I wondered if there was little criticism because there simply isn’t much Science Fiction being written about the real effects of climate change in the first place? That there isn’t much to really interest Science Fiction writers?

He goes on to argue that climate change is too slow, too incremental…too boring for science fiction. In his response, Niall argued this sells science fiction short, and I agree with him (as did Mark, in the comments). But I do think Mark was right that science fiction writers don’t seem all that interested in climate change, and I think the limited ambition of Niall’s response to this specific point (well, Night Shade has published three climate change books recently) illustrates the issue. Obviously there are science fiction novels that involve climate change, but we need only compare with other tropes to see how muted the genre is on the subject. Zombies, anyone? Yes, most zombie fiction is probably best considered fantasy, but there are plenty of science fictional approaches to zombie fiction at the moment. How about spaceships? Pretty common, yes? And yet for decades it has been obvious that manned space travel of the sort envisioned in the heady early days of the space program quite distant from the present, and science has very little to say about zombies no matter how much authors might wave their hands about viruses or genetic engineering. In comparison, climate change is not just an important area of cutting edge science with large implications for the near future, it’s constantly in the newspapers and on television as people debate the extent of it and what ought to be done.

As always in these genre discussions, there’s a frustrating lack of empirical data to work with, so whether or not you find the above paragraph persuasive, concede for the moment that climate change is underrepresented. Why might that be? Is it just because the process is too slow and subtle? That doesn’t help, I suppose, but I’m willing to go a lot farther and assert that concern about climate change is philosophically alien to most science fiction authors and readers. Before I go into the reasons why, I will disclaim that this is going to entail the sort of unprovable, sweeping generalizations that tend to piss people off, especially those who feel said generalizations leave them out. The SF community is diverse (at least in some dimensions) and I’m not saying there aren’t people who love SF and are enormously concerned about climate change. I’m saying a subset of the community would prefer to read and write about something else. How large and influential the cultural subset I’m describing is (and whether it exists at all) something you’ll have to decide for yourself when I’m finished.

Here’s the short version of my argument: Science fiction is the literature of change, but the modern environmental movement is fundamentally conservative.

I expect the second clause requires some explanation, as I’m using “conservative” differently than the political definition in America or Britain. When he founded the American conservative magazine National Review, William F Buckley’s lighthearted description of its mission was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” I’m not enough of a historian to say whether that was a good description of his movement in 1955, but it certainly has little to do with today’s American political conservatism, which has fundamentally revolutionary impulses. It’s a fantastic description, however, of the modern environmental movement, and in particular its campaign against carbon emissions. I would summarize the core climate change activism argument as follows: “Human civilization is emitting more and more carbon dioxide and, if this goes on, the result will be calamity. We must take swift measures to reverse this trend, and though the lack of fully developed substitutive technologies means this reversal will cause significant economic pain, the alternatives are considerably worse.”

Even though science fiction ought to be home court for any “If this goes on…” setting, I think there are many reasons why many in the science fiction community, even if they accept the conclusions of climate science, would prefer not to dwell on this argument:

• SF doesn’t have a strong naturalistic tradition. Yes, Dune is the most popular SF book ever, but vast numbers of SF books take place entirely within wholly artificial environments. Nature has, from the start, been something largely relegated to fantasy, where Lord of the Rings planted a strong ecological note deep within the genre’s subconscious. Unfortunately, fantasy is so conservative that it only rarely deals with the industrial revolution, much less climate change, but it does frequently put forward restoring balance to nature as an important goal, an idea that goes all the way back to the ancient polytheistic traditions. Science fiction, for its part, has from the start almost always rejected balance in favor of change.
  

• Environmentalism tends to be pessimistic about technology. Technological change created the means for our vast increases in carbon emissions, the ubiquitous technology of our daily lives requires energy usage we can’t sustain without carbon emitting power, and for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad) most environmentalists are deeply hostile to geo-engineering approaches to halting global warming, insisting on emissions reductions as the only answer. Dune, for all the power of its ecological content, looks very favorably on geo-engineering, and to a lesser degree so do the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars books. On the other side, Iain M. Banks was channeling the conservative nature of the environmentalist movement when he posited that in his enlightened far future, terraforming will be forbidden as an ecological crime, but unlike other elements of the Culture setting this idea doesn’t seem to have proved influential.
  

• Carbon emission arguments, whether by coincidence or some sort of psychological deep structure, strongly resemble religious arguments: “Certain things you like doing are, in fact, bad. If you continue in your wicked ways, nothing obviously bad will happen to you immediately. Maybe not even in your lifetime. But eventually the price must be paid. The details are complicated, but scholars far wiser than you have ascertained these truths. If I do not convince you, then you should read their writings, for not only does your sin imperil you, it endangers the entire community, and therefore we must urge you to help us spread these important truths to others. If people will not voluntarily comply, they must be compelled for their own good.” It has often been observed that science fiction has, at best, a distant relationship with religion, and while this is sometimes overstated it has been and remains true that most science fiction will at best avoid it. While the personal right to religion is widely accepted, if a character in a modern SF novel strongly believes that society should reflect the sin/punishment axis they are almost certainly a villain, or indoctrinated by a dystopian society.
  

• Climate science, at least in applied form, is the science of constraints. Science fiction is the literature of possibilities. Much as some might wish otherwise, SF is usually happy to ignore science when its constraints are getting in the way of a good story. The obvious analogue is relativity, a theory far older than climate change science and one universally believed among the SF community. Needless to say, relatively is depicted more frequently in the breach than the observance.

Those are all reasons why climate change might not resonate with some readers. Beyond those, there are also reasons particular to writers:

• Climate change is perhaps the broadest collective action problem ever encountered and, as such, the responsibility for both the problem and any eventual solution is inevitably diffuse, spread across both enormous populations and time. This is just a refinement of Mark Charon Newton’s original point, but while Niall is right that SF can still depict the effect of climate change on individuals, but if we want novels that are “about” climate change instead of novels that incorporate a changed climate into the matte painting behind the characters, it would help if there was a way for a protagonist to defeat it. Or even affect it in any measurable way. By making climate change the central “enemy” of a novel, the author renders the protagonists helpless. It’s true that literary fiction has produced a long line of helpless main characters, but popular fiction has always preferred active protagonists who are able to at least try to change their circumstances. Science fiction is widely considered a populist genre no matter how vibrant its literary wing has become, and American science fiction in particular tends to be strongly individualist and distrusting of collective authority. Even leftist science fiction routinely sets up dystopian rightist governments for its protagonists to fight.
  

• Climate science is changing far more rapidly than virtually any other branch of science (considering science, here, as distinct from technology). For rhetorical reasons, the popular literature of climate change emphasizes the science as “settled”, and indeed the idea that global warming is happening and it will be very, very bad if it continues is pretty settled. But bad in what way, for whom, when? These are enormously complicated questions to answer and scientists do not agree. Popularizers tend to wield worst-case scenarios, so the moment some scientist publishes a scenario worse than the one they’ve been trumpeting, they switch to the new one. This makes plausible extrapolation difficult. When I reviewed Rob Ziegler’s Seed for Strange Horizons, one problem I had with the book was I didn’t find its depicted climate plausible, to the point I at first assumed the author had intentionally invented an unrealistic climate. An interview he gave convinced me that, no, he believed it was quite plausible. Was he right and I wrong? I spent some time researching the question since I was reviewing the book, but ultimately I’m not a climate scientist. Unfortunately, in writing the appearance of implausibility is just as dangerous to writers as the real thing.
  

• Finally and perhaps most importantly, fairly or not climate change remains controversial, particularly in the United States. On any controversial issue, writing with an activist stance alienates those on the other side. Readers are hard enough for most writers to find as it is. Ambitious writers have an enormous incentive to smooth over any edge even a relatively small minority of readers might consider rough.

None of these obstacles are insurmountable, as demonstrated by the success of The Windup Girl, but I think it’s going to be a while before we see climate change crowding out spaceships and dystopias in genre bestseller lists.

I made an exception and tried reading Methods of Rationality because I was led to believe it was funny. Someone quoted from passages that amounted to criticism of Rowling’s worldbuilding encased in a narrative. Having been known to rant about this myself, I gave it a try. There were indeed some sections that pick some deserving nits, as I expected. What I did not expect was that I would enjoy the actual story tremendously, indeed, far more than I enjoyed the Harry Potter books.

A quick summary of my feelings about Harry Potter is perhaps in order, since apparently I never reviewed any of them here (I could have sworn I reviewed Deathly Hallows…ah, apparently I just wrote a long comment on Abigail Nussbaum’s interesting essay). I enjoyed the Harry Potter books and read all of them, but was never a huge fan. In theory I liked the way the series grew with its readers, but in practice I felt that Rowling’s strengths were better suited to the earlier, younger books…her paper-thin worldbuilding became more of a problem for me the more seriously I was supposed to take the story, culminating in a metaphysical climax whose metaphysics I didn’t respect. But it must be said few writers have concluded a long series without going off the rails, or at least sparking a serious backlash from fans, so I was really impressed she nailed the dismount.

What’s different about Methods of Rationality? The biggest difference is Harry Potter. In this story, his aunt married an Oxford professor and he grows up in a loving home voraciously reading science (and science fiction). What’s more, he’s a genius, a child prodigy of Ender-like proportions who has read and can even quote from dozens of collegiate-level books on science. I was never convinced Ender was a young boy, and I don’t believe for a second this Harry is just eleven, but so often as a reader I’m burdened with characters who are frustratingly stupid that I’m willing to suspend disbelief if that’s what it takes to read about characters who are genuinely smart (other people saying they are smart doesn’t count). Harry Potter-Evans-Verres, as he is named in this story, is genuinely…relentlessly…smart, as are many of the other characters.

The conceit here is the same as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Harry takes his massive knowledge of modern science and, in particular, the scientific method to the pre-enlightenment culture of Hogwarts. This is the perfect setup for the sort of nitpicking I discussed before, and Harry reasons through, with devastating effect, the implications of original Harry Potter series’ depiction of everything from banking to Quidditch to ghosts to snake-talking.

This nitpicking can be fun, but it also serves as a vehicle for education. The author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is what you might call an evangelical rationalist in the Dawkins mold, and he is upfront that he hopes readers will, by reading his story, learn about the conclusions of modern scientific research as well as the very methods of rationality alluded to in the title. Personally, I was familiar with much of the research that Yudkowsky explains through Harry’s mouth, but I would be lying if I claimed not to have learned some things. Although Yudkowsky probably views this as the most important part of his work, for me it’s the least interesting. Thankfully, Yudkowsky avoids the trap (so common in science fiction) of turning Harry into someone smug and perfect, either adored or hated for being special. Instead, Harry makes bad choices and while other characters respect his talents, they tend to do so the way they might respect a loaded gun. Further, while Harry’s knowledge is special, his intellect is not. He may be preternaturally intelligent, but Hermione, Draco, and most especially Professor Quirrell get similar upgrades and can hold their own as later chapters involve increasingly complex webs of intrigue.

Methods of Rationality breaks with typical preachy fiction in another way in that it proves to be surprisingly funny. Reading Bujold’s A Civil Campaign years ago, I was struck while reading the dinner party scene how rarely I see comedic set pieces done well in science fiction (that dinner party being a wonderful exception). Perhaps I don’t read the right books, but in any case, the clothes-fitting scene very early in Methods was, if quite a bit less complicated than Bujold’s party, just as funny for what it was.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality starts out as a satire, becomes a comedy, then turns into an intrigue story, and at present has increasingly grappled with how to live ethically in a world where the consequences of one’s actions aren’t obvious. I say “at present” because, alas, it’s not finished, though at about 400,000 words it’s within hailing distance of the length of the first four Harry Potter books, so rest assured there’s plenty of material here already. The story is being published in serial format, with new chapters being released reasonably frequently. Think of it like an on-going television show. Since there’s still some way to go before any ending, this is a recommendation and not, in the end, a review. When the story is finished I expect to have a lot to say about the answers provided to the questions the story currently is asking about death, justice, heroism, and morality, but for now I invite you to find out for yourself.

Any man who claims to remember and can recount each cut, parray, and riposte in a melee like the one we faced is either a liar or did nothing but watch.

The above aside comes from Michael Stackpole’s Talion: Revenant, a teenage favorite of mine that I’m currently rereading. I’ll review it in a few days, but in the meantime I wanted to do something a little different. I’ve seen some people talking about the need for new critical terms lately, and it’s true that most attempts at defining lexicons are either not available online (like Clute’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy lexicon), aimed at writers and not readers and reviewers (like the Turkey City Lexicon, which for the most part is not actually a lexicon), or else comedic (like Lavie Tidhar’s new blog and Adam Roberts’ hilarious Anathem review). I can’t and won’t attempt an actual lexicon, but there are a couple concepts that I find myself mentioning fairly frequently in reviews here, so I thought it would be helpful to coin terms for them and write a little description–not because anyone else will ever use these words, but so I can use them and link back to my previous comments instead of repeating myself.

The first of these is a word I’ve used in my head when thinking about books for a while now: choreographist. It refers to prose fiction that takes it upon itself to carefully choreograph something for you, usually some sort of hand to hand combat. Here’s an example, from a small part of a fight scene from early in Matthew Stover’s choreographist science fantasy novel Heroes Die:

At about this time I realize he’s been pounding the side of my head with his doubled elbow. He can’t get any force behind it, lying down like that; he’s doing it mostly to distract me from his other hand, which is sliding up my neck to hook a thumb toward my eye.

As he swings again I rear back out of his elbow’s path and grab his upper arm, twisting him on around so his back’s to me now, pinning his scabbarded sword with my chest. The hair on the back of his head is matted with blood from a single cut where his scalp split against the edge of the step. I lock my legs around his again and roll us both over faceup just in time—the pair of ogres, who were winding up for free shots at my back, lower their morningstars uncertainly.

My left arm snakes around Berne’s face, over his eyes, to pull his head back while my right hand draws one of the long fighting knives from its sheath along my ribs. I put its point against his external jugular; it’ll take a single second to drive it straight in the side of his neck and slice out though the front, parting carotids, external and internal jugular, and windpipe. He has no chance to survive, and he knows it.

In this scene, Stover has figured out precisely what movements the combatants are making and is explaining it as precisely as possible to the reader. Stover is, by my reckoning, pretty good at this difficult transformation of movements in three dimensions into prose (I should note I haven’t done him any favors by stripping the context in order to keep the length of the excerpt down). His first person narrative renders most of these scenes in a distinctive voice and he sprinkles his fights with a lot of little character moments, similar to but more realistic than the way comic book characters converse while fighting. However, and this is the difference between fiction with some choreography and what I call choreographist fiction, these elaborate fight scenes are clearly a big part, though still by no means the only part, of the novel’s appeal for its readers.

But no matter how well done, what’s really going on here? Action movie envy, if you ask me. Action movies have always been popular, and with the rising popularity of martial arts and the importing of idioms and styles from Asian cinema, the choreography in movies has gotten ever more elaborate. But prose fiction is not a movie, and even if one is reading a novelization of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is it really desirable to recreate it “shot for shot” in prose? The movie Crouching Tiger is actually an adaptation of a novel, so perhaps at some point I should read the original and see how it handles the fight scenes, but in the meantime I will provisionally answer: probably not. And by the way, this doesn’t just apply to hand to hand combat. You often hear people talk about how space battles are exciting, but how many books have space battles that are even remotely as exciting as those in movies?

Fight scenes considerably predate action movies, of course. In fact, I suppose they predate written literature. Here is the end of the most important fight in the Iliad:

As he spoke he drew the keen blade that hung so great and strong by his side, and gathering himself together be sprang on Achilles like a soaring eagle which swoops down from the clouds on to some lamb or timid hare–even so did Hector brandish his sword and spring upon Achilles. Achilles mad with rage darted towards him, with his wondrous shield before his breast, and his gleaming helmet, made with four layers of metal, nodding fiercely forward. The thick tresses of gold with which Vulcan had crested the helmet floated round it, and as the evening star that shines brighter than all others through the stillness of night, even such was the gleam of the spear which Achilles poised in his right hand, fraught with the death of noble Hector. He eyed his fair flesh over and over to see where he could best wound it, but all was protected by the goodly armour of which Hector had spoiled Patroclus after he had slain him, save only the throat where the collar-bones divide the neck from the shoulders, and this is a most deadly place: here then did Achilles strike him as he was coming on towards him, and the point of his spear went right through the fleshy part of the neck, but it did not sever his windpipe so that he could still speak. Hector fell headlong, and Achilles vaunted over him saying, “Hector, you deemed that you should come off scatheless when you were spoiling Patroclus, and recked not of myself who was not with him. Fool that you were: for I, his comrade, mightier far than he, was still left behind him at the ships, and now I have laid you low. The Achaeans shall give him all due funeral rites, while dogs and vultures shall work their will upon yourself.”

This is a prose translation of the poem, but it’s pretty clear that for all his blood, gore, and constant battle scenes Homer wasn’t really writing choreographist fiction. The stock epithets fly fast and furious, but Homer takes it for granted his audience believes in the skill and prowess of Achilles and Hector and lets them decide exactly how it all looked. Of course, tastes have changed, and when I read this in high school it struck me as anticlimactic. If someone were to make a modern movie out of the Iliad the battle would last for several minutes at least (I can’t remember how it was done in Petersen’s Troy but I’m not willing to watch it again to find out). This is now true for most novels as well: the climactic sword fight of Guy Gavriel Kay’s not even remotely choreographist Lions of Al-Rassan carefully describes quite a bit of the back and forth.

You might think this is all an elaborate way of saying I think choreographist fiction is garbage, but I’m not. Now some of it is badly written, and then it is fair game, but otherwise I think this is a matter of reader preferences. There are, as I see it, two reasons one might attack choreographist fiction as a whole. The first complaint would be that in the first person, and these stories are quite often written in the first person, it is flat-out unrealistic. I began with a quote from Talion: Revenant that made this argument, although curiously throughout the rest of the novel the narrator is happy to provide a blow by blow description of his fights. Apparently melees “like the one we faced” are different. Perhaps I simply wasn’t good enough, but I used to be a fencer and five minutes after a bout, while I could remember the decisive moments and the broad outline, I certainly couldn’t provide a detailed description of what happened. The idea of reproducing anything even remotely accurate days, weeks, or even years later is absurd.

The same criticism, however, can be made of first person narratives providing the exact words of conversations, so this turns out to be an objection to the first person perspective as a whole. In truth, with a very few exceptions, every first person narrative is unrealistic. Most people (although not all, see the discussion in the comments here) just accept that as long as it follows certain conventions we can ignore the question of precisely how the text came into existence, just as we don’t require that a movie explain how the camera got there and why no one is looking at it.

The second possible objection, and the one I am more sympathetic to, asks: why we are reading a book in the first place? It’s a cliché of adapted movies that the novel is always better than the movie, but is that because the fight scenes are better in the book? While that’s not impossible, given competent direction I think it’s safe to say only the most ardent lover of books would rather read a fight scene than watch it. There’s a reason that “action” is widely considered to be an actual genre of film but has only extremely weak parallels in the book world. Shouldn’t we read books that emphasize the things prose does well, and leave the things film does better to film and television? I guess some people are text purists, like Johan Jönsson in this Strange Horizons article where he concludes that he doesn’t like maps in fantasy novels because he prefers “a book where the text works without such aids as maps or appendices.” I guess I’m more pragmatic. Maps are much better at communicating geography, so why on earth wouldn’t you use them if you can? Likewise, if the perennially two years away multimedia novel of the future ever becomes common (I have my doubts), then by all means let’s switch to live action video for the fight scenes.

However, despite my sympathies, the reality is virtually all good books appeal on multiple levels. Heroes Die may be “just” a choreographist novel, but it’s also a fantasy novel. In fact, simultaneously, it also happens to be a science fiction novel. It would be a shame if readers missed out on the novel just because they look down on fancy fight scenes. I confess I tend to skim when fight descriptions get technical, but there’s plenty more to like about Heroes Die. For elaboration, albeit not much, you can see what I wrote about it five years ago (lacking the term choreographist, I went with “fighting procedural”).

Now, if a book strikes me as being solely choreographist that’s a different matter, but that’s where a reviewer can help readers figure out whether or not a book is worth reading. Hopefully having a term will be helpful in that regard.

Unlike some I’m not criticizing Martin for the series’ delays. Writing fiction is hard enough and writing series fiction may be the hardest kind because no one lives long enough to get a lot of experience at doing it. JRR Tolkien, to take just one example, had enormous difficulties writing Lord of the Rings and spent fifteen years in a failed effort to finish the Silmarillion. I wouldn’t dream of second guessing him, or Martin either. By the same token I also am not criticizing his many fans. Unfortunately it didn’t quite come together for me and my post was an attempt at thinking about why that was. I think that with a tighter plot this series would be even more popular, but who knows? Finally, and maybe most importantly, I don’t have any more access to Martin’s mind than anyone else. Maybe less…my guesses about the origins of his work are based almost entirely on the text itself and his Wikipedia article, although over the years I’ve read the odd interview and some (but not nearly all) of his blog.

One more note: I stuck to fairly general observations in my previous article but this time there will be more spoilers, so if you haven’t read these books, you should probably go do that first. While I’m obviously not crazy about the series, there’s an excellent chance you’ll love them and in any case you can do far, far worse when it comes to fantasy.

Now, finally, let’s talk more about some of the responses people had to what I wrote.

An air of realism was the intended effect of the plot structure – I’m definitely willing to say I may have not given him enough credit here. I reasoned that since the standard elements of fantasy were present, just relegated to being second-class citizens to the realistic political story, that he wasn’t intentionally going for realism. But a few people have said he wanted to meld the two together and that could well be right. If so, I don’t think it was very successful. I think the problem is that the fantasy elements are relegated to the geographic sidelines. Almost all of the story (my guess was 85% but I think the io9 piece gave it more credit than a completely wild guess deserved) is set in Westeros, but the fantasy is where Daenerys and Jon Snow are, outside the borders.

The later books are going to tie all this together. – Some will object (have already objected actually) that I’m jumping the gun here. And I totally agree that all this is going to come to a head within the borders of Westeros before the end. But I don’t think it’s correct to say a series that, when complete, will probably be well over two million words can be structured the same way as an eighty thousand word novel, and more than a short story should have the same pacing as a novel. There are limits to the amount of material a reader can internalize. Fans who have reread the extant series ten times can probably speak comfortably about every narrative thread, but for the vast majority the disproportionate detail of the Westeros material is an obstacle to appreciating Martin’s project.

It’s wrong to write off the politics as “window dressing” because all of this will become important in later books. – Well, I disagree. Yes, a unified Westeros seems like it would be able to fend off the evil from the North as well as defeat Daenerys on the beaches when she arrives. But after reading the four books, is it anyone’s impression that but for some small chance this would have happened? The impression I got was that there were absolutely massive fault lines under the surface of King Robert’s nation that would inevitably rip it apart once it was put under the slightest stress. And once apart, all the King’s men are patently unable to put it back together. If Sansa hadn’t told Cersei about Ned Stark’s plans, perhaps Stark would have gotten an advantage for a short time, but would Tywin Lannister have given up his ambitions for his family? I think not. That’s just one example, but for me the takeaway was that Westeros is hopeless without some foreign overlord like the Targaryens to impose order.

But if efforts to staunch the bleeding in Westeros are futile, then why are we subjected to such endless detail of people trying? If a point is being made about power and ambition, why do we need the explicit fantasy sections at all? Why cloud the picture with the evil and the princess when you’re actually talking about mundane human government? And if the point is that in the face of these existential threats the government still cannot function, well, this would be more persuasive if more time was devoted to the existential threats. I think before the fourth book there were, what, ten or twenty people in Westeros who know anything about Daenerys? And if most of the Night’s Watch doesn’t believe they are facing a supernatural evil, or even remember how to fight it, it seems unreasonable to expect the rest of the country to take it more seriously.

Robb and Ned Stark are definitely main characters – Oh, I agree they are absolutely main characters of A Game of Thrones. I just don’t think they are main characters in A Song of Ice and Fire since, as I discussed above, no matter what they did they were going to be ground up in the mill of Westeros before the Ice and Fire parts of the story actually get moving. This is the heart of my concerns. The series is called A Song of Ice and Fire and most would agree that’s a reference to Daenerys and Jon Snow’s stories, but the individual books spend all of their time on Westeros politics. Notice that despite the series title, the titles of the books that have been released (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows) all refer to events in Westeros. The unreleased book titles (A Dance With Dragons, The Winds of Winter, A Dream of Spring) all seem to be referring to the fantasy side of the story.

(Incidentally, apparently Daniel Abraham is a good friend of Martin’s…if so it’s humorous that he swooped in and got to the season-based titles with his Long Price Quartet after Martin had announced the last two book titles but before either were written.)

The story is really about the Stark children – My guess is the story is about Daenerys and Jon Snow (and that Snow is not, in fact, a Stark child) but I could be wrong about that. However if it’s true that Sansa, Arya, and Bran are more central than they appear (without a doubt they’ll ultimately have a significant role, the question is how central they’ll be) then I have a different complaint: why have the main characters been stuck being passive for such an excruciatingly long time? Robb was hugely active but was killed off for his trouble. Sansa, Arya, and Bran have changed due to their experiences, but have spent most of their viewpoint scenes being carted around by other people (and are totally absent from all other viewpoints). It’s nice that Sansa isn’t quite such an idiot any more and Bran has gone about two feet down a two mile spirit journey, but if this is so important why haven’t they been given more to do? Arya does get a lot of screen time in Feast for Crows but unfortunately it was mostly spent on what seems like it’s going to be end up being ninja training, probably the most generic part of the entire series. If the series’ realistic tone is such an asset (and I do agree that, while I’d like more structure, it’s an asset) is it helpful to turn a main character into a ninja? I’m all for strong female characters but I’m anti-ninja (male and female alike) in fiction which aspires to even a passing relationship with reality. Oh well.

This gets back to what, if anything, is “window dressing” in the series. It matters that Robb Stark was killed, in that he won’t be around later, and it matters that Arya has been forced to kill people and become a ninja. But given the number of pieces likely to be left on the board when we start approaching the final act (i.e. way, way less than the number of dead characters) was all the endless detail necessary for the story that was told? I think the answer is no. I know the fans liked that detail, and I certainly liked some of it as well. But surely most people would agree that there’s a point where it gets to be too much. We all draw the line at a different point. Maybe some fans could spend a hundred books of this size on Westeros politics and the characters caught up in it. I felt like my point was somewhere in Feast for Crows. Other people (including the io9 writer I think) didn’t make it that far.

Martin wasn’t “distracted” by the political side of the series, he was focused on it from the beginning – Apparently he’s talked about how he was inspired by the Wars of the Roses, he grew up fascinated by knights, and so forth. I’ll cop to being flippant when I said he got distracted by the politics. Whether or not he intended it from the beginning, certainly neither Martin nor his editor could fail to see it was the focus of Game of Thrones once there was an actual draft. But looking at the first four books together (since that’s how I read them) I still say that it is trying to be a fantasy story. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, except that the fantasy structure has been distorted by the narrative emphasis given to the unstructured politics. Being realistic doesn’t mean you have to give up on an orderly plot…I’d point to The Wire as the best recent example of a story that feels real despite keeping tight control over the plot at all times. I think, and I emphasize it’s my opinion, that the series would have worked better with me and probably a lot of other readers if it was written both with a better sense of narrative direction and momentum.

When I was in high school English class we got in groups of about eight and each group performed a Shakespeare play for the rest of the class. For time reasons, we had to abridge the plays, and if I recall part of the grade was based on how well we boiled the play down to its essentials. It felt like sacrilege (and I had the misfortune to be given the role of Macbeth…it turns out that when you boil down Macbeth the best way is to cut out everyone else’s lines and Macbeth just talks to himself and mostly silent people around him for the whole play). I don’t think anyone would ever come away thinking our butchered versions were even close to as good as the original texts. I think it’s a rule of thumb in writing circles that less is more. Less fluff, that is. The most effective stories are lean stories. I couldn’t tell you how true that is but if you’ve read A Song of Ice and Fire you can now decide for yourself. Are there scenes that can be removed without damaging the story? No doubt you’ll consider some of these scenes too good to cut. But remember other people are going to want to cut the scenes you liked and keep the ones you didn’t. I think this is why writers are told to “kill their darlings” and cut everything that isn’t needed regardless of how neat it might be. If that was done to A Song of Ice and Fire what would it look like?

We’ll find out one answer when the HBO series airs. I certainly don’t know the right answer. This question is hard, and having to answer it is yet another reason why writing is hard. Fortunately for us, backseat driving on the Internet is a lot easier.