Game of Thrones

Season 5 of "Game of Thrones" fires up on HBO in April.  It should be interesting.  So I thought I would take a look at "Game of Thrones" in particular, and long form epic fantasy in general.  "Game of Thrones" is based on the series "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R. R. Martin.  Martin has said that the series will run a total of 7 volumes.  The first five are in print.  The first volume "A Game of Thrones" is the source of the title for the HBO series.  It was published in 1996.  The fifth volume "A Dance with Dragons" was published in 2011.  To date there is no release date for volume six, "The Winds of Winter".  Since the HBO series originally planned to cover one volume in each of its seasons, theoretically they should be caught up when season five concludes.  If they stick to their "an episode a week" schedule and their pattern of ten episodes per season, season five should finish up about the end of June.  What happens next?  Season six should begin its broadcast run in April of 2016.  So with that as a jumping off point, let's look at some background.

Epic Fantasy as a fictional genre is very new.  Most people date it back to Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.  It was initially published in 1954-55 and was a great success.  It followed a much smaller volume "The Hobbit".  Tolkien had a deep interest in mythology.  He turned that interest into a bunch of stories for his children.  By a queer set if circumstances these stories got published as "The Hobbit" in 1937 and became a surprise success.  "The Hobbit" was a children's book.  There was an almost immediate groundswell for a sequel.  Tolkien felt that he had thrown "Hobbit" together without that much thought.  He decided if he was going to do a sequel he was going to do it right.  So he spent ten years creating an entire world.  He designed geography, races, entire languages, and a complete history for his mythical world.  Then he spent some time deciding exactly what story he wanted to tell.  The story became too large to fit into a single volume.  So he ended up ultimately breaking it into three parts which were published in rapid succession as the "Rings" trilogy.

The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy was designed for adults.  Readers loved the story and they loved the rich world Tolkien had designed as a backdrop for his story.  "Rings" contains appendixes and other supplementary material.  Ultimately a great deal of this and other "back story" material has made it into print, most notably in a posthumous book called "Silmarillion" and in various publications by his son Christopher.  "Rings" was popular from the beginning.  It quickly attained and still maintains cult status.  All this was supercharged with the release of the three Peter Jackson directed "Rings" movies in December of 2001, 2002, and 2003.  Jackson has just completed a "trilogy" treatment of "The Hobbit".  The films were released in December of 2012, 2013, and 2014.  Although not as well reviewed as the "Rings" trilogy, nevertheless the films have grossed just under $3 billion world wide.  The "Epic Fantasy" genre entered the public consciousness with the publication of the original "Rings" books.  When they were published "trilogy" and other "long form" formats were not popular.  So let's go back further and see what we find.

The "Rings" trilogy was not the first long form (longer than a single book) publication.  Ultra-long books were a fad shortly after the invention of movable type.  The record holder is something nicknamed "Artamene".  It was published in 10 "parts", each of which consisted of three volumes.  The total word count was just under 2,000,000.  The fad for ultra-long books quickly petered out and was not heard from again for a long time.

If we look at the twentieth century we see a number of series.  Erle Stanley Gardner published 82 "Perry Mason" novels plus a number of short stories between 1933 and his death in 1970.  But there was no continuing story.  Each book was a stand alone offering that was designed to be self contained.  A book did not depend on events that took place in earlier books.  Series publications featuring the same character or cast of characters were very popular during this period.  Lester Dent managed to produce 181 full length "Doc Savage" stories over a period of about 15 years.  That's an astonishing production rate of roughly ten per year.  A more typical rate of production was that of Rex Stout.  He managed to produce a "Nero Wolfe" book at the rate of close to one per year from 1934 to 1969.  Stout and Gardner were just two of a dozen or so authors who churned out one or more books in their series per year for long periods of time.  But they all followed in the Gardner mold where each book was designed to be read stand alone.  It didn't hurt if you were familiar with the continuing characters, locations, etc.  But it also didn't help much.  And the age and station of the characters stayed pretty much the same from beginning to end.

There is one excerption to this that I can think of that dates from this period.  Nordhoff and Hall published a trilogy containing related works of historical fiction.  The first book is the only one that is now remembered.  It is "Mutiny on the Bounty".  I won't describe it on the theory that you are already familiar with it.  But "Bounty" was followed by "Men Against the Sea".  In this book Bligh goes from villain to hero.  He manages to navigate a small boat and its crew across three thousand miles of open ocean to safety.  It is perhaps the most outstanding example of seamanship in history.  "Pitcairn's Island" follows the Bounty mutineers as they find and occupy the extremely remote island of the same name.  In their time the books were immensely popular.  Now, only "Bounty" is remembered.

The success of the "Rings" trilogy enabled others to be given a chance at a longer form.  A classic example of a trilogy from a different genre is the "North and South" trilogy by John Jakes.  The three volumes were tied together tightly and all concerned the Civil War.  The books were successful enough to be turned into a miniseries.  But this was unusual.  A more common approach was the "beach read" book.  From the '30s through most of the '60s a "book" was typically around 60,000 words long.  The Gardner and Stout books clocked in around this length, as did most of their competitors.  (Not surprisingly, the Savage books clocked in at a shorter length but they were not that much shorter.)  This changed in the '60s when we started seeing longer "beach read" books.  Each volume was longer, perhaps 100,000 - 150,000 words.  But even books from the same author conformed to the Gardner "stand alone" formula.

Also at about this time what I am going to call the "back door" long form series started to appear.  It was especially popular in the Fantasy genre.  The most well known example of this is the "Pern" books by Anne McCaffrey.  The first entry was a novella (essentially an extra-long short story) called "Weyr Search" published in a Science Fiction magazine called "Analog" in 1967.  It was very popular so it was followed quickly by a second novella in the same magazine.  And the series and its popularity kept growing and growing.  McCaffrey kept churning out more Pern material right up to her death in 2011.  (The last few entries were a joint effort with her son Todd).  McCaffrey backed into the idea of a connected series of books using the same world and carrying characters over from story to story or book to book.  After the whole thing got going she was forced to go back and lay out a history, time line, and relationships.

Another example of this "back door" to a longer form is the "Hornblower" books by C. S. Forester.  I think Forester had mapped out a complete time line for his character, Horatio Hornblower, before he published his first book.  But that first book finds Hornblower mid-career.  Forester published several more books before he went back to the beginning and wrote "Mr. Midshipman Hornblower", the first in the series from a chronological perspective.  Forester's eventual (and most likely initial) plan was to take his character from midshipman to admiral.  The Hornblower books were originally published between 1937 and 1967 so they effectively predate both the Tolkien and McCaffrey efforts.

Since then the whole "midshipman to admiral during the Napoleonic era" thing has turned into something of a cottage industry.  I can't recommend most authors who have attempted to pull it off.  The most successful writer to follow in Forester's footsteps (and the one who did perhaps a better job than Forrester) is Patrick O'Brien with his "Aubrey-Maturin" books.  Another series I can recommend is the "Sharpe" books by Bernard Cornwell.  They take place in a similar time frame (the Napoleonic Wars) but involve a land officer instead of a naval one.  In Sharpe's case he advances from foot soldier to Lt. Colonel.  In all these cases the main character mostly evolves by advancing in rank.  The world changes as the Napoleonic Wars progress.  But this is mostly used to provide a change of scenery and some variety in the combat.  And I must confess that at least in the case of O'Brien and Cornwell they set out to do a series from the start rather than backing into it as McCaffrey did.

So we do have a kind of long form fiction.  A series of novels follows a character that evolves at least as far as his rank is considered.  But then we come to the modern era that Martin is very much a part of.  Wikipedia lists 95 entries under "Fantasy Novel Trilogies".  And conspicuous by their absence are the big two:  The Hunger Games and Twilight series.  So Wikipedia's list of trilogies is not complete and fantasy trilogies is a thing now.  And there are now many fantasy series that extend beyond the boundaries of a trilogy.  In many cases the author set out to tell a story to big to fit in one or even three books.  In short we have the epic fantasy series.  Wikipedia, in their "high fantasy" article, calls out 9 series as examples.  "The Song of Ice and Fire" (or "Game of Thrones", if you prefer) is not listed.  But a series I want to talk about next is.

Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney Jr.) had been knocking around in the writing game for a good long time before he published his first "Wheel of Time" book.  His most notable earlier achievement was penning seven titles in the "Conan the Barbarian" series between 1982 and 1984.  He decided he could do better and he laid out an epic series.  The main action would take place over a three year period.  He mapped out a land that consisted of a core area and several peripheral areas that don't figure as locales in any significant way.  The core area consists of about ten kingdoms.  The core area is big enough that it takes several weeks to cross on foot or horseback.  There are more than twenty main characters and, by the time the series was completed, over three thousand named characters.

I don't know how many books Jordan originally planned on (rumor has it six) but ultimately he planned on twelve and the actual number turned out to be fourteen.  The first volume ("The Eye of the World") was published in 1990.  The last volume Jordan wrote (#11 - "Knife of Dreams") was published in 2005.  He died in 2007 after an illness lasting roughly a year.  His wife and editor handed the task of finishing what was supposed to be the final volume over to Brandon Sanderson.  Sanderson found he couldn't get the remaining material (Jordan had done extensive planning and outlining before he died) to fit into one volume.  It ultimately took three. Volume 14 ("A Memory of Light") was published in 2013.  It wraps up the series and has the ending Jordan planned on when he originally laid things out.  Overall I liked the series.  But the general consensus is that the Martin series is stronger.

I don't know if it's true but I suspect that Martin became aware of the "Wheel of Time" series, took a look at it, and decided "I can do better".  Like Jordan, Martin spent a long time knocking around in the writing game before he started his series.  He sold his first short story, "The Hero" to a Science Fiction magazine called "Galaxy" in 1970.  He had enough success to continue writing for print until his book "The Armageddon Rag" flopped in 1983.  This caused him to turn to TV where he had considerable success.  But he found the one hour TV show format constricting.  He couldn't write the kind of big stories he wanted to.  So he conceived his "Ice and Fire" series and started writing it.

"A  Game of Thrones" was published in August of 1996.  I picked up a paperback copy some time later.  I thought the series had potential so I picked up "A Clash of Kings" (first published in February of 1999).  I became a little impatient but it still seemed worth it.  So I went ahead and got "A Storm of Swords" and read it when it came out (first published in November 2000).  By now I was becoming disillusioned with the series.  When I picked up "A Feast of Crows" (first published in November of 2005) I said "last chance" when I started it.  At the end I said "I'm done".  But I wasn't.  I did not get "A Dance with Dragons" (first published July 2011) but a friend of mine loaned me his copy so I went ahead and read it too.  It reinforced my "I'm done" opinion from the end of book four.

Now, the general consensus is that the Martin series is better than the Jordan series.  So why did I stick with one and end up with a positive opinion of it but want to distance myself from the other?  I'm sure there is some kind of literary argument as to why Martin is better.  But I find I generally dislike "literary" books so maybe that's it.  But I think not.  Martin's books are not finalists for the Mann-Booker prize (or any other "literature" prize either).  So they aren't "literary" in the usual sense.  And they have lots of the elements that I like in a book and that I find missing in "literary" books.  So I think my reasons are different.  But they have something to do with what draws others to Martin.  So let me go into that.

I went into some aspects of the world of the "Wheel of Time" books above.  The "Ice and Fire" books have a similar amount of world building.  There are seven kingdoms in the central area and northern and southern peripheral areas.  And unlike with the Jordan books a considerable amount of the action takes place in these peripheral areas.  The main action in the Jordan books takes place over a three year period.  But Jordan built a thousand years of history for his world and regularly made use of it.  Martin says he loosely based his saga on the Wars of the Roses (1455 - 1487) with a bit of Hundred Years' War (1337 - 1453) thrown in to spice things up.  There are lots of factions and dynasties battling each other.  That gives him a canvas as big or bigger than the one Jordan employed.  And the action spans many more than Jordan's three years.  I have no problem with any of this.  And I don't know if the "named character" count is higher in "Wheel" or in "Ice and Fire" but it is very high in both.  And again I am fine with that.

So those are some of the reasons that could be why I could be unhappy with "Ice and Fire".  But none of them actually are why I am unhappy.  Let me go over some more "could be" reasons.  Martin's work is considered a breakthrough with respect to "adult content, including incest, pedophilia, and adultery".  His "mature descriptions" are "far more frank than those found in other fantasy authors" (all quotes from the Wikipedia "A Song of Ice and Fire" article).  I am ok with all that.  So, with the brush cleared, let's get on to what I actually don't like.

Let's start with the feature that Martin is now perhaps most famous for.  It is one I haven't mentioned yet.  He kills off a lot of people.  That's pretty standard.  But the standard fiction formula is to kill off a lot of spear carriers (characters that are there just there to fill in the background or to add some local color without making a contribution to the plot).  Martin certainly does that.  There is lots of blood and gore around.  So where does Martin deviate?  Well, in a traditional piece of fiction one and only one important character gets killed.  In "Ice and Fire" important characters are slaughtered left and right.  One of the most important characters in "A Clash of Kings" ends up dead by the end of that volume.  It's shocking but it totally works.

But that's just the beginning.  He keeps killing off important characters at a good clip all the way through.  This certainly contributes to a realistic feel.  And its so shocking that it has generated a lot of buzz by now.  When a large number of important characters were slaughtered in the "Red Wedding" scene in the book (and especially when that particular TV episode aired) people were shocked.  People who had read the book even went so far as to set up video cameras so they could record their unsuspecting friends and family.  There is now tons of these videos of YouTube available for your viewing pleasure.  People who were not in the know are shocked and appalled as the slaughter plays out on the TV screen in front of them.  There's a good reason why it is called the "Red Wedding" scene.

So what's the problem here?  A good author creates a bond between the characters he is writing about and the reader.  We are supposed to become invested in them.  At bottom this is an adventure story so there is a lot of adventure.  And part and parcel of adventure is danger.  What these characters are supposed to be doing (and are doing in this case) is dangerous.  This means that the possibility of death for these admittedly fictional characters exists.  In most cases death in the fictional world the author has created is limited to bad guys (good riddance), minor "good guy" characters (like spear carriers, people we have not invested a lot in so a loss but not a big loss), and typically one important "good guy" character (just to keep things honest).  Martin is right to conclude this is fundamentally dishonest.  More important characters should die if it's really as dangerous as the author says it is.  But Martin takes it too far.

How do I know?  Well I rented the boxed set of season one of the TV show.  I thought pretty much everything about it was extremely well done.  But I found as I was watching it that I was saying "this character gets killed" and "this other character gets killed" and so on.  Every time one of these characters I knew was destined for death in a later episode appeared, it took me out of the show.  Why invest in a character if you know they are just going to get killed?  And having a character I don't want to have anything to do with (because they are going to die) is distracting.  The show doesn't connect with me like it should because of all these distractions.  I haven't rented any of the other seasons for this reason. 

That's the emotional answer.  Let me give you a more analytic one.  The author presumably knows how things are going to shake out.  Knowing that most authors pick characters that are going to survive to tell the story.  It's not that a lot of people aren't going to die.  It's that the best way to tell the story clearly, most authors conclude, is to pick characters that survive everything.  There is a bond of trust between the author and the reader.  You invest in my characters and I will make sure they (mostly) survive to the end.  This unwritten rule serves the needs of both the author and the reader.  Breaking a rule when done well can liven things up and add to the pleasure of the reader.  But Martin just  wore me out and lost my trust because of the sheer number of important characters he kills off.  What else?

There is a thing called a thread.  This is very important when you have a lot of characters and they are spread out all over the place.  You follow one character around for a while and that's one thread.  Then you temporarily drop that thread and follow another character around who may very well be at an entirely different place.  That's another thread.  This switching between multiple threads thing is a good idea.  It allows the reader to be involved with many actions involving many characters at different places and times.  And Jordan deploys this technique very effectively.  There are a lot of threads that show up at one place or another in the 14 volumes that constitute "Wheel of Time".  But Jordan wisely closes out threads on a regular basis.  If one thread is complete you can forget about it and this gives you the mental energy to pick up a different thread.  Jordan keeps the "active thread count" manageable.

And you have to periodically switch between active threads.  You follow one thread for a while.  Then you drop it before it is complete and pick up another thread.  You keep switching from thread to thread until it is appropriate to pick the first thread back up.  This switching between threads can be used very effectively to maintain tension and interest.  In the back of your mind as you are following a thread is the question:  what's going to happen next with respect to that other thread.  So switching threads is a good thing if it's not done to excess.  If it is done to excess then we have forgotten what was happening in the old thread we are picking back up.  It takes us some time to get back up to speed.  While we are getting back up to speed the story is not as effective and compelling as it should be.

Jordan keeps the number of active threads at an appropriate level.  That way he can switch away to build tension (good).  He doesn't stay away so long that we have lost track of the old thread.  When he switches back we are right with him (also good).  And we have been away just long enough that we are still worrying (as we should) about what will happen when we get back.  Martin, however has bad thread discipline.  My take is that he just can't bring himself to end a thread.  The result is that he has zillions of threads open.  Maybe someone else can, but I can't keep track of that many threads for that long.  What are now volumes 4 and 5 started out as one volume.  But it got too long.  So he split it.  The technique he used was to split his world into two parts.  The threads concerning one part went into volume 4 and the rest went into volume 5.  That meant that when we started volume 5 we were confronted with a bunch of threads that had been dormant since somewhere in volume 3.

It is common for a thread to get split into two or more threads.  A group will break up for whatever reason and each subgroup will go a different way.  So instead of having a thread involving a relatively large group of people we now have two separate threads, each of which now involves a smaller group of people.  Jordan does it all the time.  Martin does it all the time.  But Jordan never let things get out of control.  You'd think that with all the characters Martin kills off a lot of threads would go as a result but not so.  He creates threads even faster than he kills characters off.  So you end up with groups all over the place.  He can only get to what's happening with a particular group infrequently.  This fragments the narrative and diminishes its power.  It also seriously annoys me. 

Apparently there are lots of people that are not annoyed by the number of characters that have been killed off and the number of threads Martin is juggling.  Good on them.  Then there's this last thing.  The unofficial standard for authors is "a book a year".  Lots of authors can't crank 'em out that fast but "a book a year" gives us some kind of benchmark.  The "Wheel of Time" series took from 1990 to 2013 to get published.  That's roughly a book every two years.  Given the size of the books (and the fact that Jordan died before the series was completed) that's not bad.  Fans are always interested in "faster, faster, faster" but they also want quality maintained.  So Jordan's pace was entirely acceptable.

Now let's look at Martin's pace.  Volume 2 came out 2 1/2 years after volume 1.  Volume 3 came out just under two years after Volume 2.  Volume 4 came out exactly five years after volume 3.  Martin had an explanation.  He decided he had to reorganize everything when he figured out that volume 4 was running too long.  However, supposedly the reorganization was complete when volume 4 came out.  Subsequent volumes were supposed to pop out relatively quickly as a result.  But then volume 5 came out 5 1/2 years after volume 4.  With no release date published I can confidently predict that volume 6 will not come out in 2015.  That means that volume 6 will come out a minimum of 4 1/2 years after volume 5.  That's ridiculous.

Martin has been heavily involved in the TV series.  He announced a few months ago that he was going to dial his involvement back so he can focus more on writing.  We'll see if that helps.  His past writing pace, however, confronts us with two questions.  First, will the books be done before the TV series is?  HBO is cranking out a season a year.  Originally the idea was seven books and seven seasons.  But HBO abandoned the strict "a book a season" rule after season two.  HBO has also announced that the show is not going to run forever.  They are talking in terms of seven or possibly eight seasons and no more.  Supposedly Martin has told the show runners how everything turns out.  But it is looking more and more likely that we will get to the end of the TV series well before Martin gets done with the last book.

The second question relates to an even more dire possibility.  What if Martin dies before he finishes the series?  Martin is 66 and ,except for a serious weight problem, is apparently in good health.  But what if his estimate of how many volumes it will take to complete the series is completely wrong?  Publishers are hell on authors who miss their deadlines or turn in books that are much larger than promised.  Unless, that is, the author is wildly popular.  Then all that goes out the window.  Martin has already been forced to turn what was supposed to be volume 4 into two volumes.  So was the original plan for 6 volumes?  Let's assume so.  With "volume 4" now split into two volumes we are now up to 7 volumes.  On paper this means that we are still on track for just two more volumes.  But what if the old volume 5, now volume 6, needs to be split.  Now we are up to 8 volumes, the current 5, plus 6a, 6b, and 7.  Given that, is it likely that volume 7 will hold the line?  No!  It is more likely to turn into 7a and 7b and possibly 7c.

Let's be realistic and assume Martin is now on a "book every 5 years" pace.  That means 6a comes out in 2016, 6b comes out in 2021, 7a comes out in 2026, 7b, comes out in 2031, and 7c finally wraps everything up in 2036.  By that time Martin will be 88 years old.  Lots of people live past 88 and are still productive at 88.  But its not a sure thing.  This estimate is pessimistic.  It assumes Martin's pace does not pick up and it assumes that volumes continue to inflate.  Martin could fight back.  But another concern I have is that it may be that Martin no longer has his heart and soul invested in finishing the book series off.

I think he has found working on the TV series is a lot of fun.  In the past his TV experience was as a lowly writer on someone else's show.  But this time around he occupies a much more exalted position and people are much more willing to do things his way.  That tends to amp up the "fun factor" quite a bit.  At this point he has cranked out a lot of words for volumes 1-5.  Each and every one is a hefty tome.  The publishing of his last volume happened about the same time as the first episode of the TV series came out.  I believe Martin feels some responsibility to the fans of the books.  But is it enough?  I think not and that's the final reason I am no longer interested in the series.