Is a Song of Ice and Fire better than Lord of the Rings?

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by lev

And because of that, the story gets reduced to simply a series of events rather than a great story/epic fantasy, in my opinion.
(...)
To me, great epic fantasy creates a unique universe FOR THE PURPOSE of telling a story with a message. The universe isn't an end to itself. I have read ASOIAF books, and WoT books, and have enjoyed most of them very much. But I now see that my enjoyment wasn't because the stories were enriching my life with messages to take to heart. Instead, they were simply a means to relax. (...) I don't engage those stories in order to glean messages from them. They don't enrich my life as art. I engage them to escape.

Agreed, very much agreed. That's very much my impression as well. And welcome to the 'Downs, by the way!

Originally Posted by lev

If the ideas are written as multiple 1,000ish page stories, instead of one mother story. That way, each story could be tight (a standalone story of Lord of the Rings scale), and the presence of all the stories would make up one fascinating universe (the stories could even overlap!) There could even be novellas and short stories within the universe too! And perhaps even some stories written in a "nonfiction" style, like some of the bland (I think) but cool historical stories that Tolkien tells in some of his other books. How cool would that be?!

In fact, I think that's actually what happens all the time. Many, and I would even dare say most, "big" fantasy authors are suffering from something which e.g. the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski called "falling too much in love with one's world" syndrom. He said that was the reason he never wanted to draw a map for his own books, because he would then feel tempted to set more stories into the same world, and just draining it of all the originality of the stories set in it. The premise being - authors can easily fall in love with their created universes or characters and then they can't leave them, so they publish more and more novels about the world, about the main characters, about their children and grandchildren, and while it enrichens the world (and many fans would be exactly happy to learn what Aragorn's son did, what lay beyond Lake Rhun to the east, or what did the daily life of the Lossoth look like), it also mostly "imprisons" the author and shuffles the priorities: the story is not (often) based on an original plot idea, but on the idea to exactly explore a culture which was interesting but played only a minor role in the original big story arc etc.

I said many fantasy authors do that - and I am sure you can find which ones if you look at some bookshelf in a fantasy bookshop. When you see a row of books from the same author, some of which are titled "The Sixth Volume of the Epic Wizardwar Octalogy" and "The Fourth Volume of the Adventures of the Survivors of the Wizardwar Saga", you know that it is the case. I don't usually read that stuff, exactly because I don't think it's often very good. One example I am familiar with being R.E. Feist. I have read his Riftwar Saga, but then there was exactly like thousand other books about the main characters' descendants, about some Serpent Priests who are normally playing quite minor role in the story, and so on. You can learn a lot of details about the world, but often (even if the world is interesting in the first place) it loses its charm, or ridicules things you knew from before. (If the author does not want to just write first an epic story with a great plot, and then lots of subsequent stories without much plot, but referring to different cultures in the same world, but instead wants to e.g. have some new equally epic plot featuring this time not a Hobbit, but a Wood Elf as the main hero, he might easily end up devising New World War which totally diminishes the point of the original story, since now we learn that the Dark Lord defeated in the original book was in fact only one of the twenty Dark Lords who serve the Darkest Lord who has to be defeated by the new main hero. And so forth.)

Martin, I believe, avoided some of this by stuffing the "extra info" already in his original series of ASOIAF. So, instead of having three volumes of Adventures of the Stark Family in the South, and later three volumes of The Return of the Dragon Rulers, and even later the Adventures of Jon Snow, we have everything in one place, and I think that's fine. But it is still only another manifestation of the same "problem".

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Let me also remark, in conclusion, that I am actually glad we have only Tolkien's notes and drafts regarding all the other cultures in Middle-Earth, all the minor or major historical figures like Isildur or Glorfindel, because that may very well be the optimal course. We still have something to satisfy our curiosity about the "large world", but it does not conflict with the main story, it does not try to present itself as a story on the equal level with LotR, and it leaves still a lot to our imagination within the world itself.

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

However sometimes a writer becomes so successful that perhaps the editing process gets less robust and the work suffers. I always feel that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix could have lost a couple of hundred pages but by that stage nopne dared tell JK R that it was baggy

Interesting remark. In fact, my brother stopped reading Harry Potter exactly because of the Order of the Phoenix dragging too much, he said. I haven't met anyone else who would have complained in the same way, but now there's at least you (and therefore I assume more people thinking that), so I start seeing that there might be something to that idea.

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

However I cant say which is the case here until I have read Martin.... i have been tempted but I am waiting for it to be completed ... if I like it I know the waiting will drive me nuts..

I can totally understand that approach. It may be very "safe". Then again, given GRRM's progress, it could mean you're going to read it in, like, ten years... But it isn't as if there weren't other books to read meanwhile.