> I am behind on work because American Airlines doesn't have proper power points in International first class like, er, all the other airlines I've flown on in the last few years.
> (They offered to sell me an adapter for $150 to plug in the battery-dead computer, and I probably should have said yes to keep working, but was so outraged, and had decided not to fly American in future, so it would never have been used again, and said no.)
Regardless of the "real" point of the article I was totally irritated by that. How would any company rationalize behavior like this? Do "rich" people flying first class really normally just shell out $150 instead of deciding (like Gaiman did) to just not fly them again?
We've all been pissed off by an airline and vowed not to fly with them again... Until we planned another trip and that airline was the cheapest and/or most convenient.
Airlines know this. There isn't a huge choice for consumers.
Oh I don't know about that... I swore off Ryanair after one bad experience too many, around 2013, and have managed to avoid them ever since. I've intentionally bought more expensive tickets from Lufthansa and Swissair (iirc) where Ryanair would have been cheaper - and it was my own money, not business travel where I could claim the expense back.
I don't see myself ever using them again - barring hypothetical scenarios where I desperately needed to go somewhere and they were only airline flying there.
And they lost more than 1 person's business - I've gladly "upgraded" my travel companions on 3 occasions so far, paying either their full ticket or price difference, so we could fly together on anything-but-ryanair.
I keep reading (possibly sensationalized) news pieces about their latest cost saving measures like banning employees from charging their phones at work, and my disgust reinforces my intention to never have anything to do with them.
I have the sense that being a "captive" customer to a single carrier, or two carriers at most, is a predominately American problem.
Here in Houston -- a huge city in the middle of the country -- it is far, far easier to fly United than any other carrier for any long-haul route. Southwest is an option for close US locations, and that's great, but United is what you're using to go to either coast.
Sure, there ARE other airlines here. There are LOTS of them. But if you want to go to the UK on something other than United, you better be going to wherever that other carrier goes, because you won't have a lot of options. (EG, Singapore flies direct to Manchester, but that's it. Emirates flies to Dubai nonstop every day, but has no other legs in Houston.)
I think it's quite common. Once saw a proeminent warning in a five star hotel that cautioned Wi-Fi is only free for the first month of your stay. So, if you're spending more than a month in that five star hotel, you'd better start paying for Wi-Fi as well.
It's true, there's nothing about laptop chargers in the American Airlines Contract of Carriage[1], so clearly he should see to his own entitlement issues for expecting that courtesy.
I remember when this came out. I agree with the sentiment, but I think that as an audience you have every right to feel cheated that someone told you half a story and then never finished it. Sure, they didn't owe it to you, but it's still a shitty thing to do.
Like if a friend offered to help you move and then never showed up. Hey, I'm not your bitch! They might say. No, but they said they'd do something and then they didn't do it, so from now on people are going to take that into consideration and rightly consider them a bullshitter who doesn't follow through.
I've pretty much written off any hope of ever reading the rest of A Song of Ice and Fire and also The Kingkiller Chronicles (by a different, also wildly unreliable author, what is it with these guys). Yeah, they're not my bitch. They don't owe me anything, it just sucks that they turned out to be bullshitters.
Specially since the fact that George R. Martin can now enjoy his life, and not work is thanks to this same audience. Those who treat their audience like shit, is due to lost everything.
His readers (not audience) paid to buy the books he had written. They didn't pay him to write books in the future. I really don't understand this bizarre "fandom" idea that a writer owes his readers something beyond what they have paid for. It's a polite fiction that some writers unfortunately indulge, but the fact that you've paid a small amount of money to read a book doesn't impose any future obligation on its author.
His publishers might have cause to be annoyed if they have a contract for more books, but the readers, however disappointed, don't have a moral right to dictate a writer's future labour. And that's what writing novels is—it's work for money, like programming or plumbing, not some mystical calling or vocation.
No, his readers paid and followed him to hear a story. Of course he doesn't literally, in a legal sense, owe anything to them. And of course they are not entitled to harass him in any way.
But they are entitled to feel cheated, and loudly proclaim that they were cheated. Especially with a story as full of intrigue as A Song of Ice and Fire.
By comparison, fans of Agatha Christie's work would not have any entitlement to complain if she stopped after three novels, as those novels were complete works in and of themselves. But they would have every reason to complain if she published the first half of And Then There Were None, but never published the ending.
Why? Do you feel that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not telling a complete story unless you also read Murder on the Orient Express?
Note that I'm not saying some fans wouldn't have been pressuring her into writing more if she had stopped. I'm saying those fans, unlike the ASOIAF fandom, wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Every story has details not followed up on. Just like real life.
LOST had an ending but it was terrible because the story kept piling on more bullshit.
GOT TV had an ending and it was terrible.
ASOIAF is a short chronicle (yet still full of many great characterizations, episodes, and plot lines) of characters coming and going through the world. Some plot lines start in the middle, some end in the middle, because neither us nor GRRM are immortal beings.
>Do you feel that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not telling a complete story unless you also read Murder on the Orient Express?
That's completely irrelevant. Everyone is entitled to feel however they feel and think whatever they think and should not be precluded from voicing their opinions. Why should your opinion of the relative completeness of one story versus another determine whether someone else is permitted to express disappointment with a story?
That's not the question. The point is whether you are entitled to feel an author is cheating you by not writing a new novel in a series you like.
My contention is that George RR Martin is cheating his ASOIAF readers by spending time on other works instead of writing the next ASOIAF novel.
By contrast, I don't think Agatha Christie would have been cheating her Poirot fans in any way by writing Miss Marple novels instead of Poirot ones.
The reason I draw this difference is that you can enjoy (or hate) any particular Poirot book individually. By contrast, you can't really like A Dance With Dragons without knowing if what happens next to some of those characters actually resolves the tension and mystery in a satisfying way (or doesn't resolve it, but in a satisfying meaningful way, like a good open ending).
> They didn't pay him to write books in the future. I really don't understand this bizarre "fandom" idea that a writer owes his readers something beyond what they have paid for.
Do this day, 12 years after this was written, he blogs about how the books are his top priority. He is certainly giving his readers the idea that he owes them a finish by constantly communicating that he will finish.
I paid with the expectation that he would finish the story. Since he didn't I wont buy more of his books until he stop procrastinanting other porjects and release the full story.
Look, I understand. If I had made so much money like he had, I would be now snoring cocaine over strippers instead of writing. But I had the expecation that in his age, he would be more responsable then me.
> They didn't pay him to write books in the future.
No, but HBO did, he (co?)wrote Fire and Blood to give them material for a new GoT style TV show; they probably paid him so much to cram its writing in between the mainline ASoIaF books. On top of the licenses for the once popular TV show.
> And that's what writing novels is—it's work for money, like programming or plumbing, not some mystical calling or vocation.
I agree with your overall comment, but this is not entirely true. For many writers, writing is a vocation. They would do it even if they couldn't make a living out of it, just like a painter would paint even if nobody commissioned any of their work.
It just happens that for a relatively small percentage of writers, writing is a viable way to make enough money to make a living.
Ok, in the case of a series of novels the promise to eventually finish the story is not explicit, as in someone promising to help you move, but other than that, I agree with the point you are making.
For Stephen King, it took 22 years and a wake up call in the form of an accident that nearly killed him to get him to finish his "magnum opus", the Dark Tower cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(series)). So I haven't completely given up hope about ASOIAF yet, but I'm not holding my breath either...
I mean, it's kind of implicit when someone starts telling a story that the story is going to come to some kind of conclusion at some point since that's how stories work. It's not something that usually needs to be stated.
I take your point though, but I think they've also explicitly stated that they intend to finish it at some point.
The start is only valuable if there is an end, especially for a novel built on mystery and intrigue. When George RR Martin will, sadly, die without having finished A Song of Ice and Fire, all its parts will be forgotten by history (except, perhaps, A Game of Thrones), as they only work as scaffolding for a future ending (save a few extraordinary moments here and there, like the Red Wedding). But if by some miracle he finishes them (and it would be a miracle by this point, given he has spent more than a decade writing the next book, with no end in sight), and if the finale holds up to the quality of the mysteries he has built up, then it may be remembered right next to Lord of the Rings as one of fantasy writing's greatest masterpieces.
I don't think Game of Thrones lost money. I would guess HBO paid George Martin well.
Moreover, I think that in the eyes of most, GoT would have been better without going beyond Martin's published works. In other words: finishing that story significantly reduced its value.
In case you think this is an exception: Matrix, Terminator, Coupling, How I Met Your Mother, Battlestar Galactica reimagined: all stories whose value was diminished greatly by their ending.
Are you talking about the 4th season with Oliver? I mean, he was no Jeff, but it wasn't all bad—and Jane got a bit more depth, which I appreciated. Or do you mean the actual series finale with Susan having the baby?
If you bought the beginning based on the implicit (and explicit) promise that the story would be finished, because A. stories usually have an ending, and B. they've both said many times that they are going to finish them, then yeah you did kind of get cheated, you bought them under false pretenses.
If George R.R. Martin wrote 5 books and told everyone "Hey, here's half a story, I'm never going to finish it", most people probably would not have bought it and HBO probably wouldn't have spent millions of dollars producing a TV show about it.
> and HBO probably wouldn't have spent millions of dollars producing a TV show about it
But they did. I don't think HBO had any confusion about what they bought, and the series being unfinished was either not a problem for them, or possibly a plus.
This is the exception that proves the rule: The whole reason people sit and listen to shaggy dog stories for so long is that they're expecting some sort of satisfactory conclusion to the story; and the reason people are (in my experience) typically angry at the teller of the story afterwards is that the implicit promise of a satisfactory conclusion has been purposely broken.
I mean if you're going to try and be all 'on-topic'..
Its important to note that you're making details up in your analogy. It is implicit in your story that the storyteller intended a betrayal of expectations, otherwise the emotional response wouldn't make any sense. It is also a very limited scope of time which is hugely important in how people see abandoning a project. At this point your anecdote and the topic of discussion have nothing to do with each other.
It is reasonable to experience disappointment that this story will likely never be concluded. Going past the place of having and owning one's emotions into angry blaming is not reasonable. This is the point of TFA, taking any understandable bad feelings around not getting what you wanted and transmuting them into specific directed grievances or demands is embarrassingly entitled behavior. I don't think this will be controversial to you, but I did want to mark the difference.
I think you're reading more into my comment than intended. Someone said, there is an implied promise of a conclusion when you start telling a story. Someone responded, well, that's not true with shaggy dog stories. My response to that person is, on the contrary -- shaggy dog stories are what they are because there is an implicit promise, which they break. That there is an implicit promise was my only point; I didn't mean to comment at all on the situation w/ Game of Thrones.
Perhaps "promise" is too strong of a word; "intention"?
I certainly don't think Martin, when he started writing Game of Thrones, was planning on leaving his work unfinished. If he had, then he'd certainly deserve some annoyance, just as the teller of shaggy dog stories does. Nor do I even think that Martin got to a certain point and then said, "Welp, I'm rich now, I can just sit back and relax; no need to do that pesky writing stuff any more." And if that was his attitude, then I think he deserves some annoyance.
Presumably there's a part of him that would like to finish them off, but finds it difficult for whatever reason. I think that's unfortunate, naturally, but as long as he has, within himself, made a good-faith attempt to move things towards completion, then I think he's held up his end of the bargain. And I agree that the expectation of anything more is toxic entitlement.
I would argue that A Song of Ice and Fire is not a series of novels, it is a single novel in many parts. Perhaps A Game of Thrones can be considered a stand-alone novel in its own right, but the others have little in the way of a self-contained plot, especially the last two books.
It's similar to The Lord of the Rings in this way - it would be pretty disingenuous to call, say, The Two Towers "a standalone novel", as it tells several disparate plots that start nowhere and mostly end nowhere, and have little interaction with each other. But that is not to say that it is not an excellent part of the Lord of The Rings.
Some novel "series" are really just a single work. GRRM's and JRRT's are certainly examples. Rothfuss' is, too.
The other example is something like Scalzi's Old Man's War books. They are all in the same universe, and expand on the story told in the first, but they stand alone as novels, too. You don't need to have read the first to enjoy a "later" one, though the later one probably contains spoilers about the earlier one.
Then you get kinda neither one nor the other books, like The Revelation Space books from Alistair Reynolds. There IS an overarching plot, but you could also come in late, and each book has its own "local" plot.
Another good example of a disparate series that has connected narrative threads but is nevertheless perfectly readable from any point, and where each individual novel is a complete work in itself, is the fantastically funny Discworld series from Terry Pratchett. There are recurring point of view characters who change and grow across the 50 or so novels, yet each novel is a complete story in its own right (well, with the only exception of the very first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic).
The wonderful thing is that many (if not most) Discworld novels can be read standalone in any order. Yes, you'll miss some references and subtleties, and recurring characters are better if you know their traits, but still they work standalone.
Some are truly standalone (Monstruous Regiment, Small Gods, Going Postal, The Truth, etc), some aren't but can be mostly read in random order (wizards, witches, city watch).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I agree. The white walkers just being beaten felt like a bad conclusion to that arc.
Dragon girl’s felt like it was “good” but the execution of the show’s build up was terrible. Her going psycho felt like it was… intended to be foreshadowed even though it really wasn’t?
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.
I'm not sure how, but you seem to have deduced that I am somehow against... spoilers?
My point is that a plot can seem interesting and mysterious while you are reading it, but only the ending will tell you if that feeling was justified or not. For example, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is not in any way dulled by knowing how it ends, the moments where you were reading about Orpheus trying to reach Hades and not yet knowing if he'd succeed are not in any way wasted if you know how it does end - the dramatic tension is beautifully resolved, if tragically so.
If instead the story ended with Orpheus, given the right to try to leave hell with his beloved if only he never looks back would turn around to ask her what time dinner would be ready, as he just kinda forgets about Hades' deal, or he starts remembering some other woman he likes more and doesn't even care if Eurydice is no longer there; then the whole thing would be easily written off as a hack job and not remembered for some 2000 years later.
Simialrly, the reason the ending of the Game of Thrones TV show destroyed the value of its entire story isn't simply that we found out how it ends, it's because most of what seemed in earlier seasons to be building up was proven to have been irrelevant.
For example, for the longest time, you wondered if the world could band together and whether it could survive the threat of the White Walkers. However, the show made that out to have been an irelevant worry, since the whole White Walker army was easily defeated by a random assassin with a random knife (well, one made of good steel, but nothing more), who just had to find a moment when the main baddie had his back turned. The White Walker army turned out to be unable to even defeat half of the armies that stood against them in an open field - they were really a non-issue in the end.
Even the themes of climate change, of politics and old rivalries and mistrust getting in the way of necessary action - these are all wiped out and proven to have been incorrect readings of the show. The White Walkers weren't a metaphor for external problems that an inward looking system can't solve, they were just ice zombies that are hard to kill individually, but easily coapse if you kill the queen bee.
Similarly, for the entire duration of the show we look at Daenerys Targaryen and see how she confronts the antiquated, monstrous systems she encounters, and wonder if she can truly defeat them. Then, near the moment of her opportunity to do so, she snaps and goes crazy (according to the writers themselves) and decides to burn down the very people she has been trying to help. Any character building she had shown is made irrelevant, as it's simply the bad genes she inherited from her mad father that make her fantasy Hitler in the end. Not her haughtyness, not her tendency for retribution, not her belief in her own rights as a monarch - things that could have led to an interesting descent into madness or evil - no, just her bad blood.
Oh, this is a tech focused forum so you might not know this, sometimes people take joy in writing and play with the language while otherwise still sharing their real thoughts.
You're right that it was a shallow dismissal and not a constructive critical comment. I'm sorry for that poor behavior. Thanks for calling me out.
For the record, I picked up the first book of ASOIAF after loving GRRM's beautiful novella The Hedge Knight, I believe written for the Legends anthology I discovered it in.
I was deeply, profoundly disappointed in it and never touched another book in the series again. It fell so miserably short of The Hedge Knight that I would need multiple pages to fully express my disappointment.
I read The Hedge Knight last (well, the whole Dunk & Egg I mean) and I liked it. I found it to be a compressed, fast-forwarded version of A Game of Thrones. But the style elements and plot devices are all there, and I find them to be mostly the same. What is it that you liked in Hedge Knight but disliked in A Game of Thrones? Was it the supernatural element (dragons, zombies, etc)?
(I realize this might be hard to answer, and that's fine!)
The Hedge Knight does a wonderful job of contrasting Dunk's pure, steadfast insistence on doing what's right and upholding a knight's duty no matter the cost with the selfish meaningless insanity of the political machinations around him.
I was really excited to dig into the whole series based on how well the author pulled different elements together into that overall structure.
As I worked through the first book, I slowly realized "Oh. This is all about the meaningless sound and fury of political maneuver, backstabbing, and treachery, signifying nothing... along with an overdose of prurience."
What would take me pages to do (and hours to revisit the story) is explain in detail all the things that work so well and come together to make The Hedge Knight's overall effect what it is, and then to explain just how much that element is missing in A Game of Thrones.
I have absolutely no interest in revisiting A Game of Thrones in order to make this point thoroughly and well, so I doubt I'll ever write a full, detailed explanation of my disappointment.
I have tried writing for the sheer love and joy of words many times.
I rarely get good results, but I have certainly enjoyed trying.
I work hard to avoid fancy words in my writing these years. I value clarity over ornament in most of what I write at present.
For dexterous use of language my favorites are probably J. R. R. Tolkien (the only fantasy author who can really write Old High Forsooth reliably well, IMO), P. G. Wodehouse (a true master of comedy, at whose feet Douglas Adams studied), and probably Robin McKinley (see especially her book Beauty).
The shallow, negative dismissal was poor behavior on my part.
I was applying a standard to the original comment I should probably reserve for published novels, and I was doing it without providing any useful critical feedback, in a cantankerous way.
I know that and it's fine, when done in moderation. When it's over the top like this it's just tedious to read, and it's not impressive someone has a thesaurus close at hand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
So the good guys mostly lost through the show, many permanently killed, with whole cities laid to waste and innocents and guilty alike slaughtered, and the victors proved either morally gray or outright mad, and they only won at the very end of the series, and you consider this "easily winning"?
I guess the Allies also "easily won" against Hitler then ;)
No, there were very clear good guys, with slight shades of gray - Sansa, Sam, Davos, Jon, Arya, Tyrion, Brianne, Bran, Robin, Yara: all of their actions in the final few seasons are portrayed as at least justified if not outright heroic, even some of those that were arguably psychotic (Arya slaughtering the Freys and feeding them to Walder).
Conversely, there were very clear bad guys, with no redeeming qualities: The Night's King, Euron Greyjoy, Cersei, The Mountain, Qyburn, and Daenerys after she goes mad.
There were a few characters portrayed as morally gray (Jamie, Bron, perhaps Varys and Greyworm). But the vast majority were very clearly portrayed as either heroes or villains in the final season.
I partially disagree, and think GRRM (and the TV show) mostly paint morally ambiguous characters with some redeeming qualities and some grievous flaws.
Of these, I consider only Sam, Davos and Brienne to be "clear good guys". Jon arguably comes last. You missed Eddard, the one truly moral character that gets killed because of this (I think this was GRRM effectively showing that moral good guys will get killed if they cannot be a little devious). Let me explain why the others aren't, in my opinion:
- Sansa is portrayed almost as stupidly naive. From the beginning she buys into all sort of courtly things that -- even if true -- were pretty shallow. And they turned out to be untrue. When she finally wakes up to the harsh realities, later in the show, she becomes manipulative and cold. She's on the right side, sure, but you can easily see her turning into another Cersei, given the chance. So she's either painfully stupid or dangerously vindictive.
- Arya joins a death cult and becomes callous. She's driven by hatred and vengeance. Again, you could easily see her turning into an assassin for hire. You already mentioned her psychotic outbursts.
- Tyrion... well, there's a lovable but definitely morally gray character. No need to explain further, I'm surprised you included him as a clear-cut "good" guy. Maybe because he's the only likable Lannister and stole the TV show.
- Bran starts as likable and gradually turns into an enigmatic, unempathetic, alien creature. Who knows what he's thinking, he certainly won't tell. Some fans speculated (incorrectly, it turns out) he was going to turn into a Big Bad mastermind by the end of the show. Even if this was incorrect, it shows the character was not perceived as unarguably "good".
- Robin. Is this the teenage lord of the Eyrie, the one who still was sucking from his mother's breast, was very capricious, easily manipulated, and eager to let prisoners "fly" out of the Moon door? This was a very creepy character, not a good guy.
- Yara. An amoral pirate, willing to kill or be killed for power. It just happened that she didn't truly hate her brother and that her relatives were even worse.
Re: the bad guys. I mostly agree with your list except (Euron Greyjoy in particular was an irritating charicature, and they didn't even bother with the Night's King), but for two exceptions:
- Cersei. It's true she's the main villain -- other than the walkers -- of the latter seasons, but she's nuanced. She's obviously suffered. She's driven mad by grief and power lust, but she's also a woman in a world of men. She refuses to become simply the concubine of a powerful lord, or a mother. And she's truly capable of love, though the objects of her affections are sometimes misplaced (and she's quick to hate as well). I think there are admirable traits in Cersei's character, not enough to overlook she's also a mad, self-destructive murderess, but enough to consider she has her shades of gray.
- Daenerys is mostly the good gal until she suddenly turns mad. You don't get to ignore she was good for most of the series, so you cannot place her in the "clear bad guys" box.
Re: gray characters. Yes, Jame, Bron, Varys. Most in the small court in Kingslanding. Most of the nobles. Most of the soldiers, be it free men or slaves. I don't you can claim most weren't gray, when the whole show is populated mostly by morally gray characters!
The final episodes of the final season are not the whole show. If they were, you could claim Cersei is mostly a dead woman in GoT, just because she dies in the final chapter.
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.
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.
> But, the jury is still out until he actually finishes his work.
I don't think it could possibly matter. Assuming he writes the most amazing ending in the history of the written word, it could not possibly change anything he wrote before to suddenly have mastery, depth and/or beauty. You wouldn't need to read the second half of Camus' The Stranger to determine whether the first half has any good writing in it. You can divide a good work into sentences, and even phrases, and randomly pull them out, without context, and still determine whether the writing is bad, ok, good, or exceptional.
I certainly don't think Martin is boring, nor do I regret the time it took to read, and I liked it in pieces and overall, even if it at times is a bit indulgent. But let's not insult the masters. Just because we like something doesn't mean it must intrinsically be any good.
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.
> 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"?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sure the authors would also love to release their work together but, again, this is a gate on the publishers side. The publisher is the one that refuses to invest in authors, resulting in situations where authors who could write amazing trilogies and multi book series are gated or dropped too early before their careers can really take off. Writing a stand-alone is different skill than writing a series.
Authors are, in this day and age, no longer bound to their publishers. Self publishing is both easy and widely practiced.
Perhaps not ironically, my current favorite authors (Forthright, Travis Baldree, Honor Raconteur) do not go through traditional publishers. They also don't drop series in the middle of the story because of market forces.
Self publishing is not at all easy. It’s a completely different thing with very different necessary skills to succeed. An author may not have the skills nor time necessary to successfully self publish. (Off the top of my head- just keeping track of sales/sale trends, reaching out to booksellers, organizing your own marketing campaign, editor, cover art, rights management, etc.)
FWIW, most of the books published today have been self published. The books handled by publishers are just the tip of the iceberg.
As for those skills - these are skills common to every entrepreneur, including authors who work with publishers (they still need to do their own promotions and market research - they are the ones who propose new series to the publishers, after all).
> You are effectively selecting for less trilogies released because of this
I'm ok with this. I wish they made more single-novel SF&F stories. It seems everything wants to be a trilogy or a saga, with an eye to a Netflix/HBO adaptation.
Meaning Kvothe (not a spoiler) kind of has all his stats maxed out except wisdom, which allows the plot to move forward.
I did thoroughly enjoy the world that was built in the first book, but couldn't stand his stupidity in the second, and stopped reading. It didn't help that I knew the trilogy wasn't finished.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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/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.
While you're right, you can feel cheated, it shouldn't mean that you need to nag someone about it. I've not read the books (though saying I was disappointed with the ending of the TV adaptation, is a massive understatement), but I've had other examples. All that should do is lose trust in that person, and potentially avoid their uncompleted other work, because the same thing might happen.
Taking your example, if my friend doesn't show up, assuming I don't buy his excuse, it means a) I lose trust in him when it comes to something that matter, and b) I'm less likely to ask him to help me move next time.
You're right, nobody should be harassing the authors. That doesn't mean they can't voice their disappointment, even publicly, even in places where the authors might read it and feel bad and cause other authors to write defensive posts about not being anyone's bitch.
While the people harassing the authors are a bigger pain in the ass, those people at least still care. The bigger problem will be all the fans who silently drift away. The ones who, when a friend asks them about the series, will tell them "yeah, don't bother with that, it's never going to be finished".
> That doesn't mean they can't voice their disappointment, even publicly, even in places where the authors might read it and feel bad and cause other authors to write defensive posts
This was "writing to another author attempting to egg him on to also voice his disappointment". Neil Gaiman didn't just stumble across someone's voiced disappointment, it was specifically directed to him. They just didn't get the response they were hoping for.
A Song of Ice was that twisted the plots in a way that made you wonder just how on earth will it all end. That is a big part of the appeal to the books. The catch is the plots don't go anywhere and there was never a plan for them to do so.
So it doesn't just "feels like being cheated". It really is cheating. Over promising and hyping and never delivering.
Rothfuss is a special case as he, or at least his publisher claimed that the next two books were already written and only needed to be edited. That was one of the reasons I bought the first book early before any later books were released. Starting an unfinished series is always a gamble, I generally don't mind it but I'm also okay with not always getting a satisfying conclusion, or any conclusion at all. But I don't appreciate being lied to about the state of the later books like this.
For larger series with more than 2-3 planned books I would generally be wary now, and the only one of that kind I'm reading is Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson who has a very solid track record of delivering on his promises.
This doesn't justify the vitriol these two authors receive at times. But it is certainly valid to be disappointed in them. It has also lowered by opinion about their writing, as in both cases it has made it clear that they wrote themselves into a corner, and that some of the most intriguing parts of the early books probably have no substance at all and were mere illusions.
you have every right to feel cheated that someone told you half a story and then never finished it.
Yet this isn't what happened. He was working on it, and people were complaining that he was doing other things.
EG "You, like, totally went to the movies, and the next book isn't done??!" kind of posts and emails to him.
His creative process is his, and his alone. Doing "other stuff", does not mean his mind isn't thinking of what to write, or where to go with the plot.
Thus, in as at that point he never said "no new book", all upset emails were literally nagging him, and complaining that he should do nothing but write.
Really, the very essence of a micro manager, solely looking a lines of code as proof of work done, yet Martin isn't even in their employ!
>I agree with the sentiment... but it's still a shitty thing to do
Well no, clearly you don't agree with the sentiment. Maybe you wish you did.
There can be many reasons why an author never completes a work. Creative writing isn't something you can just turn on like a tap. I'm sure George could just sit and write a few hundred thousand words, get an editor to knock it into shape, slap it on shelves and call the job done, but that's not how he works.
The material he writs is extremely complex, with many characters and different locations, has many influences that he draw on and needs to keep in his head, and with each new book it gets more and more complex. Also, he's not getting any younger. As a writer ages, it gets harder and harder to maintain the same level of output, at the same quality. He seems very keen and motivated to finish the work. Let's hope.
Happens occasionally, I imagine the writer is not too pleased with not finishing the job either.
In SF earlier we had Harlan Ellison's postponed-to-irrelevancy third volume of Dangerous Visions anthologies, and David Gerrold's meandered-into-a-corner War Against the Chtorr.
Yep. I would imagine it's way too tempting for the heirs. Heck, look at Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series. I was recently in a bookstore and saw they had a lot of new books. I assume if the author doesn't finish a work someone will cough up the money to finish it for a nice profit.
Some upcoming end of the story may be implied, but not seeing it doesn't make the author a bullshitter. What if the author doesn't have a good enough idea for the ending yet? Would you be satisfied with "And then a meteorite crushed everyone, the end." just because you want to see some result? The expectation that you can get a new book is basically "if I tied the author to the desk they'd write it"... but would they be able to? How do you know?
It may be an honest "I'm going to keep trying to do X" rather than "X will be done, I have it all set up". I believe it's extremely rare for an author to have the whole series planned and ready to go the moment they sell the first book (i.e. when you get that implicit promise)
> Like if a friend offered to help you move and then never showed up.
No, it's not at all like that. That friend told you they would show up at a particular time. By contrast, when your read a book, then you've read it. Deal done. What goes on in the media is another matter, totally NOT analogous to a personal commitment directly from one person to another.
the thing is you paid for the first few books in the series with (probably) money and (definitely) time on the expectation that they were going to follow through with an ending, so it is sort of like they got really rich of the money their books earned them but they did not follow through on the implicit contract of a 'series' of books.
I don't even know where to begin... so, I like reading, a lot. and I think this is a really stupid comment. I read constantly all sorts of things and 99% of the time they are partial things; some academic paper, some weekly fantasy series that go on forever, books, websites, whatever!
There is not particular harm done if someone can't finish a story by themselves, I have read so many stories (and all of tvtropes) that in my internal world all these different stories come together. You read one story like song of ice and fire and then another one like the first blade and then another one and another one and another one and eventually you see how they play out and what can happen and you learn to enjoy the glimpses rather than getting all huffed up that the author didn't put enough into it.
Seriously awful to be in a society that is so entitled that you can get top comment on the heading "Entitlement issues" with such an entitled comment.
Here's the thing, you can feel disappointed that something didn't happen, even if there was no particular obligation for it to happen. You're allowed to feel that way. It doesn't mean you think it was owed to you or that you were entitled to it. If you were looking forward to something, and then it doesn't happen, then you're going to feel bummed and let down. And if a specific person told you repeatedly that they were going to make it happen and then they don't, yeah, you're going to feel like that person let you down.
I get it, it feels bad to let people down. George R.R. Martin probably doesn't want to feel bad. But telling people they aren't allowed to feel disappointed because you never technically had a legally binding contract that obligated you to provide the thing they expected is a little ridiculous.
The thing is; if someone lies to you repeatedly, then why do you trust them?
If you liked the story that got told up to the point it got told then you are the benificiary in the situation. If you got bummed out because it couldn't sustain your orgasm then well boohoo, go take some MDMA or whatever it is you do to keep a 24/7 hardon. The rest of us will enjoy the ups _and downs_ of life.
Apparently it's your problem because you feel the need to read long threads on Hacker News about it and get upset that other people don't like it when they don't get to hear the end of a story they were enjoying.
> The rest of us will enjoy the ups _and downs_ of life.
Yeah, this would be one of the downs. By definition, it doesn't feel good. Telling someone "enjoy feeling bad" is an oxymoron. If you enjoy it, it doesn't feel bad now does it?
Writing is incredibly difficult and pays incredibly bad. Inspired books are often written for the pleasure of it, and any money from it is a big optional unknown. The author may want to finish the series, but they still need to pay their bills, and if their writing doesn't do it, it's back to trimming lawns and taking odd jobs.
There is a simple thing people can do to help writers: read more.
If an author called people who bought the first book of a series but didn't buy later ones bullshitters, they would be mocked for being an entitled idiot.
It's normal for people to have failings like procrastination, being unproductive and not being able to finish something they started. GRRM's failings just happen to be very public because of his earlier success.
He's never finishing those books and I think that at this point many of the fans have moved on.
First, you're dealing with humans, rationality is a distant consideration in dealing with emotions.
Second, There's an implicit promise that stories have a structure, and that structure includes an ending, where there's payoff and/or setting other things up for a longer story. That lack of ending leaves built up tension that, well, hasn't been relieved. With that tension, see my first point.
Thirdly, I'd lay the vitriol that's brewed purely at the feet of David & Daniel for royally fucking up the TV show adaptation's final seasons. The catharsis of the "TV ending" could have given GRRM a good few more years to work on the book ending, as some would have put down the story with the end of the show, and others might have debated how the divergence between book/tv before would affect the book ending.
Instead, we got a train wreck, and snapping back to the reality that GRRM is getting old, and the only "canon" ending currently is.... not that good.
Edit: I'm not endorsing shitty behaviour from fans, I've seen it cause plenty of issues over the years, just trying to offer some perspective as to why.
It is weird. But on the other hand he created a series, not isolated books, and the story is quite unfinished. I don't think anyone would be mad at him if he finished the series but then didn't produce anything else after that.
The hatred is still excessive, but imagine watching the first 2 Lord of the Rings movies and then discovering the 3rd one won't ever come out (not a perfect fit, given that the books were all finished long ago, but...)
At this point, I am not sure we will get the end of the story.
I am almost glad that HBO killed my love for GoT.
I totally understand that George R.R. Martin is not our bitch but when someone creates a book series that lots of people come to love, you feel cheated when you learn about all the side projects when the main project doesn't seem to evolve.
Anyway, I read the 5 books, absolutely loved them. I think I'll just stop caring and try to remember these 5 amazing books as the end of the story.
GRR, fiscally empowered, has his entire body frozen upon death.
Years later you learn, now as an old man, that he has been decanted, re-youthed (something you cannot afford), and is now almost done the next book. The entire series in fact!
Yet now you are the one who is 73, he young, and you may not live to see his new novels!
Brandon Sanderson last week posted a video [0] where he said he would come clean. Spoiler: It was him having written 4 new books during lockdown in addition to those promised. The Kickstarter [1] for those books is now the biggest ever.
He is a machine, also gets a lot of goodwill from the way he interact with fans. He's the one author where I read books before the series is finished, because I feel I can trust him.
Yup, he is a machine and I love some of his works, while others I find mediocre at best.
It's the same as with all the other "machines" out there, really. Some very good books, many mediocre, some even outright bad.
All my subjective taste of course.
But you're right, one can trust him that he finishes and that has its merits too.
I agree. The quality of his writing and output is generally on par with someone like Clive Cussler, or Joyce Carol Oates. The method is pretty simple: write a lot and see what sticks. Updike was probably the best writer in the modern era to have used that method.
Sanderson generally has some interesting concepts but his characters are pretty simplistic, and he puts an extreme emphasis on "systematic worldbuilding," to the detriment of their plot. His style is really starting to show its limits in the Stormlight books, which are very long, which have some neat scenes, but which are also in incredible need of an editor.
If I have time I plan to read at least one of his books. I've been wasting alot of time on YouTube, and frankly here. Books remove that option, you need to focus on them
Well, even if he never finishes, the red wedding still a better love story than twilight, I guess ;)
As an absolute fan of ASoIaF, The Kingkiller Chronicles and The Gentleman Bastard I can say:
I am waiting for Winds of Winter for over 10 years now... I would be full of joy if it really came out, but I also see that George doesn't owe me anything.
I paid the existing books, knowing the series wasn't finished and still I ate right through them.
It's a bit like with open source, really.
Some people expect you to deliver again and again if they donate (!) to your work.
I felt so smart by starting GoT books when the TV series started in 2011 - Dance of Dragons came out and I thought I had enough material to hold me for the next 4-5 years
The HBO show was amazing, for at least 4 seasons and maybe as many as 6 seasons. My working assumption is that the fan reaction to the HBO ending has sent GRRM back to the drawing board on many storylines and thus he will require more time to finish. He’s 73… fingers crossed.
George is a free human not a slave to our desire for _content_, also true.
But I also understand fan frustration. When Gaiman wrote that, "A Game of Thrones" was already 15 years in the past. "A Dance With Dragons" had been promised for 2005-ish and was still 2 years in the future.
Since "GRRM is not your bitch", George has published 10 books, of which one advanced the core story of ASoIaF. Meanwhile, on his not-a-blog, George's infrequent posts usual refer to how busy he is while simultaneously telling fans they just need to be patient.
It's been 11 years since the last book in the main ASoIaF story line. _26 years_ after reading "A Game of Thrones" I'm not even mad. I've just given up. I'll just put this in the same category as Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai saga or Coleridge's Kubla Khan: brilliant but never-to-be-finished.
I mean - I guess it depends on how we define "bitch".
I agree he's a free human who can make his own choices - but he made a few choices that I find distasteful - Primarily: He lies through his fucking teeth.
I read the first three books of his series in middle school - I was 13 at the time. I VIVIDLY remember how he promised not only that book four was coming soon, but that the problem was that it was so much content his editor was making him break it into two books.
Then five years passed. Not a peep. No updates, no content. He happily wrote a poem anthology and a quartet of short stories in between - but not a peep on where his two books of content were.
Finally - as I entered college, he got around to publishing book four. And that was the last book I read from him. Not only was it not the quality of the first three, it left out literally half of the cast of characters.
Now - he's doing it again with the end of the series: He's very gung-ho to get good publicity by talking shit about how he'll focus on the series, and how much content he has, and how these books are the shining rainbows of everything his fans want.
Then he can't handle even small amounts of flak - like: You PROMISED this was coming, where is it?
Basically - I think he's an utter bitch. Not because I think I can boss him around (I don't) but because he acts like a little bitch - he makes promises he knows he won't keep for the attention and fawning of his fans.
His basic argument is that the contract is you paid $10 for each book you got, so the author doesn't owe you the next book.
I disagree with this. First off, the fact that the fans are so upset is evidence that this wasn't _their_ understanding of the contract.
The thing is, they didn't just spend $10. They spent time getting invested in the story. This emotional investment is left unfulfilled if they don't get the implicitly promised ending.
Now, let's turn this around. Let's say fans do decide that their $10 strictly comes with no expectation of the next book coming.
Well then many fans wouldn't have bought the first books until the whole series is finished. It would likely become uneconomical to write long fantasy series. Writers like Martin would suffer.
It's easy for Martin or whoever to drop the ball on the implicit contract now, after becoming rich; but if this contract hadn't existed, authors like Martin would probably have desired to create it explicitly. If you believe that, then Gaiman's argument doesn't hold up.
And so not finishing a promised series is taking from that trust commons.
Of course, sometimes humans _can't_ finish something, and readers should accept that risk. The authors shouldn't be harassed.
But wanting them to follow through is not the same as thinking "they're your bitch".
"Well then many fans wouldn't have bought the first books until the whole series is finished. It would likely become uneconomical to write long fantasy series. Writers like Martin would suffer."
This is me. I don't buy into a series until it's complete. Actually, I kind of HATE series works, because they are quite often seat-of-the-pants situations where the author really has no idea where it's all going, and has no real plan for sticking the landing. Also quite often they are far, far longer than is justified. I have no issues with long works, but we must be honest and admit that LOTS of series works in genre are just plain FAT and needed to be seriously edited down. But that doesn't happen, because it means they can sell more books.
> Actually, I kind of HATE series works, because they are quite often seat-of-the-pants situations where the author really has no idea where it's all going
Often, authors even start a series as a number of stand-alone books with clearly bounded character-and-plot development (think Star Trek), and then later morph it into an overarching-story-plot style series. See: Dresden Files, Kate Daniels, etc.
Dresden is an especially egregious example, since Butcher clearly reached a point a few books in where he just pull unjustified stuff out of his nether regions to push a story along.
Yeah, in fact these days I often avoid series altogether, even if they are finished, because I know once I start it I'll want to finish, and thus choosing to read a series means choosing not to read a half dozen standalone books. Those standalone books will give me more variety, are likely better quality in total (because even he best series have their ups and downs), and thus will be more enjoyable in whole. There are exceptions where series are greater than the sum of their parts, but I think they are rare.
Also don't forget that it's easier to never finish the story. To never go actually anywhere with your one idea. You don't have to explain plot holes, backgrounds, conclusions etc. Because "that's to be done in the next book" which never comes out. Fair, but then we simply can't judge anything until you're actually done - and then we may buy your stuff.
- Somebody who has never read GoT so isn't part of the fandom.
I'd like to posit that using fans getting emotionally distraught may in fact weaken your argument on the basis that a lot of behaviors that fall into that category are overwrought to the point of lashing out.
Gaimans point isn't that you can't feel disappointed, it's that when you try to treat your end of the parasocial relationship as a burden with the direct implication that GRRM directly and personally owes you that you are treating him like your bitch.
>And so not finishing a promised series is taking from that trust commons.
This is the most important point - GRRM is hurting other authors with his failure to deliver on an implicit social contract. How many future authors will not get their first book in a series read enough to justify a second because readers will wait for a series to be finished before putting in the energy to read it?
After producing 3 of the finest fantasy books I've ever read, GRRM has produced 2 books in 20 years that are mediocre at best and filled with fluff that really should've been edited out. And I have a theory about this.
Some writers will write and see where the story takes them. Others (like GRRM) will have a plan. Having a plan gives structure and a destination. It's good. Where it can go bad is the characters can change to where your destination no longer makes sense.
Take How I Met Your Mother as a perfect example of this. The (terrible) ending was always the plan but audiences hated it. In part because they loved Cristin Millotti (unexpected) but also because Robin had changed.
I believe the delay in finishing the series stems from this: GRRM doesn't know how to get to the ending he originally planned. A popular theory in fan circles is the Meereenese Knot [1]. Personaly I think it's a more fundamental problem than just one plot point.
I mean the two great hacks (DnD) rushed to end the show in one of the worst received finales of all time. I'm not sure HBO understands just how much damage these two did because not only have people moved on from GoT but the various promnects set in that universe are probably doomed to failure because literally nobody cares anymore. It's the equivalent of killing the entire MCU with one show. It's that bad.
The second trap GRRM has fallen into is another common one with writers: he now doesn't know what to leave out. The original plans was the first 3 books then a long gap and a second trilogy. But then he thought the story of Stannis and Jon Snow needed to be told (it didn't). And other such storylines crept in where these could've been flashbacks or summaries..
His early writing style was fantastic for this. A character's arc would skip ahead to something significant and then layer what's happening with what happened in the gap. It was engaging and concise.
So does GRRM "owe" us this story? Probably not. Do I care anymore? Not really. I would actually be shocked at this point if GRRM finishes the series at all (Robert Jordan anyone?). If he does, I'd target 2035 at the earliest for 2 more books.
This is crucial for me and a major source of annoyance. In Dance he is still introducing new characters and plotlines -- some of which he introduces and later resolves to nothing, like Quentyn [1], leaving one to wonder why he felt the need at all -- some even major characters like yet another contender to the throne, yet he fails to advanced in any important way many of the early plotlines he's left hanging since forever.
Why? Why introduce new plotlines and characters instead of moving the existing ones to a satisfying resolution? Does he not have editors and friends who tell him "hey George, what's the point of Quentyn at all? And what's with the blue-haired boy, is he really necessary?"
[1] it's been a long while since I read Dragons and I forgot about the quirky name spellings. Quentin? Quentyn? Kwenteen?
PS: now that I write this, I realized there's another famous person named George who could have benefited from people telling him to cut down the crap :D
Neil should of course know, since over 30 years ago he wrote an outline for a three arc Miracleman comic book, wrote only one of those three arcs and then legal quagmire ensured that nothing more happened.
Even when Disney's attack lawyers (for Marvel) nailed down all the rights to actually publish Miracleman again in the 2010s somehow nothing further got published, Marvel re-published everything from Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, up until the end of the Golden Age (the first of Gaiman's three arcs) but when the first new book was scheduled (the Silver Age) it simply never materialised, at first it was "delayed" and then all mention was simply deleted.
In 2022 yet again supposedly Marvel are "definitely" going to publish this book, and well, do you see it? No.
Neil has other things to be doing, probably more interesting to him and certainly more lucrative than some dusty old comic book franchise.
Nonsense. I don't expect a storyteller to be my bitch but I do expect them to finish the story they started telling 5 novels ago. After all, I've invested at least 150 never-to-be-relived hours of my life in reading his story with the expectation it would eventually come to a conclusion.
Not finishing a story is a monumental betrayal of trust by the storyteller. And there is a contract between storyteller and listner that is as old as time and we all feel it in our bones. Try telling a bedtime story to a 4 year old about the 3 little pigs and just stop at the second pig, walk away and see what happens.
Because kids want things does not mean that they are owed them. That's the difference. "I want it now!" by Veruca Salt is not reasonable way to interact with artists.
It boggles my mind people feel entitled to other peoples future actions based on some feeling they have about previous actions. Went through this when I lost interest in an old open source project I had created. The community hated/hates me because I didn’t continue slave laboring for them indefinitely.
They only want the things he's literally promised them.
I have no beef with an author who takes 20 years to finish a series. I do have a problem with an author consistently making grandiose promises about how much he's working on the series, and how much content he has, and how his fans should be so grateful for the effort he's putting in. Then turns around and bitches incessantly about how his fans DARE to remind him he made those promises.
Basically - I would be fine with GRRM if he would shut the fuck up. But he's not in it for writing the books anymore, he's in it for the attention.
Imagine sitting around a campfire being told a story. Everyone is loving it and throws a few coins at the storyteller. The storyteller then gets up near the climax of the story and says "thanks for the money, I'm going to stop telling stories and enjoy this money until I die". Everyone feels betrayed. The one person who sees clearly claims the storyteller is not the audience's bitch.
People! wake up! Reading is awesome? if you get emotionally invested and then never get a satisfying ending (or any ending at all) then you just learned a valuable life lesson. Now get over it and read another book! :)
It's amazing that you can get such strong feelings, as you grow older this may not be the case anymore so don't take your passion for granted.
I agree with Neil Gaiman. GRRM doesn't owe anyone anything. Some in the fandom are particularly obnoxious, like when they warned him "not to pull a 'Robert Jordan'" (i.e. dying before completing the saga). George was right to lash out at them.
That said...
I think sagas like A Song of Ice and Fire are not exactly the kind of standalone literature were it's reasonable to pay for the book you're reading, and anything else is an extra. They are more like a TV show, even if HBO's didn't exist. We accept that fans protest the cancellation or bad endings of shows they love, and ASoIaF is very much a TV show in book form.
So GRRM doesn't owe fans anything. But it's also reasonable for fans to be upset and vocal about the lack of progress of this TV-show-in-book-form saga.
Also: I might be a minority that enjoys the journey more than the destination, so I enjoy reading about these noble houses, their family mottos, their vendettas, but even then in a work like this they are all in service of a satisfying payoff. This isn't an experimental "high literature" set of novels. Not providing this payoff would be like Agatha Christie never revealing "whodunnit" in one of her mystery novels.
I would say sticking to your word matters, and he is consistently unable to do so.
He is very excited about all the attention his public promises get, and then is very condescending about any sort of reminder (years later) that he made those promises.
I personally don't think he owes anyone content, but I also find the man incredibly distasteful.
Don't make promises you know damn well you won't keep. Especially don't make those promises because you delight in the attention and fawning fans, and then turn around and act like those fans are utter monsters for, ya know, maybe expecting you to keep your promises.
Where did he call or consider his fans "monsters"? He specifically lashed out against some very rude fans who made an offensive mention of Robert Jordan's death, a personal friend of GRRM. I 100% support him on this. Fandom can be very toxic.
As for the rest: I don't think GRRM is trying to mislead anyone on purpose. I honestly think he's lost the energy to focus on ASoIaF and cannot find a way to solve this conundrum and finish the damn thing. I think he would if he could. If he's deceiving anyone, it's himself.
Writing literature isn't like writing CRUD code, is not just a matter of sitting your ass down and typing words. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.
I think he's lost his inspiration and cannot get it back, but I don't buy he's being cynical about this or purposefully cheating his fans.
Sometimes I wonder, if I knew that the series would not be finished would I have started it, and would reading something else have been a better use of my time. I usually come to the conclusion that despite GRRM's world being incomplete, it's still far better than most of the work in the fantasy genre.
No, no! Don't you know that every ASoIaF fan has, by the mere act of reading the extant books, obtained a mortgage on Martin's future writing? That he owes each and every one of us the rest of the books in the series ASAP, and that if he for whatever reason is unable to deliver, he will majorly owe us (even from beyond the grave) for the YEARS we have WASTED and the DOZENS OF DOLLARS we have spent on the older books, waiting in vain?!?
... The above is a zero-exaggeration paraphrasing of *many* so-called ASoIaF fans' ridiculously entitled views of Martin's work (including elsewhere in this discussion). People express this anger in different ways. Some do what I mention above. Some take the more passive-aggressive route of constantly posting about how Martin needs to lose weight for his health, or "please stop watching football and start writing", or "please stop going to conventions and start writing",[1] or "hope he finishes the books before dying". As if such creeps are actually concerned about Martin's well-being; if they could snap their fingers and have the entire series completed tomorrow at the cost of its author dropping dead at once, I know what 90% of them would choose.
ASoIaF is a brilliant series, one of the masterpieces of the past 20 years. If Martin were to die tomorrow I'd sympathize with his wife, be glad I had the chance to read five remarkable books and watch the TV series and, yes, be sad to not read the end of the series. I'd not, however, be angry at him/God/the universe for dying before giving us more. They're great novels, but at the end of the day they're just that, novels.
[1] Yes, there are people who have posted both of these things on Martin's Livejournal site
For people who are fans of epic fantasy and are waiting decades for completed series: please read current authors who are actually producing and have a known track record of finishing what they start. NK Jemisin has finished multiple series redefining the genre. Mercedes Lackey is a staple. Fonda Lee just finished the Green Bone Saga and it’s great. Robert Jackson Bennett writes fantasy that has the same complex magic systems and political intrigue but actively subverts expectations and really brings the humanity to it with compelling characters… and he has a complete trilogy! These people deserve more attention, more investment, and more fans.
Authors don't owe their fans a next installment in the series.
They do however, owe the fans a little bit of honesty. In 2015 George RR Martin said he's going to skip comic-con in 2015 because he needs to focus on finish off winds of winter, but hey! If he gets it done before hand, he'll come to comic-con. That was 6 years after this blogpost complaining that people have unreasonable expectations that George RR Martin will deliver winds of winter.
The problem isn't that Martin hasn't delivered the book, it's that he has a massive problem communicating with his fans about whether he's going to deliver the book. He's repeatedly done this, and people question why the fans are angry. They're angry because he's jerking them around.
It's not even unreasonable for him to make promises to the fans and then fail to deliver. But there comes a point where it's reasonable for people to be angry at him for continuing to make predictions/statements about the book when he's got such a well-established pattern of breaking those promises. It's reasonable for Charlie Brown to get angry when Lucy pulls the football out of the way at the last minute - it's not because she owed him the football, it's that she lied to him, repeatedly.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] thread> (They offered to sell me an adapter for $150 to plug in the battery-dead computer, and I probably should have said yes to keep working, but was so outraged, and had decided not to fly American in future, so it would never have been used again, and said no.)
Regardless of the "real" point of the article I was totally irritated by that. How would any company rationalize behavior like this? Do "rich" people flying first class really normally just shell out $150 instead of deciding (like Gaiman did) to just not fly them again?
Are $150 worth the lost business?
Airlines know this. There isn't a huge choice for consumers.
I don't see myself ever using them again - barring hypothetical scenarios where I desperately needed to go somewhere and they were only airline flying there.
And they lost more than 1 person's business - I've gladly "upgraded" my travel companions on 3 occasions so far, paying either their full ticket or price difference, so we could fly together on anything-but-ryanair.
I keep reading (possibly sensationalized) news pieces about their latest cost saving measures like banning employees from charging their phones at work, and my disgust reinforces my intention to never have anything to do with them.
Here in Houston -- a huge city in the middle of the country -- it is far, far easier to fly United than any other carrier for any long-haul route. Southwest is an option for close US locations, and that's great, but United is what you're using to go to either coast.
Sure, there ARE other airlines here. There are LOTS of them. But if you want to go to the UK on something other than United, you better be going to wherever that other carrier goes, because you won't have a lot of options. (EG, Singapore flies direct to Manchester, but that's it. Emirates flies to Dubai nonstop every day, but has no other legs in Houston.)
In smaller places, the choices are often starker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmPower_(aircraft_power_adapte...
[1] https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/conditions-...
Like if a friend offered to help you move and then never showed up. Hey, I'm not your bitch! They might say. No, but they said they'd do something and then they didn't do it, so from now on people are going to take that into consideration and rightly consider them a bullshitter who doesn't follow through.
I've pretty much written off any hope of ever reading the rest of A Song of Ice and Fire and also The Kingkiller Chronicles (by a different, also wildly unreliable author, what is it with these guys). Yeah, they're not my bitch. They don't owe me anything, it just sucks that they turned out to be bullshitters.
His publishers might have cause to be annoyed if they have a contract for more books, but the readers, however disappointed, don't have a moral right to dictate a writer's future labour. And that's what writing novels is—it's work for money, like programming or plumbing, not some mystical calling or vocation.
A lot of them wouldn't have bought the books if they knew there will never be a conclusion.
But they are entitled to feel cheated, and loudly proclaim that they were cheated. Especially with a story as full of intrigue as A Song of Ice and Fire.
By comparison, fans of Agatha Christie's work would not have any entitlement to complain if she stopped after three novels, as those novels were complete works in and of themselves. But they would have every reason to complain if she published the first half of And Then There Were None, but never published the ending.
Of course they would.
Note that I'm not saying some fans wouldn't have been pressuring her into writing more if she had stopped. I'm saying those fans, unlike the ASOIAF fandom, wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Every story has details not followed up on. Just like real life.
LOST had an ending but it was terrible because the story kept piling on more bullshit.
GOT TV had an ending and it was terrible.
ASOIAF is a short chronicle (yet still full of many great characterizations, episodes, and plot lines) of characters coming and going through the world. Some plot lines start in the middle, some end in the middle, because neither us nor GRRM are immortal beings.
That's completely irrelevant. Everyone is entitled to feel however they feel and think whatever they think and should not be precluded from voicing their opinions. Why should your opinion of the relative completeness of one story versus another determine whether someone else is permitted to express disappointment with a story?
My contention is that George RR Martin is cheating his ASOIAF readers by spending time on other works instead of writing the next ASOIAF novel.
By contrast, I don't think Agatha Christie would have been cheating her Poirot fans in any way by writing Miss Marple novels instead of Poirot ones.
The reason I draw this difference is that you can enjoy (or hate) any particular Poirot book individually. By contrast, you can't really like A Dance With Dragons without knowing if what happens next to some of those characters actually resolves the tension and mystery in a satisfying way (or doesn't resolve it, but in a satisfying meaningful way, like a good open ending).
Do this day, 12 years after this was written, he blogs about how the books are his top priority. He is certainly giving his readers the idea that he owes them a finish by constantly communicating that he will finish.
No, but HBO did, he (co?)wrote Fire and Blood to give them material for a new GoT style TV show; they probably paid him so much to cram its writing in between the mainline ASoIaF books. On top of the licenses for the once popular TV show.
I agree with your overall comment, but this is not entirely true. For many writers, writing is a vocation. They would do it even if they couldn't make a living out of it, just like a painter would paint even if nobody commissioned any of their work.
It just happens that for a relatively small percentage of writers, writing is a viable way to make enough money to make a living.
For Stephen King, it took 22 years and a wake up call in the form of an accident that nearly killed him to get him to finish his "magnum opus", the Dark Tower cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(series)). So I haven't completely given up hope about ASOIAF yet, but I'm not holding my breath either...
I take your point though, but I think they've also explicitly stated that they intend to finish it at some point.
Yes, but you bought the start of the stories. You didn't buy the conclusion. There's no cheating involved.
I don't think Game of Thrones lost money. I would guess HBO paid George Martin well.
Moreover, I think that in the eyes of most, GoT would have been better without going beyond Martin's published works. In other words: finishing that story significantly reduced its value.
In case you think this is an exception: Matrix, Terminator, Coupling, How I Met Your Mother, Battlestar Galactica reimagined: all stories whose value was diminished greatly by their ending.
Are you talking about the 4th season with Oliver? I mean, he was no Jeff, but it wasn't all bad—and Jane got a bit more depth, which I appreciated. Or do you mean the actual series finale with Susan having the baby?
If George R.R. Martin wrote 5 books and told everyone "Hey, here's half a story, I'm never going to finish it", most people probably would not have bought it and HBO probably wouldn't have spent millions of dollars producing a TV show about it.
But they did. I don't think HBO had any confusion about what they bought, and the series being unfinished was either not a problem for them, or possibly a plus.
For your reading pleasure, I present perhaps the finest example: http://folklore.usc.edu/longest-joke-in-the-world/
Its important to note that you're making details up in your analogy. It is implicit in your story that the storyteller intended a betrayal of expectations, otherwise the emotional response wouldn't make any sense. It is also a very limited scope of time which is hugely important in how people see abandoning a project. At this point your anecdote and the topic of discussion have nothing to do with each other.
It is reasonable to experience disappointment that this story will likely never be concluded. Going past the place of having and owning one's emotions into angry blaming is not reasonable. This is the point of TFA, taking any understandable bad feelings around not getting what you wanted and transmuting them into specific directed grievances or demands is embarrassingly entitled behavior. I don't think this will be controversial to you, but I did want to mark the difference.
Perhaps "promise" is too strong of a word; "intention"?
I certainly don't think Martin, when he started writing Game of Thrones, was planning on leaving his work unfinished. If he had, then he'd certainly deserve some annoyance, just as the teller of shaggy dog stories does. Nor do I even think that Martin got to a certain point and then said, "Welp, I'm rich now, I can just sit back and relax; no need to do that pesky writing stuff any more." And if that was his attitude, then I think he deserves some annoyance.
Presumably there's a part of him that would like to finish them off, but finds it difficult for whatever reason. I think that's unfortunate, naturally, but as long as he has, within himself, made a good-faith attempt to move things towards completion, then I think he's held up his end of the bargain. And I agree that the expectation of anything more is toxic entitlement.
I was the poster of the shaggy dog story! Side note, I did enjoy you pointing out 'exception that proves the rule'.
It's similar to The Lord of the Rings in this way - it would be pretty disingenuous to call, say, The Two Towers "a standalone novel", as it tells several disparate plots that start nowhere and mostly end nowhere, and have little interaction with each other. But that is not to say that it is not an excellent part of the Lord of The Rings.
Some novel "series" are really just a single work. GRRM's and JRRT's are certainly examples. Rothfuss' is, too.
The other example is something like Scalzi's Old Man's War books. They are all in the same universe, and expand on the story told in the first, but they stand alone as novels, too. You don't need to have read the first to enjoy a "later" one, though the later one probably contains spoilers about the earlier one.
Then you get kinda neither one nor the other books, like The Revelation Space books from Alistair Reynolds. There IS an overarching plot, but you could also come in late, and each book has its own "local" plot.
The wonderful thing is that many (if not most) Discworld novels can be read standalone in any order. Yes, you'll miss some references and subtleties, and recurring characters are better if you know their traits, but still they work standalone.
Some are truly standalone (Monstruous Regiment, Small Gods, Going Postal, The Truth, etc), some aren't but can be mostly read in random order (wizards, witches, city watch).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Dragon girl’s felt like it was “good” but the execution of the show’s build up was terrible. Her going psycho felt like it was… intended to be foreshadowed even though it really wasn’t?
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.
My point is that a plot can seem interesting and mysterious while you are reading it, but only the ending will tell you if that feeling was justified or not. For example, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is not in any way dulled by knowing how it ends, the moments where you were reading about Orpheus trying to reach Hades and not yet knowing if he'd succeed are not in any way wasted if you know how it does end - the dramatic tension is beautifully resolved, if tragically so.
If instead the story ended with Orpheus, given the right to try to leave hell with his beloved if only he never looks back would turn around to ask her what time dinner would be ready, as he just kinda forgets about Hades' deal, or he starts remembering some other woman he likes more and doesn't even care if Eurydice is no longer there; then the whole thing would be easily written off as a hack job and not remembered for some 2000 years later.
Simialrly, the reason the ending of the Game of Thrones TV show destroyed the value of its entire story isn't simply that we found out how it ends, it's because most of what seemed in earlier seasons to be building up was proven to have been irrelevant.
For example, for the longest time, you wondered if the world could band together and whether it could survive the threat of the White Walkers. However, the show made that out to have been an irelevant worry, since the whole White Walker army was easily defeated by a random assassin with a random knife (well, one made of good steel, but nothing more), who just had to find a moment when the main baddie had his back turned. The White Walker army turned out to be unable to even defeat half of the armies that stood against them in an open field - they were really a non-issue in the end.
Even the themes of climate change, of politics and old rivalries and mistrust getting in the way of necessary action - these are all wiped out and proven to have been incorrect readings of the show. The White Walkers weren't a metaphor for external problems that an inward looking system can't solve, they were just ice zombies that are hard to kill individually, but easily coapse if you kill the queen bee.
Similarly, for the entire duration of the show we look at Daenerys Targaryen and see how she confronts the antiquated, monstrous systems she encounters, and wonder if she can truly defeat them. Then, near the moment of her opportunity to do so, she snaps and goes crazy (according to the writers themselves) and decides to burn down the very people she has been trying to help. Any character building she had shown is made irrelevant, as it's simply the bad genes she inherited from her mad father that make her fantasy Hitler in the end. Not her haughtyness, not her tendency for retribution, not her belief in her own rights as a monarch - things that could have led to an interesting descent into madness or evil - no, just her bad blood.
The ending is important and can ruin an otherwise good story. That doesn't mean the rest of the story isn't important.
In both cases I disagree, but in the latter I also think you're out of line and against the etiquette of HN. Be nice.
You're right that it was a shallow dismissal and not a constructive critical comment. I'm sorry for that poor behavior. Thanks for calling me out.
For the record, I picked up the first book of ASOIAF after loving GRRM's beautiful novella The Hedge Knight, I believe written for the Legends anthology I discovered it in.
I was deeply, profoundly disappointed in it and never touched another book in the series again. It fell so miserably short of The Hedge Knight that I would need multiple pages to fully express my disappointment.
As for ASOIAF: interesting, could you elaborate?
I read The Hedge Knight last (well, the whole Dunk & Egg I mean) and I liked it. I found it to be a compressed, fast-forwarded version of A Game of Thrones. But the style elements and plot devices are all there, and I find them to be mostly the same. What is it that you liked in Hedge Knight but disliked in A Game of Thrones? Was it the supernatural element (dragons, zombies, etc)?
(I realize this might be hard to answer, and that's fine!)
I was really excited to dig into the whole series based on how well the author pulled different elements together into that overall structure.
As I worked through the first book, I slowly realized "Oh. This is all about the meaningless sound and fury of political maneuver, backstabbing, and treachery, signifying nothing... along with an overdose of prurience."
What would take me pages to do (and hours to revisit the story) is explain in detail all the things that work so well and come together to make The Hedge Knight's overall effect what it is, and then to explain just how much that element is missing in A Game of Thrones.
I have absolutely no interest in revisiting A Game of Thrones in order to make this point thoroughly and well, so I doubt I'll ever write a full, detailed explanation of my disappointment.
In any case, I enjoyed the attempt to wax poetical. They used fun words and arranged them such that some would even make pretty noises together.
You should give it a try some day, it might put a smile on your face. Read a book with a distinct use of language beforehand for inspiration.
I rarely get good results, but I have certainly enjoyed trying.
I work hard to avoid fancy words in my writing these years. I value clarity over ornament in most of what I write at present.
For dexterous use of language my favorites are probably J. R. R. Tolkien (the only fantasy author who can really write Old High Forsooth reliably well, IMO), P. G. Wodehouse (a true master of comedy, at whose feet Douglas Adams studied), and probably Robin McKinley (see especially her book Beauty).
The shallow, negative dismissal was poor behavior on my part.
I was applying a standard to the original comment I should probably reserve for published novels, and I was doing it without providing any useful critical feedback, in a cantankerous way.
I'm sorry for doing that.
Note the RR Martin does actually have many sci-fi stories with interesting, frustrating but thematically clear, open endings.
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.
It wasn't a clear cut "easy" win for the good guys. A major moral character dies in the first 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).
I guess the Allies also "easily won" against Hitler then ;)
That is very debatable. I don't think there were good guys in the end. Or bad ones, for that matter.
Conversely, there were very clear bad guys, with no redeeming qualities: The Night's King, Euron Greyjoy, Cersei, The Mountain, Qyburn, and Daenerys after she goes mad.
There were a few characters portrayed as morally gray (Jamie, Bron, perhaps Varys and Greyworm). But the vast majority were very clearly portrayed as either heroes or villains in the final season.
> Sansa, Sam, Davos, Jon, Arya, Tyrion, Brianne, Bran, Robin, Yara
Of these, I consider only Sam, Davos and Brienne to be "clear good guys". Jon arguably comes last. You missed Eddard, the one truly moral character that gets killed because of this (I think this was GRRM effectively showing that moral good guys will get killed if they cannot be a little devious). Let me explain why the others aren't, in my opinion:
- Sansa is portrayed almost as stupidly naive. From the beginning she buys into all sort of courtly things that -- even if true -- were pretty shallow. And they turned out to be untrue. When she finally wakes up to the harsh realities, later in the show, she becomes manipulative and cold. She's on the right side, sure, but you can easily see her turning into another Cersei, given the chance. So she's either painfully stupid or dangerously vindictive.
- Arya joins a death cult and becomes callous. She's driven by hatred and vengeance. Again, you could easily see her turning into an assassin for hire. You already mentioned her psychotic outbursts.
- Tyrion... well, there's a lovable but definitely morally gray character. No need to explain further, I'm surprised you included him as a clear-cut "good" guy. Maybe because he's the only likable Lannister and stole the TV show.
- Bran starts as likable and gradually turns into an enigmatic, unempathetic, alien creature. Who knows what he's thinking, he certainly won't tell. Some fans speculated (incorrectly, it turns out) he was going to turn into a Big Bad mastermind by the end of the show. Even if this was incorrect, it shows the character was not perceived as unarguably "good".
- Robin. Is this the teenage lord of the Eyrie, the one who still was sucking from his mother's breast, was very capricious, easily manipulated, and eager to let prisoners "fly" out of the Moon door? This was a very creepy character, not a good guy.
- Yara. An amoral pirate, willing to kill or be killed for power. It just happened that she didn't truly hate her brother and that her relatives were even worse.
Re: the bad guys. I mostly agree with your list except (Euron Greyjoy in particular was an irritating charicature, and they didn't even bother with the Night's King), but for two exceptions:
- Cersei. It's true she's the main villain -- other than the walkers -- of the latter seasons, but she's nuanced. She's obviously suffered. She's driven mad by grief and power lust, but she's also a woman in a world of men. She refuses to become simply the concubine of a powerful lord, or a mother. And she's truly capable of love, though the objects of her affections are sometimes misplaced (and she's quick to hate as well). I think there are admirable traits in Cersei's character, not enough to overlook she's also a mad, self-destructive murderess, but enough to consider she has her shades of gray.
- Daenerys is mostly the good gal until she suddenly turns mad. You don't get to ignore she was good for most of the series, so you cannot place her in the "clear bad guys" box.
Re: gray characters. Yes, Jame, Bron, Varys. Most in the small court in Kingslanding. Most of the nobles. Most of the soldiers, be it free men or slaves. I don't you can claim most weren't gray, when the whole show is populated mostly by morally gray characters!
The final episodes of the final season are not the whole show. If they were, you could claim Cersei is mostly a dead woman in GoT, just because she dies in the final chapter.
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.
I don't think it could possibly matter. Assuming he writes the most amazing ending in the history of the written word, it could not possibly change anything he wrote before to suddenly have mastery, depth and/or beauty. You wouldn't need to read the second half of Camus' The Stranger to determine whether the first half has any good writing in it. You can divide a good work into sentences, and even phrases, and randomly pull them out, without context, and still determine whether the writing is bad, ok, good, or exceptional.
I certainly don't think Martin is boring, nor do I regret the time it took to read, and I liked it in pieces and overall, even if it at times is a bit indulgent. But let's not insult the masters. Just because we like something doesn't mean it must intrinsically be any good.
At that point the world has need of another writer on stand-by in case Sanderson's prematurely awoken from the dream.
While they don’t “owe” us anything, 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"?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps not ironically, my current favorite authors (Forthright, Travis Baldree, Honor Raconteur) do not go through traditional publishers. They also don't drop series in the middle of the story because of market forces.
Self publishing is not at all easy. It’s a completely different thing with very different necessary skills to succeed. An author may not have the skills nor time necessary to successfully self publish. (Off the top of my head- just keeping track of sales/sale trends, reaching out to booksellers, organizing your own marketing campaign, editor, cover art, rights management, etc.)
As for those skills - these are skills common to every entrepreneur, including authors who work with publishers (they still need to do their own promotions and market research - they are the ones who propose new series to the publishers, after all).
I'm ok with this. I wish they made more single-novel SF&F stories. It seems everything wants to be a trilogy or a saga, with an eye to a Netflix/HBO adaptation.
Write a whole story. I'll buy it. Try to hook me with part of a story you may never finish? No thanks.
Meaning Kvothe (not a spoiler) kind of has all his stats maxed out except wisdom, which allows the plot to move forward.
I did thoroughly enjoy the world that was built in the first book, but couldn't stand his stupidity in the second, and stopped reading. It didn't help that I knew the trilogy wasn't finished.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/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.
Taking your example, if my friend doesn't show up, assuming I don't buy his excuse, it means a) I lose trust in him when it comes to something that matter, and b) I'm less likely to ask him to help me move next time.
While the people harassing the authors are a bigger pain in the ass, those people at least still care. The bigger problem will be all the fans who silently drift away. The ones who, when a friend asks them about the series, will tell them "yeah, don't bother with that, it's never going to be finished".
This was "writing to another author attempting to egg him on to also voice his disappointment". Neil Gaiman didn't just stumble across someone's voiced disappointment, it was specifically directed to him. They just didn't get the response they were hoping for.
So it doesn't just "feels like being cheated". It really is cheating. Over promising and hyping and never delivering.
For larger series with more than 2-3 planned books I would generally be wary now, and the only one of that kind I'm reading is Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson who has a very solid track record of delivering on his promises.
This doesn't justify the vitriol these two authors receive at times. But it is certainly valid to be disappointed in them. It has also lowered by opinion about their writing, as in both cases it has made it clear that they wrote themselves into a corner, and that some of the most intriguing parts of the early books probably have no substance at all and were mere illusions.
Yet this isn't what happened. He was working on it, and people were complaining that he was doing other things.
EG "You, like, totally went to the movies, and the next book isn't done??!" kind of posts and emails to him.
His creative process is his, and his alone. Doing "other stuff", does not mean his mind isn't thinking of what to write, or where to go with the plot.
Thus, in as at that point he never said "no new book", all upset emails were literally nagging him, and complaining that he should do nothing but write.
Really, the very essence of a micro manager, solely looking a lines of code as proof of work done, yet Martin isn't even in their employ!
Well no, clearly you don't agree with the sentiment. Maybe you wish you did.
There can be many reasons why an author never completes a work. Creative writing isn't something you can just turn on like a tap. I'm sure George could just sit and write a few hundred thousand words, get an editor to knock it into shape, slap it on shelves and call the job done, but that's not how he works.
The material he writs is extremely complex, with many characters and different locations, has many influences that he draw on and needs to keep in his head, and with each new book it gets more and more complex. Also, he's not getting any younger. As a writer ages, it gets harder and harder to maintain the same level of output, at the same quality. He seems very keen and motivated to finish the work. Let's hope.
In SF earlier we had Harlan Ellison's postponed-to-irrelevancy third volume of Dangerous Visions anthologies, and David Gerrold's meandered-into-a-corner War Against the Chtorr.
No, it's not at all like that. That friend told you they would show up at a particular time. By contrast, when your read a book, then you've read it. Deal done. What goes on in the media is another matter, totally NOT analogous to a personal commitment directly from one person to another.
I don't even know where to begin... so, I like reading, a lot. and I think this is a really stupid comment. I read constantly all sorts of things and 99% of the time they are partial things; some academic paper, some weekly fantasy series that go on forever, books, websites, whatever!
There is not particular harm done if someone can't finish a story by themselves, I have read so many stories (and all of tvtropes) that in my internal world all these different stories come together. You read one story like song of ice and fire and then another one like the first blade and then another one and another one and another one and eventually you see how they play out and what can happen and you learn to enjoy the glimpses rather than getting all huffed up that the author didn't put enough into it.
Seriously awful to be in a society that is so entitled that you can get top comment on the heading "Entitlement issues" with such an entitled comment.
I get it, it feels bad to let people down. George R.R. Martin probably doesn't want to feel bad. But telling people they aren't allowed to feel disappointed because you never technically had a legally binding contract that obligated you to provide the thing they expected is a little ridiculous.
The thing is; if someone lies to you repeatedly, then why do you trust them?
If you liked the story that got told up to the point it got told then you are the benificiary in the situation. If you got bummed out because it couldn't sustain your orgasm then well boohoo, go take some MDMA or whatever it is you do to keep a 24/7 hardon. The rest of us will enjoy the ups _and downs_ of life.
> The rest of us will enjoy the ups _and downs_ of life.
Yeah, this would be one of the downs. By definition, it doesn't feel good. Telling someone "enjoy feeling bad" is an oxymoron. If you enjoy it, it doesn't feel bad now does it?
If it's a cliff hanger I agree, but a complete story that's part of an incomplete series not so much.
There is a simple thing people can do to help writers: read more.
Writing is of course hard as you say though.
> I'd love to see the five-star version of the book, because right now, the one I'm toiling away at is about a three an a half-in my opinion
The rating have dropped so far it's almost at a 3.5 rating.
He's never finishing those books and I think that at this point many of the fans have moved on.
I'll finish this comment later.
That's weird.
Second, There's an implicit promise that stories have a structure, and that structure includes an ending, where there's payoff and/or setting other things up for a longer story. That lack of ending leaves built up tension that, well, hasn't been relieved. With that tension, see my first point.
Thirdly, I'd lay the vitriol that's brewed purely at the feet of David & Daniel for royally fucking up the TV show adaptation's final seasons. The catharsis of the "TV ending" could have given GRRM a good few more years to work on the book ending, as some would have put down the story with the end of the show, and others might have debated how the divergence between book/tv before would affect the book ending.
Instead, we got a train wreck, and snapping back to the reality that GRRM is getting old, and the only "canon" ending currently is.... not that good.
Edit: I'm not endorsing shitty behaviour from fans, I've seen it cause plenty of issues over the years, just trying to offer some perspective as to why.
The hatred is still excessive, but imagine watching the first 2 Lord of the Rings movies and then discovering the 3rd one won't ever come out (not a perfect fit, given that the books were all finished long ago, but...)
I am almost glad that HBO killed my love for GoT.
I totally understand that George R.R. Martin is not our bitch but when someone creates a book series that lots of people come to love, you feel cheated when you learn about all the side projects when the main project doesn't seem to evolve.
Anyway, I read the 5 books, absolutely loved them. I think I'll just stop caring and try to remember these 5 amazing books as the end of the story.
GRR, fiscally empowered, has his entire body frozen upon death.
Years later you learn, now as an old man, that he has been decanted, re-youthed (something you cannot afford), and is now almost done the next book. The entire series in fact!
Yet now you are the one who is 73, he young, and you may not live to see his new novels!
Fate. Always games by mistress Fate.
Just as they're released, nuclear war breaks out. Miraculously, you survive! You find all the books in the ruins of a Barnes and Noble.
As you sit down to finally read them, you break your glasses...
He is a machine, also gets a lot of goodwill from the way he interact with fans. He's the one author where I read books before the series is finished, because I feel I can trust him.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a-k6eaT-jQ [1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-fo...
All my subjective taste of course.
But you're right, one can trust him that he finishes and that has its merits too.
Sanderson generally has some interesting concepts but his characters are pretty simplistic, and he puts an extreme emphasis on "systematic worldbuilding," to the detriment of their plot. His style is really starting to show its limits in the Stormlight books, which are very long, which have some neat scenes, but which are also in incredible need of an editor.
If I have time I plan to read at least one of his books. I've been wasting alot of time on YouTube, and frankly here. Books remove that option, you need to focus on them
As an absolute fan of ASoIaF, The Kingkiller Chronicles and The Gentleman Bastard I can say:
I am waiting for Winds of Winter for over 10 years now... I would be full of joy if it really came out, but I also see that George doesn't owe me anything.
I paid the existing books, knowing the series wasn't finished and still I ate right through them.
It's a bit like with open source, really. Some people expect you to deliver again and again if they donate (!) to your work.
Entitlement issues (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8136670 - Aug 2014 (151 comments)
George is a free human not a slave to our desire for _content_, also true.
But I also understand fan frustration. When Gaiman wrote that, "A Game of Thrones" was already 15 years in the past. "A Dance With Dragons" had been promised for 2005-ish and was still 2 years in the future.
Since "GRRM is not your bitch", George has published 10 books, of which one advanced the core story of ASoIaF. Meanwhile, on his not-a-blog, George's infrequent posts usual refer to how busy he is while simultaneously telling fans they just need to be patient.
It's been 11 years since the last book in the main ASoIaF story line. _26 years_ after reading "A Game of Thrones" I'm not even mad. I've just given up. I'll just put this in the same category as Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai saga or Coleridge's Kubla Khan: brilliant but never-to-be-finished.
I agree he's a free human who can make his own choices - but he made a few choices that I find distasteful - Primarily: He lies through his fucking teeth.
I read the first three books of his series in middle school - I was 13 at the time. I VIVIDLY remember how he promised not only that book four was coming soon, but that the problem was that it was so much content his editor was making him break it into two books.
Then five years passed. Not a peep. No updates, no content. He happily wrote a poem anthology and a quartet of short stories in between - but not a peep on where his two books of content were.
Finally - as I entered college, he got around to publishing book four. And that was the last book I read from him. Not only was it not the quality of the first three, it left out literally half of the cast of characters.
Now - he's doing it again with the end of the series: He's very gung-ho to get good publicity by talking shit about how he'll focus on the series, and how much content he has, and how these books are the shining rainbows of everything his fans want.
Then he can't handle even small amounts of flak - like: You PROMISED this was coming, where is it?
Basically - I think he's an utter bitch. Not because I think I can boss him around (I don't) but because he acts like a little bitch - he makes promises he knows he won't keep for the attention and fawning of his fans.
His basic argument is that the contract is you paid $10 for each book you got, so the author doesn't owe you the next book.
I disagree with this. First off, the fact that the fans are so upset is evidence that this wasn't _their_ understanding of the contract.
The thing is, they didn't just spend $10. They spent time getting invested in the story. This emotional investment is left unfulfilled if they don't get the implicitly promised ending.
Now, let's turn this around. Let's say fans do decide that their $10 strictly comes with no expectation of the next book coming.
Well then many fans wouldn't have bought the first books until the whole series is finished. It would likely become uneconomical to write long fantasy series. Writers like Martin would suffer.
It's easy for Martin or whoever to drop the ball on the implicit contract now, after becoming rich; but if this contract hadn't existed, authors like Martin would probably have desired to create it explicitly. If you believe that, then Gaiman's argument doesn't hold up.
And so not finishing a promised series is taking from that trust commons.
Of course, sometimes humans _can't_ finish something, and readers should accept that risk. The authors shouldn't be harassed.
But wanting them to follow through is not the same as thinking "they're your bitch".
This is me. I don't buy into a series until it's complete. Actually, I kind of HATE series works, because they are quite often seat-of-the-pants situations where the author really has no idea where it's all going, and has no real plan for sticking the landing. Also quite often they are far, far longer than is justified. I have no issues with long works, but we must be honest and admit that LOTS of series works in genre are just plain FAT and needed to be seriously edited down. But that doesn't happen, because it means they can sell more books.
Often, authors even start a series as a number of stand-alone books with clearly bounded character-and-plot development (think Star Trek), and then later morph it into an overarching-story-plot style series. See: Dresden Files, Kate Daniels, etc.
First couple are fun, though.
Amusingly, the first couple are the episodic ones. :D
- Somebody who has never read GoT so isn't part of the fandom.
Gaimans point isn't that you can't feel disappointed, it's that when you try to treat your end of the parasocial relationship as a burden with the direct implication that GRRM directly and personally owes you that you are treating him like your bitch.
This is the most important point - GRRM is hurting other authors with his failure to deliver on an implicit social contract. How many future authors will not get their first book in a series read enough to justify a second because readers will wait for a series to be finished before putting in the energy to read it?
Some writers will write and see where the story takes them. Others (like GRRM) will have a plan. Having a plan gives structure and a destination. It's good. Where it can go bad is the characters can change to where your destination no longer makes sense.
Take How I Met Your Mother as a perfect example of this. The (terrible) ending was always the plan but audiences hated it. In part because they loved Cristin Millotti (unexpected) but also because Robin had changed.
I believe the delay in finishing the series stems from this: GRRM doesn't know how to get to the ending he originally planned. A popular theory in fan circles is the Meereenese Knot [1]. Personaly I think it's a more fundamental problem than just one plot point.
I mean the two great hacks (DnD) rushed to end the show in one of the worst received finales of all time. I'm not sure HBO understands just how much damage these two did because not only have people moved on from GoT but the various promnects set in that universe are probably doomed to failure because literally nobody cares anymore. It's the equivalent of killing the entire MCU with one show. It's that bad.
The second trap GRRM has fallen into is another common one with writers: he now doesn't know what to leave out. The original plans was the first 3 books then a long gap and a second trilogy. But then he thought the story of Stannis and Jon Snow needed to be told (it didn't). And other such storylines crept in where these could've been flashbacks or summaries..
His early writing style was fantastic for this. A character's arc would skip ahead to something significant and then layer what's happening with what happened in the gap. It was engaging and concise.
So does GRRM "owe" us this story? Probably not. Do I care anymore? Not really. I would actually be shocked at this point if GRRM finishes the series at all (Robert Jordan anyone?). If he does, I'd target 2035 at the earliest for 2 more books.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2pp2m8/spoilers_all...
This is crucial for me and a major source of annoyance. In Dance he is still introducing new characters and plotlines -- some of which he introduces and later resolves to nothing, like Quentyn [1], leaving one to wonder why he felt the need at all -- some even major characters like yet another contender to the throne, yet he fails to advanced in any important way many of the early plotlines he's left hanging since forever.
Why? Why introduce new plotlines and characters instead of moving the existing ones to a satisfying resolution? Does he not have editors and friends who tell him "hey George, what's the point of Quentyn at all? And what's with the blue-haired boy, is he really necessary?"
[1] it's been a long while since I read Dragons and I forgot about the quirky name spellings. Quentin? Quentyn? Kwenteen?
PS: now that I write this, I realized there's another famous person named George who could have benefited from people telling him to cut down the crap :D
Even when Disney's attack lawyers (for Marvel) nailed down all the rights to actually publish Miracleman again in the 2010s somehow nothing further got published, Marvel re-published everything from Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, up until the end of the Golden Age (the first of Gaiman's three arcs) but when the first new book was scheduled (the Silver Age) it simply never materialised, at first it was "delayed" and then all mention was simply deleted.
In 2022 yet again supposedly Marvel are "definitely" going to publish this book, and well, do you see it? No.
Neil has other things to be doing, probably more interesting to him and certainly more lucrative than some dusty old comic book franchise.
Not finishing a story is a monumental betrayal of trust by the storyteller. And there is a contract between storyteller and listner that is as old as time and we all feel it in our bones. Try telling a bedtime story to a 4 year old about the 3 little pigs and just stop at the second pig, walk away and see what happens.
I have no beef with an author who takes 20 years to finish a series. I do have a problem with an author consistently making grandiose promises about how much he's working on the series, and how much content he has, and how his fans should be so grateful for the effort he's putting in. Then turns around and bitches incessantly about how his fans DARE to remind him he made those promises.
Basically - I would be fine with GRRM if he would shut the fuck up. But he's not in it for writing the books anymore, he's in it for the attention.
Which sentence sticks out?
People! wake up! Reading is awesome? if you get emotionally invested and then never get a satisfying ending (or any ending at all) then you just learned a valuable life lesson. Now get over it and read another book! :)
It's amazing that you can get such strong feelings, as you grow older this may not be the case anymore so don't take your passion for granted.
That said...
I think sagas like A Song of Ice and Fire are not exactly the kind of standalone literature were it's reasonable to pay for the book you're reading, and anything else is an extra. They are more like a TV show, even if HBO's didn't exist. We accept that fans protest the cancellation or bad endings of shows they love, and ASoIaF is very much a TV show in book form.
So GRRM doesn't owe fans anything. But it's also reasonable for fans to be upset and vocal about the lack of progress of this TV-show-in-book-form saga.
Also: I might be a minority that enjoys the journey more than the destination, so I enjoy reading about these noble houses, their family mottos, their vendettas, but even then in a work like this they are all in service of a satisfying payoff. This isn't an experimental "high literature" set of novels. Not providing this payoff would be like Agatha Christie never revealing "whodunnit" in one of her mystery novels.
I would say sticking to your word matters, and he is consistently unable to do so.
He is very excited about all the attention his public promises get, and then is very condescending about any sort of reminder (years later) that he made those promises.
I personally don't think he owes anyone content, but I also find the man incredibly distasteful.
Don't make promises you know damn well you won't keep. Especially don't make those promises because you delight in the attention and fawning fans, and then turn around and act like those fans are utter monsters for, ya know, maybe expecting you to keep your promises.
As for the rest: I don't think GRRM is trying to mislead anyone on purpose. I honestly think he's lost the energy to focus on ASoIaF and cannot find a way to solve this conundrum and finish the damn thing. I think he would if he could. If he's deceiving anyone, it's himself.
Writing literature isn't like writing CRUD code, is not just a matter of sitting your ass down and typing words. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.
I think he's lost his inspiration and cannot get it back, but I don't buy he's being cynical about this or purposefully cheating his fans.
... The above is a zero-exaggeration paraphrasing of *many* so-called ASoIaF fans' ridiculously entitled views of Martin's work (including elsewhere in this discussion). People express this anger in different ways. Some do what I mention above. Some take the more passive-aggressive route of constantly posting about how Martin needs to lose weight for his health, or "please stop watching football and start writing", or "please stop going to conventions and start writing",[1] or "hope he finishes the books before dying". As if such creeps are actually concerned about Martin's well-being; if they could snap their fingers and have the entire series completed tomorrow at the cost of its author dropping dead at once, I know what 90% of them would choose.
ASoIaF is a brilliant series, one of the masterpieces of the past 20 years. If Martin were to die tomorrow I'd sympathize with his wife, be glad I had the chance to read five remarkable books and watch the TV series and, yes, be sad to not read the end of the series. I'd not, however, be angry at him/God/the universe for dying before giving us more. They're great novels, but at the end of the day they're just that, novels.
[1] Yes, there are people who have posted both of these things on Martin's Livejournal site
They do however, owe the fans a little bit of honesty. In 2015 George RR Martin said he's going to skip comic-con in 2015 because he needs to focus on finish off winds of winter, but hey! If he gets it done before hand, he'll come to comic-con. That was 6 years after this blogpost complaining that people have unreasonable expectations that George RR Martin will deliver winds of winter.
The problem isn't that Martin hasn't delivered the book, it's that he has a massive problem communicating with his fans about whether he's going to deliver the book. He's repeatedly done this, and people question why the fans are angry. They're angry because he's jerking them around.
It's not even unreasonable for him to make promises to the fans and then fail to deliver. But there comes a point where it's reasonable for people to be angry at him for continuing to make predictions/statements about the book when he's got such a well-established pattern of breaking those promises. It's reasonable for Charlie Brown to get angry when Lucy pulls the football out of the way at the last minute - it's not because she owed him the football, it's that she lied to him, repeatedly.