[Kuruharan]

I can answer this question by pointing out that Tolkien never used the phrase "as useless as nipples on a breastplate." Case closed.

Now that is not to say that I don’t enjoy ASOIAF because I do very much and I also greatly enjoy the TV series.

The story COULD be better had Martin written the entire series before it's release. As it is, Martin does not even seem to know the END of his tale. And because the first 5 books are already out there, he cannot change anything already written so that the story as a whole fits together better.

I think there is much merit to this statement.

Martin claims to know the ending of the story in broad strokes and to have some sign posts between where he is now and the end but he doesn’t have the entire story mapped out in his head (and I think that is pretty much how he phrases it).

I think he is being honest when he says that he knows the ending he is working toward. However, I think the not knowing how he is going to get there is what is getting him into trouble.

Also he has been working on this series for decades now. Over the course of that time he has changed as a person and as a writer, and as a writer in my opinion he has gained skill in creating detail and lost greatly in plot advancement. I’ve read both of the preview chapters of The Winds of Winter that he has posted on his website and the Theon chapter I thought was pretty good. The Arianne Martell chapter he posted I thought was cringe-worthy and ghastly, to me it felt like it was summing up all the horrifying aspects of A Dance with Dragons and plopping them down into one chapter. It was very discouraging to me as to what Winds is ultimately going to be like.

There is a lot of speculation among his fandom that he needs to get a new and a more critical editor, a contention I agree with.

There is also a lot of speculation among his fandom that deep down inside he has lost interest in telling the Song of Ice and Fire and would rather spend his time telling shorter stories fleshing out the world he has created. I obviously cannot speak to what is going on in the nether reaches of his desires, but based upon the recent evidence which I can observe I can say that writing shorter stories of world building would certainly seem to suit his current skill set better.

As far as world building goes, Tolkien is vastly superior to Martin. Tolkien’s world building was superb or excellent in almost all aspects. Martin’s is pretty good in some places, mediocre in some, and horrible in others. Personally I can pretty much narrow down my greatest complaint against the world building in ASOIAF to one of scale. Martin’s sense of scale is ridiculously outsized in a number of aspects of his world…which is kind of odd in one particular aspect because I read an article that said based on what we know so far the world of ASOIAF is actually smaller than our own. However, being an incurable pedant with a firm historical grounding it sticks in my craw every time I think about how the Seven Kingdoms are supposed to be approximately the size of South America (if not a little larger) and are held together in a loose feudal structure. That structure didn’t work too well in France or the Holy Roman Empire which were much, much smaller. I’m willing to accept that with the aid of dragons one could quickly conquer the majority of a large continent in a medieval setting and level of technology (although the inability to conquer Dorne with those same dragons when you have conquered the rest of the Seven Kingdoms is just bizarre, and Martin knows that now because every time in the story that he tries to explain how in the world that happened he stumbles badly). However, once the dragons are dead there is no way a kingdom of that size could be held together under one dynasty and monarchy via the system described in the book. It’s just preposterous. And I’m not the only one who has noticed this. From a couple things in the TV show I think the show producers have noticed some of the problems as well.

Then we have Essos, which taken as a whole is cover-your-eyes awful and incoherent in so many ways that it would take too long to list them all. That being said, paradoxically I am pretty weird when cut against most ASOIAF fans in that I actually like a number of aspects of Essos much better than I like some aspects of Westeros. I think a lot of it is that I find the cultural and political diversity of Essos more plausible and appealing even with all its risible foundation and conceptualization than the great monolithic sameness of Westeros. For example, I actually enjoyed the descriptions in Dance of Braavos and I also enjoyed the Volantine Freehold (although maybe I just have a taste for the improbably exotic...let’s face it, it is probably that. I would probably just go all to pieces if we were ever taken to Asshai).

I think the reason why I enjoy that level of description and detail in the setting is because that is where Martin’s skills shine the brightest, even though it can stagnate the storyline. Martin excels at fleshing out the details of his world. However, the world as a whole collapses because much of its conceptual foundations are so absurd as to be laughable. Martin is, I think, at bottom a small scale writer and he has gotten himself out of his element with the scale of the world he is trying to write about and doesn’t have the skills (and possibly even the desire) to credibly get himself out of his mess.