very very good and novel writing to prove that Martin is a hack, in regards to his technical skill at writing. > All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. Is it unfair to compare Martin to Melville? Yes. They're quite in different worlds of ability. > The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. Martin can not even begin to approach Conrad. There is such notable depth here, as well as the discernible craft of a master of words, and you will find these in nearly every phrase within Heart of Darkness, and in none of, say, A Song of Fire and Ice. I'm going to double down. Martin is not a good writer, period. There is no quotation anyone is able to pull from his library and say, "wow, that is an excellent piece of writing." It can't be done, but I'd like to see someone try.
musicale 5y ago
> Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. He's both incredibly prolific and for the most part very creative and novel Yes - Brandon Sanderson is incredibly productive and well-organized and also actually good. (Ironically my problem with his work is that he produces it faster than I am motivated to read it, even when I know I would enjoy doing so. Given this state of reading motivation, I'd like to see the return of fantasy/SF novellas, though perhaps they are no longer economical.) In an alternate universe he would have helped to get Song of Ice and Fire finished before Game of Thrones outstripped its source material.
Fatnino 5y ago
Rothfuss' story really grabbed me for the first book and a half and then went completely off the rails in the last half of book two, to the point I'm not even disapointed he chose to abandon it. If someone else picks up the thread and wants to do something with it I sincerely hope they just chop off the crap with the sex fairy and pick up the story from before that happened.
knighthack 5y ago
> Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. He's both incredibly prolific and for the most part very creative and novel. I guess that's why he was hired to finish Robert Jordan's series. It was certainly a good fit, all things considered. Brendan Sanderson has already said that he won't touch the Game of Thrones series. I can see why - it's quite different, stylistically, but he has religious concerns, which I respect, for not doing so: https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/4uwjq9/comment/d5vjve3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/4uwjq9/comment/d5vj... > But the point is moot, as I wouldn't say yes to finishing ASOIAF, if asked. (And I don't think they'd ask me.) I'd respectfully decline. I wouldn't be right for the job for many reasons. I wouldn't want to put in the content that the series has, and part of that is due to my religious faith, part of it is just who I am. I don't shy away from difficult material, but I prefer not to get explicit. Honestly, when I read it in George's work, I often just cringe. I don't think it fits in prose; I think it looks tacky. But that's almost 100% due to the my religious leanings. I realize that others don't read such scenes in the same way as I do.

by marvin 5y ago

tsimionescu 5y ago

I don't know The Kingiller Chronicles so I'm not going to comment on that, but I don't think you can call A Song of Ice and Fire a masterpiece until you see it's ending. A lot of the quality is in the intricate plots it implies, but it has yet to resolve the vast majority of them, and if it falls flat, a lot of the majesty of what was started will turn put to have been smoke and mirrors. This is what the Game of Thrones TV show proved: overall the show should not be considered a masterpiece, even though the early seasons seemed good at the time, since the stories they were telling mostly led nowhere. Sure, it had its excellent moments, but that's about it - overall, it was a show about the good guys winning easily, women being irrational and just kinda forgetting, armies fighting without consequences, and so on. The fact that the early seasons made you think it would be a different story was proven an illusion by the end.

iamsaitam 5y ago
This is the issue in today's market driven society, there's a big crowd which seems very open to forgetting the pleasures brought up during the development process, when the end comes and is not to their liking. They would all be much more content if they weren't so keen in erasing their own memory.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  This is not a property of the market driven economy, it is a property of storytelling. For example, a story can have certain themes building up and exploring what you think are interesting directions, only for the ending to show a terrible conclusion to that theme. To give an extreme hypothetical example, lots of fantasy stories explore issues of race, and one could imagine a series that builds up a race conflict with complex characters on both sides, with only thinly veiled references to the real wod. If then the book were to end by showing that characters of a dark-skinned race are simply too stupid and evil, with even the moat interesting of them falling prey to his race's tendency for being criminal, readers would justifiably be horrified by the ending, and feel that the apparently interesting direction they were being led on was a lie, retroactively regretting having been nodding along with the author.
oneoff786 5y ago
Huh. I only watched the show and I felt it was much more guys being idiots, and women tending to be wiser if gender lines must be drawn. I thought the show, despite very poor quality writing for the final seasons, managed its plot lines pretty well. It didn’t bring in all the threads but it finished most of the ones that started. But the tone of things changed quite a bit following the red wedding. The red wedding, and the execution of Ned, were two fairly surprising events. They greatly shifted the arc of the story, and added a lot of drama to the world. After this event I felt everyone started wearing their plot armor heavily. Main characters went off on their adventures and couldn’t plausibly die without making a good deal of the story otherwise pointless to have pre existed. I didn’t feel anyone’s death mattered after those two events, which frankly is also fine. That’s a cool, novel story structure in itself.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Well, of the main female characters, one ends up an isolationist, another is a psychotic assassin who fed a lord his own children, two literally go mad and kill thousands, and only one has any positive development, the most mannish of them. > It didn’t bring in all the threads but it finished most of the ones that started. It finished them in abrupt ways that made all of the build-up irrelevant, and proved all of the thematic elements simple misreadings. Particularly the White Walkers were turned from a world-ending problem that could only be confronted using humanity's entire attention, from which political squabbles were a silly distraction, into a simple horde of zombies that could easily be killed by stabbing their leader with a good weapon, and who couldn't even destroy half of a band of light cavalry facing them in an open field. Also, Daenerys's complex character build-up, with elements of genuine desire to create a new Era of prosperity, but self-righteous belief in her own right to be at the head of that new Era, was made irrelevant as she became a raving genocidal maniac when her father's bad blood got to her seeing the old seat of her family's power. This is all glossing over all of the nonsensical decisions made by characters, the unexamined hypocrisy (to name the most egregious one, Daenerys executing a trusted advisor trying to poison her is presented as abhorrent, while Jon hanging the conspirators who killed him is presented as righteous, even if one of them was a 10 year old child).
  - 5y ago
fao_ 5y ago
This is what the Game of Thrones TV show proved: overall the show should not be considered a masterpiece, even though the early seasons seemed good at the time, since the stories they were telling mostly led nowhere. Oh, for only you could provide that wonderful evidence of which you talk about -- that proof for the first half of this quote. If only you could enlighten us all, cast the drapes from our eyes, and elucidate what difference lies between the fact of merely hinting at plots, and having an ending written, versus having the plots written, but the ending languishing in dreams. Sure, it had its excellent moments, but that's about it - overall, it was a show about the good guys winning easily, women being irrational and just kinda forgetting, armies fighting without consequences, and so on. The fact that the early seasons made you think it would be a different story was proven an illusion by the end. Thus, I am to take it that you feel the end of a work invalidates the whole? If I may be so bold as to talk about my experience, I find myself most content to read the latter half of a work, and circle around to the start. While I find myself most humble in hopefully not alluding to presume the minds of others, I do not think that the majority of people who cast their eyes over The Lord Of The Rings do so merely because they wish to find out what happens at the end? Surely, if they do so they must be rather disappointed by all of the videos and movies put forth in the years hence, that describe to one's eyes and culture the most intricate details of the ending in exact terms. It seems rather well documented, indeed -- it has been subsumed into our very culture, that the short of stature hobbits win their restless battle, in the end. That "Good" wins, and "Bad" fails. Alas, what reason is there to read the book now? For you already know the ending, why should one know the journey? Why open a book for which you know in advance the ending? Oh, simply the writer's prose, I suppose. Perhaps even, the skill and wit and deft of description. Merely the entire story and content of those soft white pages, before the last handful. From your perspective, surely you deem such things to be inadequate? After all, since a story only holds merit, if the ending holds merit, how could such things matter! I'll assent, that to be let down by an ending that you feel is shoddy or hastily jotted down by a perhaps all-too-sleep-deprived author, feels like being besmirched by their very hand at a prim and proper dinner party. And I shall even assent that these are all personal feelings, forthwit! What a dull and dreary world you must live in, it makes one sad. I truly pity you, and hope you too one day come to know the pleasure of taking the journey of things, and not just the finality.
seba_dos1 5y ago
So, what I take from your comment is that the author should simply declare the ending to be open and get a masterpiece status for free now instead of having to think hard about a satisfactory ending that could drag the whole story down!
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Well, an open ending can itself be satisfying or not. The current state of ASOIAF would have about 30 open major plots, most without any discernible relevant theme at their current state, so I would say that no, it would end up in the "irrelevant story with some nice ideas along the way" state if the last two books were truly the end of the story. Note the RR Martin does actually have many sci-fi stories with interesting, frustrating but thematically clear, open endings.
the_af 5y ago
> it was a show about the good guys winning easily We must have watched a different show. It was a show about the good guys losing, people who were "right" being killed, people who were "wrong" mostly being in command until very late in the show, and potential heroes being offed in the first season. There was a whole bunch of memes about not getting too attached to a likable "good" character, since Martin was likely to kill him/her.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  And yet, in the end, the good guys won, this is my point. The bad guys had a few temporary wins along the way, but they all lost in the end. Every last bad character died, almost all good characters survived and became the new lords and ladies of Westeros.
  - the_af 5y ago
    Sort of. The good guys won at the very end, and it wasn't easy. And lots of good characters were tortured and died along the way. It wasn't a clear cut "easy" win for the good guys. A major moral character dies in the first season!
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      They won the "Battle for the Dawn" in a few hours only losing half their army or less and only two significant characters mid-way through the season. They then won the final battle with even fewer losses after a few hours of fighting, with no major characters dying, in what would have been a clean victory where they would have been hailed as saviors, had Daenerys not gone insane after the victory. Even she was then easily defeated, with little consequence for her killer or the former prime Minister who publically condemned her, despite the fact that the kingdom was under the control of her fanatically loyal general and his fanatically loyal troops. There were more characters committing what amounted to suicide in the final few season than those who were killed by the horrors of war or scheming enemies. I would call all of this quite easy. Sure, along the way in previous seasons, a lot were tortured and died, but many of them turned out not to matter too much at all in the overall plot (particularly, Rob Stark, and arguably, Jamie Lannister).
Maursault 5y ago
I think you're using the term, masterpiece, too loosely. Martin's works are novels filled with stories, but there are not many interpretations of what he is describing. There are not layers upon layers of meaning, but instead, it simply is what it is, and there is little to no argument about what his words mean. J.R.R. Tolkien is a favorite of mine, but I would not talk about his writing skill, and what is fascinating about Tolkien has nothing to do with is writing but the world he created. I think Martin has similarities in this regard. But The Lord of the Rings has many interpretations. A Song of Fire and Ice, not so much. The Renaissance frescoes by Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel is a masterpiece, no one would rationally disagree. In comparison, A Song of Fire and Ice is merely pulp, i.e. popular writing that is generally regarded by academic experts of writing as poor quality. Tolkien influenced academics, and you can study Tolkien in certain lectures. Even Rowling is studied. I seriously doubt any university level professor would pull out A Song of Fire and Ice, or any of Martin's work, and develop a seminar around it, or spend a semester studying it to reveal the levels of complexity and novel style of prose, because it simply isn't there. Martin is very much a two dimensional thinker that writes in one linear dimension, his words have one single meaning, and scratching past the shallow surface of Martin's words doesn't reveal anything below it beyond the story it is telling. I think you should read more Melville, Hemingway, Miller, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Twain, Steinbeck, Salinger, Bradbury and Vonnegut, and many many others, before ever claiming anything by Martin is a "masterpiece." Just try to get out more.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Thank you for assuming my reading level. If you must know, I greatly enjoy (and have extensively read) people like Rushdie, Marquez, Kawabata, Hesse, Wolf and many others who indeed have a very specific and masterful writing style. I do agree that Martin doesn't have a way with words the way the greatest writers do - his writing is quite flat in terms of style. I disagree (tentatively) that ASOIAF is mere pulp - I think it makes some interesting social commentary, particularly on the effects of war and how it leaves everyone, winner or loser, worse off than they were (in his personal life, he was a conscientious objector and is a lifetime pacifist, so I do believe that these themes are likely to be intentional). He also seems to be making a point about how political concerns rightly or wrongly stop the world from acting against ever more clear and imminent threats, with the Long Night probably being an allegory for Global Warming. But, the jury is still out until he actually finishes his work. It may turn out that I'm reading entirely too much into this, and that the ending will be similar to the show, where righteous war wins the day (as long as you don't commit atrocities) and the long night is not a crucial problem to be fixed, but a mere zombie distraction from the important political topics of the day. If we ever got an ending like this (I do not believe we will ever get an ending of any kind), I would then agree with you that this is a work of pulp fantasy with little literary merit. But if the ending makes good on these themes, it may turn out to be a true masterpiece, even if the writing style is quite flat. There are, after all, writers like Balzac, who is still taught and studied and read, even if his writing style (at least in the translations I've read) is just as flat.

Freak_NL 5y ago

> Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. At that point the world has need of another writer on stand-by in case Sanderson's prematurely awoken from the dream.

dageshi 5y ago

Sanderson is on record as saying he wouldn't be able to finish Martin's work. Plus, Sanderson just had a $25 million kickstarter, he's at the point now where finishing others work would frankly be a waste of his time.

barney54 5y ago

Both GRRM and Rothfuss are great beginners of stories, but neither has shown the ability to end a big story. It’s sad. While they don’t “owe” us anything, not finishing shows a certain contempt for the fans.

burnished 5y ago
Consider that they have tried and failed. Where is the contempt in that?
mcphage 5y ago
> not finishing shows a certain contempt for the fans I think this is a case where Hanlon's Razor applies—why would you assume it's an act of contempt, instead of something simple like "finishing the stories is really hard, and they don't know how"?
seba_dos1 5y ago
How entitled one has to be to consider not finishing up a complex creative work "a certain contempt for the fans"? Haven't you ever struggle to finish a creative endeavor? I have tons of unfinished works in my portfolio, there's certainly some truth in that saying about the last 20% of work taking 80% of time - and finishing things up feels much less rewarding than starting something new.
lupire 5y ago
Would you rather have a story with a great ending but no beginning? Why not let the fans exercise some creativity and imagine how it would end? How does "end" even make sense when talking about a complex fictional history? 2021 is over but the story didn't "end". Life goes on. Endings are a silly modern invention. The ancient Greeks just killed off the characters to end the story.

cooperadymas 5y ago

> I'd rather live in a world where Martin and Rothfuss never finished their masterpieces than a world where the unfinished works never even existed. We are living in a world where a hundred, a thousand works even more marvelous never even existed, aren't we? > In fact -- has any fan fiction been published that attempts to continue these works Yes, an obscure HBO show titled Game of Thrones attempted it to universal disdain.

the_af 5y ago
> We are living in a world where a hundred, a thousand works even more marvelous never even existed, aren't we? I've seen this rhetorical point being used before, in several contexts, and it never makes any sense to me. It can be used to disregard any argument in favor of the existence of something. Let me explain why with an example: "I'd rather live in a world where my wonderful daughter exists, even if she has flaws and throws tantrums, rather her not being born at all". "Well, we live in a world where a lot of potentially wonderful babies were never born, aren't we?" And my answer is: yes, but I am talking about ONE specific baby (or book) who matters to me. Who cares about the others that never existed?
- cooperadymas 5y ago
  I think you are probably correct, and I was mostly being blithe in my original remark. However, I think the way of the world is that if Martin or Rothfuss or Jordan didn't exist in our reality, two things would happen. One, someone else would have risen up in their place and produced equally or more magnificent works that were as impactful as what we're is being discussed. Read up on Harry Seldon's work for more about this theory. Two, the OP to whom I was responding would have been affected by one of those works in a similar manner to how they were affected by our timeline's original. The idea here being, the work is unique and dramatic, yes, but a person will always find something to cling to and what attracts them is as much about the person as it is about the art itself. It isn't as if the generations that existed before GRRM had no noteworthy literature in their lives.

ubermonkey 5y ago

I disagree. Kingkiller is bog-standard fantasy. I read the first one because it was given to me, and having done so I bear no ill will to Rothfuss because I just don't care what happens. Generally speaking, though, I don't start trilogies or other serieses unless they're COMPLETE. Some SF/F fans go apoplectic when I say this ("You have to buy the early books to ensure there's demand!"), my counter is that I have no interest in fractional stories.

ModernMech 5y ago
Indeed, I was burned with both Serenity and Dollhouse. From now on I will wait until it’s syndicated thanks.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  TV <> books, though.
falcolas 5y ago
> bog standard high fantasy Complete with the OP MC trope. > I don't start trilogies or other serieses unless they're COMPLETE. That's my new rule too. Been burned too many times by favorite authors just dropping series. It gets old reeeally fast.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I would like to push against this because it results in some very terrible market behavior. You are effectively selecting for less trilogies released because of this, or only the people who publish trilogies are people with enough fan base (aka no debuts). What happens is actually the publisher drops the author! Rarely the author loses interest, more often the publisher sees the lack of sales and drops the author entirely, killing the series.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    I'd argue that the stories should be released as one book then, not three. There's often no need to release a single story as a trilogy, other than to make money. As it stands, there's too many other good authors out there who do either follow through with their promises or release great stand-alone books to waste money and time on incomplete stories.

Maursault 5y ago

> is magnificently inspired and novel writing I like the stories, but personally, I do not see much talent in Martin's writing, and I certainly don't think his writing style is "novel." Not at all unlike Stephen King, George R.R. Martin writes to the lowest common denominator, likely intentionally, to have a wider audience, to more efficiently make a buck. It would be laughably absurd to compare the quality Martin's work with that of, say, James Joyce, Albert Camus or Shakespeare. I don't quite understand those that appreciate the work of modern authors like J.K. Rowling and insist they are great writers. They're not great, they're just popular, and they're popular because anyone with a 4th grade education can enjoy and consume them. I hope I don't come off as snobbish. But we won't know who is a good writer today until we have the perspective of time, which we likely won't live long enough to observe. Although, when Camus was writing, contemporaries knew how good his work was, and this transcended translation from French, and it could not be ignored. The same is true of Joyce. Great writing is not easy to read, necessarily, it is has a certain density, and no matter how many times it is repeatedly returned to, it never fails to lose it's sparkle, to reveal more with the same prose. You can't say that about Martin or King or Rowling. Again, I like Martin's creation, but I am not deluded into believing his writing is novel or compares to any of the Great Works by the Great Authors.

Maursault 5y ago
I'm getting downvoted, so I wanted to give a couple examples of very very good and novel writing to prove that Martin is a hack, in regards to his technical skill at writing. > All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. Is it unfair to compare Martin to Melville? Yes. They're quite in different worlds of ability. > The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. Martin can not even begin to approach Conrad. There is such notable depth here, as well as the discernible craft of a master of words, and you will find these in nearly every phrase within Heart of Darkness, and in none of, say, A Song of Fire and Ice. I'm going to double down. Martin is not a good writer, period. There is no quotation anyone is able to pull from his library and say, "wow, that is an excellent piece of writing." It can't be done, but I'd like to see someone try.

musicale 5y ago

> Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. He's both incredibly prolific and for the most part very creative and novel Yes - Brandon Sanderson is incredibly productive and well-organized and also actually good. (Ironically my problem with his work is that he produces it faster than I am motivated to read it, even when I know I would enjoy doing so. Given this state of reading motivation, I'd like to see the return of fantasy/SF novellas, though perhaps they are no longer economical.) In an alternate universe he would have helped to get Song of Ice and Fire finished before Game of Thrones outstripped its source material.

Fatnino 5y ago

Rothfuss' story really grabbed me for the first book and a half and then went completely off the rails in the last half of book two, to the point I'm not even disapointed he chose to abandon it. If someone else picks up the thread and wants to do something with it I sincerely hope they just chop off the crap with the sex fairy and pick up the story from before that happened.

knighthack 5y ago

> Maybe they could both hire Brandon Sanderson to finish their works someday. He's both incredibly prolific and for the most part very creative and novel. I guess that's why he was hired to finish Robert Jordan's series. It was certainly a good fit, all things considered. Brendan Sanderson has already said that he won't touch the Game of Thrones series. I can see why - it's quite different, stylistically, but he has religious concerns, which I respect, for not doing so: https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/4uwjq9/comment/d5vjve3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/4uwjq9/comment/d5vj... > But the point is moot, as I wouldn't say yes to finishing ASOIAF, if asked. (And I don't think they'd ask me.) I'd respectfully decline. I wouldn't be right for the job for many reasons. I wouldn't want to put in the content that the series has, and part of that is due to my religious faith, part of it is just who I am. I don't shy away from difficult material, but I prefer not to get explicit. Honestly, when I read it in George's work, I often just cringe. I don't think it fits in prose; I think it looks tacky. But that's almost 100% due to the my religious leanings. I realize that others don't read such scenes in the same way as I do.