Crow Chow

I hate to give up on a story before I know the end of it. This causes me some grief, like that I get every time I go to see a new Harry Potter movie - or buy the latest DVD.

When Tolkien more or less created the modern epic fantasy, the success of The Lord of the Rings launched a thousand imitators, not all of which are utterly bad - though of course many are. I have indulged in a few of them, and once in, I'm usually caught. Robert Jordan had to write about four lousy books in a row (in the Wheel of Time Series) before I gave up on him.

My latest indulgence is George R R Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series. The first book was pretty good - the guy can write and he created some interesting situations and characters. Book four, A Feast for Crows got quite a lot of hype (from Time, among others), but I'm pretty disappointed.

Magic has more or less disappeared from the series, and the cardboard characters are getting a bit old, but the worst feature of the book is the sheer bloat. The number of characters has become so large that a forty-one page appendix is needed to list the main ones and their principal relationships. There are a dozen or more characters who get the story told from their point of view and each one only gets a chapter at a time.

The damn thing has become a giant swords and sorcery soap opera, with little swords and less sorcery. What does fascinate Martin is disease, deformity, mutilation, rape, and death. There is a bit of sex, depicted with the enthusiasm of someone who hates it, but a lot of four letter words.

If that sort of thing interests you, you might want to wait until the author finishes, probably sometime in this millenium. Jordan died before finishing his series, but I think he was out of ideas a few books earlier.

I wonder if I should preorder the next book in the series now, or wait until it's published this fall.