Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago (2 page)
Authors: Unknown
POWER AND FEMINISM IN WESTEROS
CAROLINE SPECTOR
COLLECTING ICE AND FIRE IN THE AGE OF NOOK AND KINDLE
JOHN JOS. MILLER
How George R.R. Martin Fights the Genre Wars
NED VIZZINI
Stories for the Nights to Come
R
.
A
.
SALVATORE
WHY FANTASY
?
Why write it? To entertain? To enlighten? To cut new alleyways of allegory? To chase spirituality with magic?
It pains me when I hear Margaret Atwood claim that she’s not a fantasy author, as if that label somehow diminishes the quality of her work, just as it pained me three decades ago when my favorite literature professor discovered that I was reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in my free time. How his face turned red with anger! He had been pushing me toward his beloved Brandeis, to follow in his literary training, and bristled at the notion that I was wasting my intellect with such drivel.
He is long retired, but Tolkien certainly isn’t. The twilight fancies resound about us, in books, movies, and television. They dominate the nascent art form of video games.
But even today, the pushback remains, as professors teaching Gilgamesh and Beowulf, Homer and Dante, wonder the worth instead of the irony. So it follows: when we see specific works of fantasy fiction, such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, threatening to break into the halls of respectability, there is an undercurrent of commentary seeking to discredit the notion that said praiseworthy works could actually be, well, fantasy. Whether it’s the author’s own statements, as with Ms. Atwood and Terry Goodkind, or the marketing angle attached to the books—Chris Paolini is a “child prodigy writing young adult stories”; Philip Pullman is writing religious (or antireligious) allegory; J.K. Rowling is carrying on the fine British tradition of prep-school tales—the notion that these wonderful works sit well under the label of fantasy is always downplayed. Could it be that they are fantasy and they are all of those other things the academics and the marketers say, as well? Of course, to all, or they wouldn’t succeed.
Or could it be that they are none of those things, and the labels themselves cut too fine a pie slice to be worth the taste? Is there really a corner to be turned here? Can the brilliance of
The Handmaid’s Tale
be diminished by a label attached to it? If that is the case, then we truly have found superficiality, but not in the work.
Peter Jackson accepted the slings and arrows of Hollywood royalty with his loving treatment of The Lord of the Rings as a serious and fantastical work. Millions of fans understood and appreciated his accomplishment, if the Academy did not, or did so only grudgingly. I hope my favorite college professor saw the films, and perhaps, if he did, the experience helped him to open his eyes, to understand, as Peter S. Beagle put it in the forward to the 1973 Ballantine edition of Tolkien’s epic, that what Tolkien actually did was “to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world.”
Jackson’s films have helped to reveal the absurdity of the label as condemnation. But if not Jackson, then certainly George Martin has done so, and hopefully for good.
I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with George a few years ago; it felt more like we were sitting around a campfire on a dark winter’s night, whispering of adventure. Listening to George recount the stories of a childhood spent reading is listening to a love letter to speculative fiction. There’s no getting around it: George Martin writes fantasy—unabashedly, proudly, lovingly.
He also writes brilliant characters: heroes to cheer, and too often to cry for; villains to hate, but more than that, to understand (and, perhaps, to view as the dark sides of our own natures); monsters to make you ponder that most basic and profound human fear, the one to which, alas, there is no answer. It’s no secret and no accident why he’s so successful. His characters are real to him, it matters not their race, and he writes them with such affection that they become real to the reader.
That’s the thing about fantasy. Set aside the strange trappings, erase the swirl of magic and strike the fairy-tale castles, and you have elves and dwarves and evil orcs that the author has to make, in the end, human; if the readers cannot identify with the sensibilities of these characters as they react to the pressure of their surroundings, the book, like any book shelved under any label, will fail.
So why fantasy? For the same reasons as any other kind of storytelling. A writer writes to get people asking questions more than to give them answers, and the ultimate achievement of literature is to begin a conversation. To read the essays that follow is to recognize the depth and breadth of the conversation A Song of Ice and Fire has started.
George Martin has woven for us the tapestry of Westeros, filled with resonating characters who see the world through a different and sometimes magical prism. And still we empathize, we sympathize, we live with and live through these exotic beings. We see enough truth of the human condition in each of them to fall in love or to spit with hate. Classify it anyway you’d like; call it fantasy, or low fantasy, or high fantasy, or allegory. Feel free to assign the label of your choice.
I’m sure those labels won’t bother George, however they’re applied or defined. Because what he knows, what the essayists in this volume and his millions of fans certainly know, is that what he really writes are damned great books, for this night and all the nights to come.
With more than four-dozen books to his credit and over 17 million copies sold in the US alone,
R
.
A
.
SALVATORE
has become one of the most important figures in modern epic fantasy. His first break came in 1987 when TSR, Inc., publisher of
Dungeons & Dragons
, offered him a contract for a book set in the Forgotten Realms shared-world setting. Bob’s first published novel,
The Crystal Shard
, was released in February 1988 and climbed to number two on the Waldenbooks bestseller list. By 1990 his third book,
The Halfling’s Gem
, had made the
New York Times
list. With a contract for three more books from TSR, and his first creator-owned novel and its sequel sold to Penguin, Bob realized that “it seemed like a good time to quit my day job.” In addition to his novel writing, Salvatore is involved in game design, most notably the creation of a brand-new world for 38 Studios, which serves as the setting for the
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
RPG and will also form the foundation for their first MMORPG, currently code-named
Copernicus
. He is currently at work writing the next and final installment of the Neverwinter Trilogy, due out in August 2012.
JAMES LOWDER
IN AUGUST 1996, WHEN
A Game of Thrones
first hit store shelves, the speculative fiction cognoscenti thought they knew what they had before them. For more than two decades, George R.R. Martin had been producing consistently smart, finely crafted prose in the service of predictably unpredictable plots. Industry insiders, along with fans and scholars of genre fiction, had saluted these works with an impressive array of nominations and awards, stretching all the way back to the early 1970s. A new Martin release was something to anticipate, at least for those in the know, and the smart money was on the book garnering several major award nominations, if not the statues themselves.
The few thousand readers who picked up the first printing of
A Game of Thrones
cracked it open and nodded knowingly at the grim, character-focused tale. As with many of Martin’s earlier works, history and the fantasy tradition—in particular, lesser-known weird fantasy authors such as Mervyn Peake and Jack Vance—inform the rich setting. Scrape the paint on the house sigils and beneath the gold lions and grey direwolves you’ll glimpse the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York. Map out the treacherous rooftops of Winterfell as Bran Stark races across them in play and you can see where he might well bump into Steerpike as that arch-schemer makes his own trek across the vast and crumbling roofscape of Castle Gormenghast.
As expected, the cognoscenti nominated
A Game of Thrones
for a World Fantasy Award and a Nebula, while the Spanish Science Fiction Association handed it an Ignotus for best foreign novel and the readers of the industry magazine
Locus
named it the year’s best fantasy novel. An impressive debut for a new series, but nothing that suggested the books would get much traction with audiences beyond the science fiction convention circuit. Reviewers in more mainstream markets, such as the
Washington Post
, echoed that sentiment when they declared the book solid enough entertainment for sword-and-sorcery fans but hampered by flaws that would limit its appeal to those with a more rigorous critical eye than the presumably uncritical die-hard fantasy readers.
The ink on those declarations dried long ago. Opinions of A Song of Ice and Fire, like the series itself, continue to evolve in ways that no one could have predicted in 1996. The books have secured a consistent spot atop bestseller lists. They’re the source for a hit HBO series. Martin’s name can be found on the
Time Magazine
roll call of the planet’s most influential people, alongside the likes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and President Barack Obama.
By the time
A Dance with Dragons
saw publication in 2011, even the
Post
had changed its tune, equating the public anticipation for the new volume with that shown for no less than crossover pop culture phenomenon Harry Potter. The latest Ice and Fire installment was a book, they declared, “with rare—and potentially enormous—appeal.” Certainly the sales numbers backed up that claim. The modest first print run for
A Game of Thrones
was a distant memory, with
A Dance with Dragons
shipping several hundred thousand copies in its first week alone. Demand was so great that a sixth printing was ordered even before the official street date. The
Green Bay Gazette
reported that, to satisfy all the new readers, a staggering 4 million copies of the previous books in the series had been printed in just the first half of the year. The HBO adaptation, which had debuted a few months before
A Dance with Dragons
hit shelves, had done much to intensify the buzz, but that exposure alone cannot explain the books’ exponentially expanding audience.
A Song of Ice and Fire is not a casual read. To work through a foot-tall stack of purposefully challenging novels requires enough of a commitment that, were the novels not brilliant, the dabblers and the fad-chasers would quickly find some less daunting object for their fickle affection. Martin announces in just about every way possible, from the books’ page counts to the long and name-filled appendixes, that they are going to be hard work. Or, at least, they will
appear
to be hard work. One of the most remarkable things about the series is that the short chapters, focused tightly on the various viewpoint characters, make the books immediately accessible in ways everything else about them seems to proclaim unlikely.
That game of confounded expectations is central to the success of A Song of Ice and Fire.
To be clear, labeling this a game is not to suggest it is a mere frivolity. Though there can be a fair bit of dark playfulness in his approach to storytelling, Martin takes it seriously—just as he takes his games seriously. After all, he readily identifies himself as a longtime hobbyist. That interest has led to the creation of several critically acclaimed and smartly realized Ice and Fire-related roleplaying, board, and card games. It informs the title of the first volume in the series and manifests in the works themselves in interesting ways, from the thematic treatment of games—the things the characters view as games, or, more often, mistake as nothing more than diversions, is a variation of the confounded expectations game—to the story’s basic structure, with the tightly focused individual chapters functioning quite like the movement of discrete units in a miniatures battle.