George RR Martin Finishes A Dance With Dragons 279
Lil'wombat writes "George RR Martin has completed his long awaited conclusion to the A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Dance with Dragons will be published on July 12, 2011. Let the celebrations begin! And everyone was worried that he was going to pull a Jordan."
Re:Pulling a Jordan (Score:3, Interesting)
Nah, with all due respect to the author of my favourite series, he was slow. Though it had more to do with his fascination to delving way too deep into often unnecessary details rather than him unable to write a plot in a first place. (For instance, did he really need to spend all that all that screen time on Galina?). That meant that he ended up wasting too much time summing it up.
Brandon Sanderson really did cut out the "no-doubt-interesting-but-ultimately-irrelevant" plot trivia. That's why he was able to bang out two books in about as many years. Him and Jim Butcher are some of my favorite modern day authors. I highly recommend their works.
Though if you like, you an replace "Pulling a Jordan" with Author Existence Failure [tvtropes.org], but that will entail you loosing all track of time :P
Disclaimer: I am a fan of the Jordan books, although I don't think I could explain the plot to you.
Which is my Preferred Theory on what happened to Jordan: I don't believe he had the whole thing plotted out, and ended up in Twin Peaks land - so many plot points to clear up that it just couldn't be done, and he couldn't decide which ones to abandon. (I think Sanderson has done a great job just focusing on the important ones, while keeping the general style.) But if I had to compare Wheel of Time to another series, it would be like taking all the Dragonlance novels and running them as one continuous series instead of breaking them up into particular three-four book plots.
Gaiman's perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
May be a good time to post Neil Gaiman's blog entry on why George R.R. Martin is not your bitch [neilgaiman.com].
Re:Pulling a Jordan (Score:4, Interesting)
Why wouldn't you want him to pull a Jordan?
Re:Pulling a Jordan (Score:4, Interesting)
Just to provide a bit more insight on what Martin is attempting to accomplish in this saga; he's actually a historian by education who specialized in the war of the roses. All the squabbling that occurs is a remythologization of that power struggle, because people generally don't want to read stale history books (and by people, I mean the fiction consuming public). So it's pretty integral to his goals a writer and continues throughout the whole series, but the POV chapters lend very well to get in to the minds of various people and villains often end up having shades of gray which adds a great dynamic IMO. Don't know that any of this changes your opinion on his work though :)