Anticipating "A Feast For Crows" by George R. R. Martin (Nov. 9)

I think your two posts just outlined why I'm glad I stepped away from all this.

Ha, that Times review. Just imagine sitting in with that book club of hers for a minute. Scarier than Martin's White Walkers imo.

it's odd that the heroic fantasy poles have become jordan and martin, jordan representing what the douchebags in the new yorker article think of as trad fantasy and martin the new-school gritty hotness, when like when jordan came out he was the new-school gritty hotness and terry brooks was the trad tired old fantasy dude.

the grittiness escalation race is dangerous, grrm is gonna end up the frank miller of never ending fantasy doorstops and we are going to enter early 90s image comics land. joe abercrombie is nu rob liefeld.

Glen Cook's Black Company is grittier than both combined; same with C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy from the early 90s.

I found Black Company gritty to the point of comedy, and quit reading it. May try to pick it up again, though.

still haven't read glen cook--is it steven erikson gritty (beleaguered soldiers caught up in a grand sweep of history beyond their control etc etc) or abercrombie gritty (swearing, sex, violence, dark dark dark)?

honestly the main reason i have yet to fuck with cook is that i can only find trade paperbacks. i like my fantasy fiction in mass market form so it's easy to carry and hide. those r scott bakker books were super embarrassing b/c they are huge with sub-games-workshop design.

Erikson gritty. Erikson owes a great deal to Black Co.

Hmmm. Cook is somewhere in between Erickson and Abercrombie, adam. Less of the descriptions of the actual injuries and maiming, but just as much death and darkness. But grander and more imaginative with more sweeping vision, not just the man-on-the-ground viewpoint.

Cook's vehicle for the Black Company's story is that the tale is told by one narrator, so whatever happens outside that person's sight/frame of reference is kinda glossed over. So you're told that the other mercs are out raping and pillaging but you don't have it all described to you around the campfire.

a nook/kindle might resolve people's self-consciousness about what they're seen reading. also, cook's sort of 'weird tales,' too, like a minimalist robert e. howard and hp lovecraft (in hp's lord dunsany mode) hybrid. he brings old resurrected gods and goddesses with revenant minions warring across john ford desertscapes and such. plus i think the perspectival trickery he's up to sometimes via-a-vis his narrator is on par with premium gene wolfe and sam delany

ebooks & audiobooks are a godsend when it comes to crappy cover consciousness.

i was ok with the original mass market grrm covers but the recent editions with the bold colors and cheesy gradient are atrocious. they look like janet evanovich novels.

the hbo tie in reprint is pretty awful too.

cover of the last erikson novel is A+ tho, would totally read in public.

Only problem with the Kindle version is the low-res version of the map of Westeros, but you can pull this up if you need a reference:

http://gameofthrones.net/images/Westeros_Maps/Map_Westeros_Political.gif

I am in portland for this wkend bcuz of a comix festival, are there any pdx fantasy thugz who have HBO and are watching this Sun night? No one I know here seems to have cable...

I just held in my hands the complete uncorrected proofs of Dance of Dragons!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YSI? ;)

HAET U

a guy from works arranged to finagle one! i won't get to read it for a long time tho, i might just wait cuz it looks like it would be annoying to read, all the stuff that supposed to be italics is underlined!

but it exists! that's the important thing! nearly 1000 pages (but on regular office paper, double space and bound like a kinkos type thing)

I do not understand how that got out from under lock and key. Do you know how tight security measures are for high-profile, long-awaited books like that??!??? Protect yourself and don't say a word about what's in it.

I bet it contains... WORDS

I'm about two thirds of the way though the second book now. Love them. Thank u ILX!

continuing from HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - will this be just for nerds? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE), AFFC spoilers ahead

i've read it and i don't know which one he means tbh. but the entire plotline with the brotherhood of the thingummy (i hope this is loose enough to not be considered a spoiler) is at least vaguely concerned with all of that, i suppose -- but in the vague-received-idea-of-robin-hood way, not the how-does-robin-hood-actually-function way

― thomp, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 11:38 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

i meant brienne's pov - fans seem hate it because all she does is ask people where sansa is, but its really a way of spotlighting the human wreckage of the war of the five kings, one of the book's best chapters is the one where the monkbro talks about being sent off to war imo

the brotherhood started out as a merry men kind of thing and turned into something more brutal and unsettling by AFFC

there's also the organization of armed monks that's reinstated towards the end of AFFC but who knows how they'll fit in

Violently, one suspects.

oh i didn't see the last revive of this thread! tamtam you should def. read something that is not robert jordan for your next go at epic fantasy whatever novels imo. but yeah: brienne and jaime and catelyn were the parts of the last two books i was conscious of continuing to enjoy. oh god, how long do i have until i have to read one of these again

haha do you have anything to recommend? because my friend is foisting his copies of robert jordan on me and i can only hold out so long

robert jordan owns fuck you

yo i am inqualified to discuss the literary merits of r. jordan, i accept this

it just seems like the 'man you really have to listen to dick's picks #2, #6, #7, #33 oh and i'll tape you all the shows from europe '72 that didn't go on the album' of fantasy fiction

haha

there are a bunch of good rec's in the old rolling fantasy genre thread tho tams

ot: i remember 'not really getting' what martin was trying to do w/ the armed monks/religous heavies stuff in the last book but that might just be the pitfall of trying to find 'real world' analogs/concerns for everything thats happening in the series

robert jordan gets sooo tedious.

i am going to shit this mini diatribe out here so that i don't foul up the tv show thread for the good folks who haven't read the books. every non-book scene in the latest episode was disgraceful.
1. renly and loras - what are they doing to renly?? his character seems so different from in the book, and he was such a well drawn character. he is all effete whereas in the book he is a fighter, just with more to him than robert who is only a fighter. and why the fuck are they talking about renly being king already? robert is still aliiiiiive. neither of them have any kind of motive to talk about ousting robert and renly is big on his biggest bro iirc. also, gay undertones were v cool when they were just undertones and you suddenly realized in book 2, "oh so...". that was v nicely handled by grrm imo. i guess on this point you can't blame hbo for hboing it.
2. littlefinger and varys - nooooooo. no. no. i thought it was kind of important that you never witness those two interacting alone. their relationship is left deliberately murky. and also the implications of what they were saying made no sense with ref to what at least littlefinger is shown to be up to in book 3. inaccurate and useless scene.
3. cersei and robert - cersei thought she had feelings for robert once?? what thee fucke? so stupidly rong. i got the impression that her being in love with her brother was kind of a plot point here, maybe an important one. why were they being so civil? the whole tone of the conversation was off.
and to make room for this shit, the trip to the vale and the useful particulars of the eyrie were gutted and the ongoing revelation re the king's bastards was kinda shoehorned in. BAH.

I APOLOGIZE FOR THIS POST

Loras and Renly are both pretty much ciphers in the book. Renly's not gonna be around long so i imagine they're trying to give his demise a little more resonance.

2. littlefinger and varys - nooooooo. no. no. i thought it was kind of important that you never witness those two interacting alone. their relationship is left deliberately murky. and also the implications of what they were saying made no sense with ref to what at least littlefinger is shown to be up to in book 3. inaccurate and useless scene.

i agree with this! part of me loves the idea of a scene between the two, but i reacted p negatively to that scene. it felt way too on the nose for those characters.

that said i think you can justify both that scene and the renly scene in the context of the show - they're still laying groundwork for the uninitiated. im not sure how clear varys' role was up until now, and having him interact like that w/littlefinger explains a lot about both of their power dynamics. the renly scene is like the new theon material, who does almost nothing in the first book - laying the foundation for season 2 so viewers at the bare minimum know who these characters are.

i actually didn't realize that renly & loras were gay while i was reading the books (it seems comically obvious in hindsight)(RAINBOW GUARD), for a couple of reasons - one is that martin never seemed to be coy about sex, so i figured if he was going to introduce gay characters he'd just show them plowing each other. but i think i wasnt taking into account that he's a dirty old fucker who just writes the kind of lurid sex scenes that get him hot & bothered. the other is that most of the "evidence" is in the form of other people making childish "lol what about your butt-buddy renly" jokes that i didnt think were supposed to be taken seriously. but i think its cool that the show's making it more explicit, i found myself wondering where all the queer characters were when i was reading it and its alright to foreground those aspects imo.

i thought the cersei & robert scene was good (if not particularly true to my conception of the cersei character), though lena headey was making some really weird... i dont know if there's something wrong with her eye, but she was making some distracting faces that sorta looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/hkAkX.gif

Well it would be difficult to explicitly show that they're gay considering neither of them are POV characters.

yeah but when the red viper is introduced, the book basically just says HE FUCKS BOYS. everyone's a lot more coy about renly & loras.

just finished feast for crows!

it felt like such a.... half-book. BUT it was nice to see grrm tackling stuff that i had been pretty conscious of him missing in the first 3 books -- the political power of religion, the experience of war on the ground (as ptamtam says upthread)

i like that martin seems to have affection and some degree of respect for his female characters but its kind of bugging me how STUPID they all are. with the exception of arya i guess? but cersei is just so transparently idiotic and brienne is a fumbling moron and sansa... well sansa is barely a character. even catelyn ends up being not as smart as robb.

tbh i didnt really give a shit about jon and stannis and the wall. or danaerys. i kind of dont care whats happening over there! way more interested in tyrion... and bran! and the reeds! i am really hoping we can get some scenes set at the neck w the crannogmen and howland reed.

also the iron islands... i dngas. i thought there was going to be something cool with the dragon horn but that petered out.

also this guy loves lesbian sex huh

frankly i hope podrick payne wins the game of thrones. #teampodrick

Hoping for some Howland Reed action too. And i guess Tyrion and Daenerys are gonna meet up at some point.

Re the female characters: yeah but almost everyone in GRRM's books is ultimately not too bright in a way that leads to his or her messy demise. There's just a lot more male characters than female ones, but I'm not sure intelligence/survival rates are disproportionate?

Very superior of you guys with your omniscient viewpoints to call the characters stupid.

I'm DYING to find out what Bran and the Reeds do and how Bran finds his secret powers and what exactly they are. Also, I remain 100% convinced that Arya and her direwolf are going to be re-united and that moment is going to make like 5 books' worth of material totally worth it.

i dunno i was kind of struck by how much smarter jaime and kevan are than cersei. and.... everyone is smarter than brienne. and even catelyn gets outwitted by robb several times! danaerys and arya seem pretty competent i guess.

i think the next book is really gonna bug me... like i was saying i was happy to not pay attention to the wall and danaerys and im not looking forward to returning to those plotlines unless some real game-changing shit is going to happen. its hard to juggle a lot of plotlines, and GRRM is better at it than most, but its like... im okay with rickon and the wildling woman just disappearing! I dont need sixteen chapters set from oshas point of view! and i wish he would take that attitude with some of the other stuff. sansa stark at the vale? please, just keep me updated during the kings landing chapters and ill be okay.

Very superior of you guys with your omniscient viewpoints to call the characters stupid.

― Number None, Friday, May 20, 2011 2:24 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha but EVERYONE thinks cersei and brienne are stupid. in the book! they get outwitted CONSTANTLY

Nah i know. I think Cersei just sort of blinded by rage/power. Brienne's dopey "I'm looking for my sister... thing was pretty annoying

Oh yeah, Theon will be back too and he's gonna totally redeem himself. Maybe.

Yeah Cersei is a case study in hubris; she basically plotted and manipulated and bode her time, but when she made her move she grossly overreached and threw all of her caution to the wind.

i like that martin seems to have affection and some degree of respect for his female characters but its kind of bugging me how STUPID they all are

i think a lot of hes trying to make a point abt how belief in/adherence to any particular code blinds a person to the reality of someone who doesnt accept the same code & so makes them unable to anticipate/manipulate those ppl. with ned its his code of conduct with sansa its her belief in romantic chivalry with cersie its her own infailability &c &c also i think he wants to show how characters that exist on the margins or 'outside' society are better able to see things for what they really are, theyre less fettered by preconceived notions & so can operate w/in the game more effectively

so its not that theyre STUPID theyre just beholden to outmoded or ineffective codes of conduct or beliefs. otoh... sansa.

poor Sansa

I ended up feeling really sorry for her

OK can someone clarify something? In the map posted above, I distinctly count eight kingdoms. Is Winterfell not a kingdom? Or is it that King's landing is a capital territory—like DC or Canberra—and therefore does not count as a kingdom?