John's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 121-140 of 186).

Disclaimer: I haven't gotten very far in re-reading the novel, so I'm commenting here without the immediate experience of having read the novel.

I just wanted to chime in on the sexism question. Martin walks a fine line, I think. He is de-romanticizing the faux-medieval milieu, such that what looked like a world of chivalrous knights turns out to be a place where, too often, the strong take what they want and the weak suffer what they must, and quite often the weak are women (and children).

At the same time, Martin is creating some very strong female characters. I don't want to spoil anything, but over the course of this novel and of the series as a whole, Martin develops very strong female characters, *despite* the sexist world in which they're living, and if I'm reading Thomas's comment accurately, some may criticize Martin for being... I hate to use the word anachronistic when referring to a world that doesn't exist, but that seems about right.

As a side note, although Martin seems to be tearing down the illusions about chivalry, it's not as though those ideas of honor, chivalry, duty, and nobility are universally scorned and ignored by any means: they certainly have strong proponents, but the ideals seem clearly to be struggling against our baser natures.

Perhaps I am short-changing him, but I'm not sure. Your point about the north is well-taken, but the north seems fundamentally different from the south. The history of the north seems to have been much harsher than that of the south, not only because the winters are worse but, because of the danger of Wilding attacks and the like. The Stark motto, "Winter is Coming" is emblematic of the mindset of the bulk of the north, I think: it's a realization that we always have to be prepared to fight off an enemy. I think as a result, the whole feudal system of loyalty is stronger, because there's a sense down through the centuries that they can't afford to fight amongst themselves.

Whatever the reason, the politics of the north seem to be far more simple than those of the south, where too many people seem to have nothing better to do than scheme for advantage and power.

Ned's flaw isn't just that he's a step behind, but that he's coming at the problems head-on instead of at an angle. In the north, he thrived on being straightforward.

Re: killing characters off. Martin encapsulated this in an interview, basically saying that he found fantasy novels where you know from page 1 that the main character is going to win through in the end and everyone you care about will live happily ever after to be rather boring. So you have one swordsman taking on 100 orcs and barely getting a scratch. In the world Martin's writing, even the greatest swordsman can be threatened by 2 or 3 guys, and characters you like may not make it to the end of the series.

That said, I think Nathan's making a good point about the questions raised there: in some ways, Ned dies because he's too good--so how will the children he raised manage?

Oh, and to the point about Robert being a crap king, which he certainly was. I think to some extent, it's also commentary on several things. On the one hand, much as Ned wasn't cut out to be a player in political maneuvering, neither was Robert. He had the charisma and the battle prowess to lead the fight to overthrow the Targaryans, but those characteristics weren't productive as a king. I think, too, it's a commentary on the way that we can't ever really know how someone's going to develop. While Ned seems always to have been more serious than Robert, we get the sense that as young men they had a lot more in common than they do now (at least, that's how I remember it--it's been a while since I read it). Ned embraced responsibility while Robert really didn't. He embraced the privileges of ruling.

Cicero, I think the lack of development of Sansa is intentional. Most of the Stark kids grow quite a bit in this novel, while she doesn't. People adapt in different ways and at different paces. I don't think it will be ruining anything to say that she does develop--albeit still pretty slowly--in later novels. That's just part of her character, I think: she's slow to shed her illusions, slow to adapt to reality.

I'm not a good one to talk about pacing--I tend not to be put off by pacing that others consider slow or dull (for instance, the first time I read Moby Dick I flew through it, not even getting bogged down by the cetology--maybe that was a benefit of years and years reading epic fantasy?). Still, I found along with Nathan that the shifting POVs with the cliffhanger endings kept me racing through the end of the book and all the subsequent ones. I often found myself staying up later than I intended, to get just *one more* Arya or Jon Snow chapter...

The prologue is the only thing I've re-read so far (after reading all four published novels). It's an interesting decision, I think, to have a prologue that's so completely detached from the rest of the novel, that's basically setting up later books. I hadn't noticed the ice and fire shape to the book, but now that you mention it, it makes sense. I think it does a few things: it serves to set up some underlying tension: we know that somewhere in the world, dark things are stirring, even though things *seem* placid enough in the early going. It also gives, from the very beginning, a sense that we can't count on any of the characters sticking around for long. Granted, it's a prologue, so you may just look at them as throwaway characters, but between the jumping around between POVs and the way in which Martin will kill off characters in this and other novels in the series, I think it sends a subtle warning that way.

That said, I can see how people would feel cheated by it. We're set up for one thing and get another.

Nathan, your point about Ned as a father are well-taken. I haven't starter re-reading yet, but when I first read the book, good parenting vs. bad parenting really stood out to me. Ultimately, Ned's a nice guy and a good father and for that matter a good ruler on the local scale. He just wasn't cut out to be involved in politics on the scale of the kingdom. Probably the same could be said of Robert in a different way: "benign neglect" might have worked out fine at his own castle, but it's a lousy way to run a kingdom, especially when you're surrounded by snakes of all sorts.

Shannon, I'm not sure that so much really hinges on the next books--at least, I enjoyed the first book quote well on its own. The reason why people feel compelled to bring in later books, I think, is because of the way our understanding gets deeper and deeper. In AGoT, we see things from particular characters' points of view, and everything makes sense. But as we get further into the series and see things through other characters' eyes, we get a fuller understanding of what's going on. Martin is, I think, playing with narrative unreliability in a rather subtle way. In a Q&A session, a reader asked about a particular passage where a character remembered something differently from the way it actually happened a book or two before, and the reader wanted to know if she'd found a mistake. I don't think Martin was just covering for himself when he said that, in fact, the character's mis-remembering of the event was telling us something about her character, that she would subconsciously choose to remember it that way instead of the way it really happened. The point isn't that Martin is misleading us, but that he's accurately portraying subjective experience.

I put off reading this series a long time, for exactly the reason Brooke mentioned, but I finally got sucked in a few months ago. I despair of the last books getting written. If it took him this long for a book that was "mostly finished," what are the chances we see books 6 or 7 in this decade?

Hope springs eternal, though, and I'm very excited about this. Also coming out in September, evidently, is the newest Steven Erikson novel--the Malazan Book of the Fallen is an excellent epic fantasy series as well.

I have to admit I don't really know Asprin's work very well, but a friend of mine who is made this known to me and I thought I would pass it along.

Asprin is probably best known for his "MythAdventures" series and as the creator of the Thieves World shared universe. At least, those were the works that I recognized even without having read them.

I would be curious to hear more from those of you who have read his work.

I've been wanting to read this--Lauren bought it, started reading it... and left it at her parents' in Cleveland. Eventually we'll get back around to it.

I didn't come to the series until the end of season 2--my fiancee got me into it then and I've been hooked ever since. I really should go back and watch the first two seasons at some point to get a fuller appreciation, but between a recap show and my fiancee's guidance, I've managed to follow it fairly well.

Although it probably won't help anyone new to the series get caught up, this YouTube video is a pretty funny recap of the first three seasons, especially for those who already know what's going on.

Although Card wrote the Ender's Game short story first, he didn't write the novel version until he was trying to write Speaker For the Dead. In writing that novel, he had decided to make Ender (from the short story) his main character, but to set up the story in SFtD and to know the character better, he needed to write Ender's Game. So this is a case where, when writing the novel, he seems to have had a pretty clear idea of where he was going in the sequel.

All of this is covered in his introduction to Speaker For the Dead--the intro is worth reading for anyone who is interested in the writing and creative processes, even if you're not interested in Speaker For the Dead itself.

I think an implication of Thomas's comment about it being motivational B.S. which is also raised in Justin's and Donna's posts, is that there is a stark contrast between the question in an abstract sense and the reality of a particular situation.

In the abstract, it makes a certain sense to say that the needs of humanity outweigh the needs of the individual, for instance, if Ender has to be unhappy or even psychologically destroyed to save humanity, well, that's too bad, just the sacrifice he has to make.

But it's way more complicated than that, in the first place because of imperfect information. Turns out, whoops, we find out that the buggers had realized their mistake in understanding humanity and, although they hadn't figured out how to communicate with us, they really wanted to and had no desire to attack us again. So, it turned out that humanity didn't need Ender's sacrifice after all. The fact that Graf really may have believed it doesn't change the fact that he was wrong.

All of this, of course, assumes the good intentions of the people at the top. Reading a novel, we have a privileged view into Graf's actual beliefs, but in the real world we don't. A leader tells us that we need to sacrifice for the greater good, but that might really mean that we're wanted to sacrifice ourselves for someone else's gain, far from what we think of as "the greater good." How often are the stakes really of the scope of the individual vs. humanity, anyway? Or even close to that?

Listening to a Sci-Fi and Fantasy podcast (The Dragon Page) yesterday, they were talking about the publishing industry, and they were saying that it's pretty much impossible these days to get a stand-alone fantasy novel published, that publishers want at least three books in a series. It was either Michael Stackpole or Tracy Hickman (I *think* it was the latter) saying that he had a stand-alone that he wanted to publish and he was basically self-publishing it first as an audio book, which he was hoping would generate enough interest to show the viability of the book to get it published in print form. Whichever guy it was, we're talking about established authors--I would imagine it's even harder for authors who are just getting started. No wonder we're having a hard time finding things!

Steven Brust has a couple stand-alones. To Reign in Hell is a retelling of the story of The Fall from Satan's point of view, and it's quite good. Agyar is a vampire novel--they aren't usually my thing, but this is very well done. Brokedown Palace is technically set in and tied into Brust's Dragaera world, but its connection is so tenuous that it's in essence a complete stand-alone. He and Megan Lindholm co-wrote The Gypsy, which is a decent bit of urban fantasy.

I felt like the series started to get better somewhere around the 3rd-5th book, but if it's doing this little for you, this probably isn't the series for you.

Lara, my younger self would have been right there with you in the reverence for books (though I couldn't really afford hardbacks in junior high!). I got into my one and only fight in 7th grade because someone ripped the cover of my copy of The Silmarillion. Being the bookish dork that I was, I was, of course, completely ineffectual, and my tormentor had the good grace not to hurt me but only to keep me from hurting him. He seemed rather bemused by the whole thing, really.

College broke me of that at least somewhat, because I had to mark books up. I tend to be fairly anal about the care of books that I'm not going to be teaching though.

Brandon, you say gaming club, I'm assuming RPGs? At my school, I started up the Games Club, but we're more focused on board games--European board games and all the most obscure American ones. The kids still try to slip in some Magic: The Gathering or Monopoly, but for the most part they've really embraced these strange games. Maybe if you feel a need to start yet another club... ;)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the Wiggin kids all hoped to be "the one" and while Peter failed because he lacked sufficient empathy, Valentine had the empathy but wasn't ruthless enough. Point being, she would have gone if she had been suitable.

I don't know that I would necessarily frame it as Card believing women are "evolutionarily deficient," per se, though I suspect that Card is saying that there are biological differences between men and women which tend to make men more suited to be hunters/warriors while women are better gatherers nurturers. Not that some women or some men might not cross over those "innate" tendencies, just that things tend to fall out that way. That, at least, is what I would guess based on other things he's written.

Is it really just those readers who "buy into relativist, multicultural values"? Or is it the case that in our "shrill 21st century" people like the allegory of their own group (which of course is just "telling it like it is") and detest or dismiss as propaganda other groups' allegories?

Allie, welcome to the group and welcome to the genres. Those are certainly great places to start in both genres.

Lori,

She writes under Robin Hobb to distinguish her epic fantasy from the urban fantasy she writes under Megan Lindholm.

And, incidentally, she and Steven Brust collaborated on a work, The Gypsy. It's an okay novel, but the really cool thing about it was that before they wrote the novel, Brust wrote a song cycle about this magical wandering gypsy an his two brothers (much of it recorded by the band Boiled in Lead). The song cycle itself grew out of another book he'd written, The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, which I liked. There was just something cool to me about the interplay between the music and the novel.

As you say, the general trend in fictions of all types has been to move beyond allegory. In literary fiction, that means eschewing allegory in favor of allegory's kid brother, symbolism.

Whereas allegory is meant to have a particular meaning, symbols tend to be more ambiguous and evocative. Allegory has a moral, its purpose is to teach, while symbolism tends to be more open and explores meanings. That's not to say that symbols can mean anything you want while allegory is pinned down, but there's something more expansive about using symbolism rather than allegory.

I think to a large degree, allegory does focus on "a kind of code breaking exercise," as Donna described it, which is a big part of why it has largely fallen out of favor. I think at least in part it's because we don't have sufficiently shared cultural assumptions. Pilgrim's Progress works in a narrowly Christian context such as Puritan New England, but it tends to lose its appeal outside of those shared beliefs.

Now, that said, some authors can still pull it off, when the allegory is couched in a good story that works as a story rather than simply as allegory. But it's all too easy for allegory to fall into the trap of preaching first and storytelling only second or third.