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

[lev]

I think the deeper question here is: What are the important factors for a great artful story/novel/epic fantasy? To me, what's most important is to have a carefully crafted story that the reader can relate to (i.e. a message about the human condition or something, a unique universe can provide a backdrop to tell unique messages, as Ursula Le Guin has emphasized before). I think the fact that Martin first said there were going to be 5 books, and now there will be 7+, is testament to the fact that ASOIAF simply is not as well crafted a story, it's not tight with precise moments of tension and resolve and that sort of thing.

However, on a different aspect, I don't think great fantasy has to necessarily copy Tolkien's PG/PG-13 tone. Tolkien's tone lends itself very nicely to metaphor and archetypal characters (like Bombadil), but I don't think that's essential to great epic fantasy. People enjoy tightly crafted non-fantasy novels at all "ratings" so to speak, and the same goes for fantasy I think. So it's cool that Martin's universe is rated R. It's convincing as a universe that way. Also, I think there are characters and situations in Martin's universe that people can relate to, so that's cool. However, ASOIAF is not tightly crafted, it "drags" as others have said. 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 think that is necessarily a bad thing, but I read ASOIAF and WoT books excessively, because the universes were more exciting with less at stake than it was to fully engage in the real world with all its disappointments and failures, etc.. It was more predictable in it's excitement and lack of dread to follow the characters than it was to fully live my "character", my life. I used to play Diablo2 for the same reason. Most TV shows I have watched in recent years have been for the same reason, although granted not as excessively as I played Diablo 2. I see most people that live on my urban street come home every day after work, and watch more episodes from a TV show, then go to bed and start all over again. Those tv shows, like ASOIAF, are not art, not a means to enrich their lives, but a means to escape it. Again, I don' think it's necessarily a terrible thing to being excited to come home and simply follow the next series of events in Don Draper's story, or Tyrion's, or whoever. I just don't want to kid myself, 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.

When I see people reading ASOIAF on the train commuting to work in my city, I doubt if any are reading it to enjoy a great work of high fantasy, a great story that enriches their lives with a message about the human condition or whatever. I think they are reading instead it simply relax. Not a bad thing to relax, just not a great story like LotR.

Perhaps a great and tight story cannot exceed 1,000 pages ish. Lord of the Rings is just short enough I think that the story stays very tight. But with these newer epic fantasy's like Martin's, the total story is going to be many thousands of pages long, and there's no way that can be tight. Don't get me wrong, I agree with that other person that it would be cool to learn more about the extra details, like about Fatty in the Fellowship, for example. But I also agree with that person that more on Fatty in the Fellowship story would have made it drag.

I think story premises like ASOIAF's could actually make "great" stories, if they are done in certain ways. Some of my ideas are next.

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?!

Sadly, I don't think this exists. So back to the Lord of the Rings I go. There's just so much that rings true to me in that story about what it means to be human in this world, I can just read it over and over, a great story...

[Mithalwen]

I am not sure that the fact that the Martin series will be longer than projected is a stick to beat him with on its own. Tolkien himself said that his tale grew in the telling and if you look at the material briefly referred to in the appendices or worked up post publication in Unfinished tales to see that had Tolkien been a follower rather than a fore runner writing professionally for an established market with secretarial support he might have produced many many volumes of third age histoey alone. Of course you would lose the richness of the unexplored vistas though maybe new ones would have been revealed. But Tolkien was writing one novel not a series so you do get that concentration or perhaps distillation of a long process the difference perhaps between a michelin starred meal with premier cru vintage wines to a good homecooked meal.

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 ...maybe that is what happened with the Hobbit films too.

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..

[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".

...

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.

[Mithalwen]

I suppose I should reread it...since I was under pressure and pass my copy on towhichever of my cousins hadn't got first dibs on their family copy. But I felt that she introduced characters and didn't really use them and then the denouement despite the many pages was rushed and unclear. I think her main concern was getting pieces in place for the culmination of the series and so it was relatively weak and least able to stand on its own merits independent of the main story arc. But with millions of people having waited years and Rowling richer than the Queen who would actually tell her to rework it? I did start rereading the series and rattled through the first four quickly but the bulk of phoenix and the negative memory put me off. Anyway more than somewhatboff topic.

[Zigûr]

I'm fairly sure I read somewhere that JK Rowling herself considers The Order of the Phoenix to be too long.

Last time I re-read it (2010 I think) I thought so too.

I think I might have observed in another thread that, in contrast to modern series' like A Song of Ice and Fire, Professor Tolkien's work tends to leave the back-story to supplementary material, which is certainly where Sauron, for instance, gets much of his characterisation.

I don't think one approach is necessarily better than the other. Professor Tolkien's makes for a more focused narrative, I might argue.

I read an article recently that was compared science-fiction and fantasy to what the article-writer called "geekery", ie spec-fic writing that's more concerned about constant world-building, exploring how characters might behave in different situations within that world and generally self-indulgence of content at the expense of form and function, I suppose. It's sort of like the difference between asking "What does The Lord of the Rings argue about the human desire for permanence?" and asking "Would an Elf turn invisible if it wore one of the Nine or Seven?" "Who would win if Aragorn fought Eorl the Young?" etc.

Professor Tolkien didn't mind a bit of the latter himself I think, his letters and other writings are full of speculation on how things might have gone in Middle-earth as if it was a real, living place (as it more or less was to him) "What if Gandalf with the Ring fought Sauron without it?" "What would have happened if the War of the Ring was more like World War Two?" But he wisely kept those things speculative and didn't make them part of the plot. When they do appear, they serve to embellish the sense of realism without dominating the narrative.

I'm not saying that George RR Martin does these things, mind you, what I read of his work was certainly above that. I do believe, however, that it's one of the ways in which the logorrhea of authors can manifest.

The films are rife with this sort of thing incidentally, in deleted scenes and elsewhere. "What if Aragorn fought Sauron at the Black Gate?" "What if Thorin fought Azog?" "What if Radagast fought the Lord of the Nazgûl?"

[Mithalwen]

If Radagast fought the Lord of the Nazgul it would be with that lethal rabbit from Monty Python and the holy grail...

[Boromir88]

I'll start by saying I haven't yet read Dance with Dragons, but do intend to at some point...as I'm in the process of re-reading ASOIAF. Much like Legate, I find myself enjoying it more on the re-read. Not that I actually didn't like it when I first read it, but just being able to focus more and seeing the bigger picture helps immensely with all the characters and winding crisscrossing stories. (more on this in a bit)

Originally Posted by Kuru

Yes, Catelyn was as stupid as a bucket of dead fish...

This makes me wonder if Rickon's chapters (assuming he's still alive...somewhere?) will solely consist of "My mother is a fish" statements?

But seriously, I agree about Cat (and I put Lysa here as well). All the petty squabbles that plague the houses of Westeros I can tie back to the Tully sisters. Either with Cat's stupendously wrong assumptions or Lysa just being flat out crazy

Originally Posted by Legate

Heck, GRRM even doesn't have any ring, any Dark Lord, any hope, and any Gandalf, so what exactly is there that is a "rip-off"?

Well some might argue Melisandre is Martin's Gandalf. Some supernatural figure who serves a "Lord of Light."...prone to uncloaking and creating followers to place their hopes in her supernatural Authority entity. More to the point of the thread though...

I happen to like both stories (and their authors), and much like the Star Wars vs. Star Trek fandoms, I don't understand why someone can't reasonably enjoy both of them? It gets annoying. I mean the Tolkien fandom seems to want to say Martin is a wannabe hack, who only seeks to write gratuitous sex and violence and pass it off as a "darker/realistic" fantasy. And the Martin fandom thinks Tolkien is old and irrelevant. That somehow you need to be "gritty" and "darker" to have a good story with compelling characters. Both assumptions, I think are quite false.

My reasons for being captivated in Tolkien's world are probably the same reasons for others on the forum. The world he created, with it's histories, landscapes, races, languages and cultures are so rich and deep it's just remarkable. It is plot-driven, and even if a lot of the criticism with Tolkien "slow, descriptive parts are boring." I actually think the pacing is great for a book (trying to turn it into a movie, creates pacing problems but that's for a different discussion in a different forum).

ASOIAF is almost completely character driven. And so it's how I understand when Kit, Firefoot, or others say they don't like it because they don't care about any of the characters. It's not that Tolkien doesn't create multi-faceted characters, but on a hero/villain scale (at least when talking about LOTR) it's pretty clear. There are grayish characters, but you basically know where each one stands in the struggle of the "Free Middle-earth" against Sauron. There is no moral ambiguity. What is right is right (Gandalf - Free Will) and what is evil is evil (Sauron - seeking to dominate free will).

Good intentioned characters may stumble and make some ultimately evil decisions that lead to their falling. But in the end, you know where Boromir's morals stands...duty, honor, pride, for Gondor and his people (as well as his own pride which allowed the ring to weasel its way into his head). Much the same can be said to Denethor, only his own obsession with holding onto his seat of power led him to distrust all his friends and allies. He hated no one more than Sauron, but his own pride and despair led him to also not trust the aid of those who were needed to defeat Sauron. Gollum, the greatest thing happens, the destruction of the Ring due to Gollum's treachery. But Gollum's evil intentions in the matter doesn't suddenly make him a morally good characters because a good action resulted from bad intentions. He's a sympathetic character, no doubt. I've thought of Gollum the same was as Gandalf telling Frodo back in Bag End "It's a sad story." But again, there's nothing ambigious about Gollum's morals.

I won't beat on about all the various complex, fascinatingly ambigious ASOIAF characters. My feelings are the same as what Jaime Lannister said to Catelyn Stark about oaths. It's a simple speech about oaths, but it did marvels in developing Jaime's character, as well as serving the "wow. So completely true!" realization for me. I can only paraphrase, because unlike LOTR, I haven't read ASOIAF that many times to basically know where to find whatever quote I'm looking for...but the basic point Jaime makes is he's had to make so many oaths to his father, family, to one king, to other kings, to duty, honor...etc...what does one do when those oaths conflict? Even the great honorable Ned couldn't possibly keep all the oaths he made to this person or that person. Jaime and Cat's talk was absolutely one of my favorite parts in ASOIAF.

I enjoy all the petty politics in the series, and the constant personal struggles the characters go through to establish their power or cement it. Because I think, the Houses are so consumed in their own petty power struggles, they aren't realizing how useless and fruitless their victories of (if they've achieved anything at all). They're unable to see the largest threat isn't this king or that king, but a horde of cold zombies and zombie-bears to the North and Dany with her dragons freeing everyone across the sea.

I was watching the HBO series in conjunction with reading the books and I think that was a big reason that led to my appreciation of Martin's books. Because the TV series plays well to the strengths of the book (nearly flawless casting that captures all the complex and fascinating characters..which definitely drive the books) while also downplaying the flaws of the books. (Many of which I think have rightfully been talked about here. I'll just add if it wasn't for the TV-series and the actresses playing Sansa and Dany delivering much better and more likeable performances for their characters, I probably would not have gotten through Game of Thrones...and thus wouldn't have gotten through the entire series. The constant "stallion who mounts the word/moon of my life" was mind numbingly annoying. The TV series went away from much of that and the actresses playing Sansa and Dany did well. Once getting through Thrones both Sansa and Dany endure some pretty serious stuff that ultimately changes their characters, I think for the better...or at least for making them better characters in the story).

So, watching the series and the near perfect casting choices, while also reading the books and finding out more about all these "power" players, I think led me to appreciate ASOIAF more because I was captivated by all the characters, and their petty power struggles now. I'll sort of go with what Nog was saying when pointing out some of the characters like Stannis or Tywin.

I think Tolkien often got criticized for all of his characters being "black and white" "good or evil." In some ways I see where those characters were coming from...I mean if you're an orc, you're evil and you're stuck as being evil. There's no getting around they were created as cannon fodder to fill the armies of dark lords. Now I would argue that this isn't an entirely fair criticism because there are countless examples where Tolkien's "heroes" aren't being very good heroes at all...and his villains can strike up sympathy with a reader.

In a similar way, I think Martin gets criticized for "oh the only reason his characters seem more realistic is because they're all so vile, disgusting, and have no qualms about slaughtering 100 babies if it cements more power for them. I can see the truth to the argument with Martin, but it's also not an entirely fair criticism. I need to stop at some point, but I'll just use Tywin as an example...He is the despicable patriarch of probably the most sordid family imaginable, but his dominating presense straight up demands respect from everyone else in the room. He's a pragmatist and the most successful (and arguably the best) Hand to the King of Westeros for decades. (Alright...I also sort of found a new bro-love for Charles Dance...Tywin's scenes with Arya in Season 3 were cinematic gold. And that's stuff that didn't even happen in the books. ...)

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

Professor Tolkien didn't mind a bit of the latter himself I think, his letters and other writings are full of speculation on how things might have gone in Middle-earth as if it was a real, living place (as it more or less was to him) "What if Gandalf with the Ring fought Sauron without it?" "What would have happened if the War of the Ring was more like World War Two?" But he wisely kept those things speculative and didn't make them part of the plot. When they do appear, they serve to embellish the sense of realism without dominating the narrative.

I'm not saying that George RR Martin does these things, mind you, what I read of his work was certainly above that. I do believe, however, that it's one of the ways in which the logorrhea of authors can manifest.

The films are rife with this sort of thing incidentally, in deleted scenes and elsewhere. "What if Aragorn fought Sauron at the Black Gate?" "What if Thorin fought Azog?" "What if Radagast fought the Lord of the Nazgûl?"

This is now apt in hindsight because the TV show has now delved into the territory of "What if Brienne fought the Hound" although that is not necessarily Martin's fault.

I was re-reading this thread and I wish to re-state (or maybe elaborate on) something I said in post 41 regarding my enjoyment of Westeros but lack of desire to re-read the books themselves. Martin is good at coming up with interesting plots and events, but while he is good at creating intriguing plots to write about, to my tastes his prose is inelegant and vaguely unpleasant to read. I just find it more enjoyable to read about the stories than to read the stories themselves.

Earlier in the thread, Legate made a reference to Andrzej Sapkowski. I have over the past year started reading The Witcher series after playing the video games and enjoying them immensely. Even though I thought the games were some of the best I have ever played, I was reluctant to start reading the books because I had a fear that they wouldn't be good. I was happily mistaken about this and The Witcher stories have become some of my all time favorites.

This is relevant to this particular discussion because Martin is often praised for the gritty realism of his works. I think Sapkowski does a far better job at gritty realism than Martin even though The Witcher world is steeped in fantastical elements to a far greater extent than even Middle earth. In my opinion, Sapkowski possesses an ability to put texture in his writing that Martin lacks.

This is not to say I don't have some issues with Sapkowski's writing. He writes some very odd things sometimes, some things ring hollow to me, and I think overall sometimes Martin is better at conceiving intriguing plotlines. That being said, I still believe Sapkowski is superior at realism and world building...and the world building aspect is interesting since he made a point not to get too drawn up in his world and torched the franchise and ran. It may also explain why he has a bit of a rocky relationship with the video game series.