OT: A Song of Ice and Fire Series (spoilers inside)
 

Please George R. R. Martin, finish the fourth book of the series sometime soon.

If you like fantasy-type sci-fi and you haven't read these yet, you are doing yourself a serious disservice. These are three of the best books I've read in a long time.

EDIT:

(4/9/07)

Please George R. R. Martin, finish the fifth book of the series sometime soon.

If you like fantasy-type sci-fi and you haven't read these yet, you are doing yourself a serious disservice. These are four of the best books I've read in a long time.

Yes, I think George's books are WAY better than the movies.

I agree, and my wife says the fourth book is due sometime this spring, March maybe.

I saw the spring deadline on Martin's own Web site, but that was months ago. You know how things change as work progresses. It's amazing to me it has taken him this long.

I did find out, interestingly enough, that this fourth book to be written was originally never to be. Apparently Martin was going to take up the stories of the characters a good five years after the end of the third book, which is basically what is in the fifth and/or sixth books now, if I understand it correctly.

His switch to writing out what happens in that time period (and I'm not sure what precipitated that change) is apparently a big reason for the long delay in getting this one out.

CR

Martin is the bomb.

I have to agree, of all the series I've read (and in 35 years thats been a LOT of series) this has to be the most engrossing. I love the style of each chapter being from another characters point of view. Seeing how everyone is thinking in depth, they're hopes their fears, its just awesome. I think my favorite trait overall is the very real feel he gives to the world. as you read you can really feel like you know and understand the world around them, which, when he throws in some of the magi really affect you as the reader all the more.

Cannot wait to have the next one!!

Thank you for the info. To paraphrase the 1st post, "I do like fantasy-type sci-fi and I haven't read these yet, so I am doing myself a serious disservice."

I will hunt them down.

dola - according to Amazon, the 4th book is due out in April.

Have them all and love them as well.

I have been a fan of Martin since reading his novella Sandkings. It was a real shame that the film rights, which changed hands a couple times I believe, ended up in the hands of the Outer Limits people. They absolutely butchered the original story in what was the debut episode on Showtime.

Thanks for the heads up...looking forward to checking this series out.

I LOVE these books. They are the only ones that have kept me up late at night to find out what happens in the past 10 years. I read them all in about a month (as compared to the six months it took me to get through Cryptonomicon).

As for "A Feast for Crows" (the upcoming fourth book) Martin's own website (updated jan04) basically says (say it with me, computer game fans) it will be out when it's done. An exact quote - "Various websites and bookshops have announced various publication dates, but until the book is actually finished and delivered, they are all pure guesswork."

Another series that I enjoyed tremendously is Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Series. It is a retelling (with MAJOR changes) of the Arthurian legends, from the point of view of a common spearman. It is similar to the Song of Ice and Fire series in that its heavy on swords and spears, lighter on mysticism and magic.

If you like Authurian legend, I would recommend the books of A.A. Attanasio, starting with The Dragon and the Unicorn. Great reads.

I have to chime in here...I love this series! I have read them over and over again...just a great writer.

George Martin does update his web site often, and he says that as soon as he is done the fourth book, he will let everyone know on his web site that it is done. So, as for bookstores predicting release dates, they are all just guesses...as was mentioned earlier, it will be done when it is done.

And please, George, hurry up!

Martin is definitely a great read.

Another author fantasy fans may want to check out is Melanie Rawn. She starts off with the Dragon Prince series (Dragon Prince, The Star Scroll, and Sunrunner's Fire) and then follows with the Dragon Star series (Stronghold, The Dragon Token, and Skybowl). Similar to Martin, she introduces you to a ruling family during a time of political turmoil. And like Martin, she has a number of characters and does a great job at following the family through the interesting times.

Best fantasy series I've ever read. Granted I haven't read too many because I usually start and then get quickly turned off. The first three books are amazing. The fat man better finish this fourth book soon. Enough is enough already.

That and I worry about his health. Did anyone see the picture of him holding the baby tiger on his website? He looked terrifying and awful. He must live to finish the series.

I had huge concerns when Stephen King got hit by that van when the Dark Tower series was still pending.

Have you never seen an old nerd before? He's fine, he's just a dork.

At one time Amazon said the 4th book was due out in April... 2003. Yeah, I've had it pre-ordered for about a year and can't wait for it to finally be published. Of course when it comes out I'm going to have to go back and re-read the first 3 books but that's not really such a bad thing.

Sample chapter from A Feast of Crows up at georgerrmartin.com.


http://www.georgerrmartin.com/chapter.html


YAY!!

ENOUGH WITH THE SAMPLES!!!

I WANT THE ENTIRE THING!

It's been FOUR AND A HALF YEARS!

I love the books. I´ve convince 6 people to read the books and all same the things.

I think this books are spreading in a mouth to ear basis, but they are greats.


PD: Maybe we can buy the stasis bed of Michael Jackson (since in the jail he wont need it) to preserve Martin... :D

He is a link to a great site that has a ton of character portraits from the books . Excellent work.

Link to character gallery web site

There is also an RPG (d20 system) based on the books due out this summer. The artwork looks great and though I only RP about once or twice a year nowadays, I'll still pick it up if nothing to act as a sourcebook for the novels themselves.

Link please. :D

But of course...

http://agot.guardiansorder.com/

Thanks for the link to the gallery. Some great stuff in there!

And here I was, hoping this meant that there was more news on it (of course, I'd have heard, so I shoudln't have hoped...I'm on a GRRM yahoo group).

Sigh.
/tk

I can't believe the last book in a continuous series came out when Clinton was president.

Yeah, I agreee, this guy needs to get off his ass and finish the darn book.

I can top that. My favorite author, Bernard Cornwell, started writing a Civil War series when I was in junior high. The 4th book in the series came out something like 10 years ago, and though he promised to continue, nothing yet.

So the last book in that series came out when Clinton was President...the first time.

I like the collected works of Homer, so I beat you all.

goddammit...

and here i htought the 4th was finished!

Good news folks.

It appears that Martin is finished with the book. From reading around it appears he was telling people at a convention in Kansas City that it was done, and it was confirmed on his website.

The bad news?

It's cut, looks like there will be no Jon or Dany in this book, it'll instead focus on the South. More importantly though, it sounds like no Tyrion, which makes me sad. Guess the publisher gave him a page limit, so he had to move large chunks of the book into the NEXT one.

Actually, from what I read earlier today (from [email protected]):

Hurrah!!

/tk

Hate the fact there's no Tyrion and John though, my two favorite characters. I dig the wall stuff.

Oh well, means I'll REALLY enjoy the next book. ;)

Martin, at least for myself, has had the unfortunate situation of following after Robert Jordan's fall from grace. After that series, which I unfortunately became addicted to back in the Bush I administration, has dragged out, and frankly, lost much of the quality it originally had, I'm now waiting for that one to just finish, and I swore off spending money on any other fantasy series that isn't finished. (I have ASOIAF because I've asked for the books as gifts over the years) I've read the first two, liked them, but haven't gone more then 50 pages into book 3 yet simply because I'm sick and damn tired of authors taking 2-3 years to put something out.

And now Martin wrote so much he has to split the same amount of time into two books? Suckers. He's following the same path RJ did. (See books 5-10 for examples)

This is going to turn into another 12 book 20 year project. Maybe it's just the curse of making such a deep world, that if your name isn't Tolkien, you get sucked into more and more details as things slow to a crawl, both in publication and in plot movement.

I'm disappointed in that as well, but I'm happy we're finally getting another book. I hate "unfinished" series as much as bronconick, but this series is so much better than just about any fantasy series I've ever read that there is nothing to do but wait.

Count me as someone who doesn't like unfinished series. But I'm kind of late to the party when it comes to reading fantasy (been mostly a sci-fi and historic epic reader) so I have plenty of finished series to keep me busy until the unfinished ones are completed.

I never read any Robert Jordan or any other modern fantasy series. Actually the last pure fantasy series I read were the Dragon Lance books. I pretty much stopped after the first six, which I think told the entire story if I recall.

I guess I had a similar experience with Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, but that's all wrapped up now.

I will patiently wait for Martin to finish his books. His world is incredibly deep and he's in a bit of bind after "A Storm of Swords." The war in Westeros is pretty much done and many of his main characters are scattered to the four corners of the earth (Bran, Arya, Tyrion, etc.) and will have little or no connection with many of the other plotlines going forward.

I will hold off bitching about things until I read it.

I'm not sure I will continue the series if his next book is not going into the two storylines left that are most interesting to me. Although it may be interesting to get some Dornish history and stories and seeing stories around a certain female character back from beyond the grave at the end of the last book. Still, I think it might be better to cut my losses. Its tough to get involved in characters in such a brutal series with long waits for the next book, and if the next book is going to ignore the most interesting characters all together....

And that's the main problem isn't it? When creating such a deep world, you have to spend far far far more time in the later novels making sure you didn't contradict some nuance in the previous ones. With all the internet fanboys, looking to nitpick the novel to death, one slip up may haunt you.

This, of course, made me think of the Xena episode of the Simpsons.

I think the last thing in the world you could accuse GRRM of is lacking in plot development. Every book has TONS of story to it and a lot of changes. Matter of fact, most of the characters you liked in the first book are probably dead by the time the 4th one will be out. :)

It's been confirmed. Good scoop, Terp!

From GRRM's website:

No, I haven't finished writing everything I wanted to include in A FEAST FOR CROWS. I have wrapped up a whole bunch of characters and storylines since the last update in January, but "a whole bunch" does not equate to "all."

And I was facing another problem as well: the sheer size of the book.

All of the books in this series have been big, mind you. A GAME OF THRONES weighed in at 1088 pages in manuscript, not counting the appendices. A CLASH OF KINGS was even longer at 1184 pages, not counting the appendices. And A STORM OF SWORDS measured a gargantuan 1521 pages in manuscript, not counting the (etc).

Any publisher will tell you that a book as big as A STORM OF SWORDS is a production nightmare, and STORM did indeed cause problems for many of my publishers around the world. In some languages it was divided into two, three, or even four volumes. Bantam published STORM in a single volume in the United States, but not without difficulty. Pretty much everyone agreed that it would be a really good thing if the fourth volume in the series came in somewhat shorter than STORM, so I set out with the idea of delivering a FEAST closer in length to A CLASH OF KINGS.

Alas for good intentions. In hindsight, I should have known better. The story makes its own demands, as Tolkien once said, and my story kept demanding to get bigger and more complicated.

I passed A CLASH OF KINGS last year, and still had plenty more to write. By January, I had more than 1300 pages, and still had storylines unfinished. About three weeks ago I hit 1527 pages of final draft, surpassing A STORM OF SWORDS... but I also had another hundred or so pages of roughs and incomplete chapters, as well as other chapters sketched out but entirely unwritten. That was when I realized that the light I'd seen at the end of the tunnel was actually the headlight of an onrushing locomotive.

And that's why my publishers and I, after much discussion and weighing of alternatives, have decided to split the narrative into two books (printing in microtype on onion skin paper and giving each reader a magnifying glass was not considered feasible, and I was reluctant to make the sort of deep cuts that would have been necessary to get the book down to a more publishable length, which I felt would have compromised the story).

The first plan was simply to lop the text in half. In that scenario, I would finish the last few chapters in as short a length (and time) as possible. That would have produced a story of maybe 1650 to 1700 pages in manuscript, which we would simply have broken into two chunks of roughly equal length and published as A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part One and A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part Two.

We decided not to do that. It was my feeling -- and I pushed hard for this, so if you don't like the solution, blame me, not my publishers -- that we were better off telling all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. Cutting the novel in half would have produced two half-novels; our approach will produce two novels taking place simultaneously, but set hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and involving different casts of characters (with some overlap).

The division has been done, and it think it works quite well. The upshot is, A FEAST FOR CROWS is now moving into production. It is still a long book, but not too long; about the same size as A GAME OF THRONES. The focus in FEAST will be on Westeros, King's Landing, the riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. More than that I won't say.

Meanwhile, all the characters and stories removed from FEAST are moving right into A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, which will focus on events in the east and north. All the chapters I have not yet finished and/or begun are moving into DANCE. I think this is very good, if truth be told, since it will give me the room to complete those arcs as I had originally intended, rather than trying to tie them up quickly in a chapter or two so I could deliver the massively late Big FEAST.

So there it is. I know some of you may be disappointed, especially when you buy A FEAST FOR CROWS and discover that your favorite character does not appear, but given the realities I think this was the best solution... and the more I look at it, the more convinced I am that these two parallel novels, when taken together, will actually tell the story better than one big book.

And if there are those who don't agree, and still want their Big FEAST with all the trimmings set out on one huge table... well, there's an easy fix. Get both books, razor the pages out with an Exacto knife, interleave the chapters as you think best, and bring the towering stack of text that results to your favorite bookbinder... and presto, chango the Big FEAST will live again.

As for me, I am getting back to work. There's good news on that front too -- A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is half-done!!!

(And before anyone asks, yes indeed, this development means that Parris was right all along. It will now probably require seven books to complete the story).

—George R.R. Martin, May 29, 2005

Yeah, but from old age, that's the problem! :)

According to the George R. R. Martin web site, the next book should be in stores on November 8!

After A Feast of Crows?

No Jon, no Dany, no Bran.

Yeesh.

He always just strikes me as a.. how shall I say.. asshole. Kinda like Tom Clancy...

That is for A Feast of Crows...

what happened to the end of July?

I could be entertained by a book about Lannisters. And the others.


And I also have to ask, "What happened to the end of July?"

No idea, but according to his web site, that is what Bantum Spectra has informed him as for when the Hardcover will be released.