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ASOIAF ruined other fiction books for me.


Daendrew

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I agree with other posters who have suggested Daniel Abraham. Specifically, his The Long Price Quartet.  Otah and Maati are fantastic characters. As are August McRae and Woodrow F. Call in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, if you like Westerns.

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13 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Non troll response: Robin Hobb wins

Although I normally do agree with you, my lovely dwarf, I'll have to add to this Lois McMaster Bujold (especially "Curse of Chalion" and "Paladin of Souls"), potentially the Vorkosigan saga and why not some Guy Gavriel Kay ("Lions of Al-Rassan").

Also: China Mieville!! "The Scar" <3

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2 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Although I normally do agree with you, my lovely dwarf, I'll have to add to this Lois McMaster Bujold (especially "Curse of Chalion" and "Paladin of Souls"), potentially the Vorkosigan saga and why not some Guy Gavriel Kay ("Lions of Al-Rassan").

Also: China Mieville!! "The Scar" <3

Well, those are all books/authors on my to read list. :P

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8 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Well, those are all books/authors on my to read list. :P

Ooooh do let me know what you think of "Curse". :)  To this day I am still flip floping on whether I like "Curse" or "Paladin" more. Still can't decide. Oh the problems. :P

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16 hours ago, Lord of Rhinos said:

Joel Shepherd's A Trial of Blood and Steel is very Song of Ice and Fireish.  Pretty much no magic and it is set in a complex medievalish society.  All the characters have believable, motivations.  The first book is Sasha.

You know, I read the first book and liked it a lot, but still haven't gotten to book two for some reason. Probably cause i have 300+ books to read.

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I'm partial to some 20th century American works, such as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night; Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; Saul Bellow's The Victim; Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood; Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; Henry Miller's The Tropic of Cancer; William Faulkner's Light in August; and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  Then there's also Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude; Jean-Marie Blas de Roble's [i[Where Tigers Are[/i]; Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina; Carlos Ruiz Záfron's The Shadow of the Wind; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits; and Albert Camus's The Stranger.  Those are just a few of the fictions I could think of whose characters, plots, prose, and themes appeal to me more than Martin's.

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On 7/13/2016 at 5:22 AM, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Stephen Donaldson and R. Scott Bakker come to mind. Note though that deep characterisation does not necessarily entail likeable characters.

If you're after magical misinterpretation, try Tad Williams. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn was a major influence on ASOIAF. Outside the genre, I, Claudius is a literary classic, and another influence on Martin.

Upvote these selections (never read I, Claudius but have seen enough of the TV series and read enough Tacitus and Suetonius to think it might appeal to the thread-starter). 

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I used to really like ASOIAF and couldn't wait for the next book to come out to read it. But the more I read other fiction, and reread works that I read before ASOIAF, the more I stopped caring about it. Now I can't wait for HBO to tell me the ending so I can forget about it.

Other fiction ruined ASOIAF books for me.

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I used to be invested in the story but hardly anymore. (Fortunately I only read the first four a few months before the fifth came out and as the 4th and 5th were considerably weaker I was basically cured from the obsession within a very short time. I re-read most of the first book a few years ago but have not touched them since and I only watched the first 4 seasons of the show.)

Although I will probably buy the next books as soon as it is out and I am trying my best to ignore the more recent seasons of the show. ASoIaF might be exceptional compared to your run-of-the-mill fantasy but they are not well enough written to spoil one for many other books, regardless of genre.

If one feels spoiled by ASoIaF one should cast a wider net and read more different, non-genre stuff, like some of the books Larry mentioned above. There is a lot more than SF/F and it is not all stuffy, boring or old-fashioned.

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9 hours ago, Larry. said:

I'm partial to some 20th century American works, such as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night; Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; Saul Bellow's The Victim; Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood; Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; Henry Miller's The Tropic of Cancer; William Faulkner's Light in August; and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  Then there's also Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude; Jean-Marie Blas de Roble's [i[Where Tigers Are[/i]; Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina; Carlos Ruiz Záfron's The Shadow of the Wind; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits; and Albert Camus's The Stranger.  Those are just a few of the fictions I could think of whose characters, plots, prose, and themes appeal to me more than Martin's.

Thanks for the reminder. I couldn't remember the title of this one and had been looking for it for a while.

3 hours ago, Gasp of Many Reeds said:

Upvote these selections (never read I, Claudius but have seen enough of the TV series and read enough Tacitus and Suetonius to think it might appeal to the thread-starter). 

I, Claudius and Claudius the God are both exceptional novels.

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I’m somewhat puzzled by this. Martin ruined fiction for you? What have you been reading before?

Martin’s book is among the few works of the fantasy literature genre that is not laughable. Mind you, I love the genre, but the mockery that it receives from mainstream literature many other genres is well deserved. And then some. It’s a flat, juvenile, plot-driven, morally questionable genre aimed at “young adults” (which is a euphemism for children) without a blatant disregard for even basic literary requirements to language, theme, or human and social psychology.

The bloody romance genre, for crying out loud, is running circles around us. Heaving bosoms and all. We are the dregs.

Martin merely uses the standards of other genres, even low-brow ones like historical fiction, in a genre that is woefully lacking. (He does this very well because he is a very, very good author.)

The thread above is full of useful references for other fantasy works that you might want to pursue. (And there are many others; this very subforum is a veritable goldmind of recommendations. Stick around for a while, there are tons of gems to be found. Or rejected – ever are men deceived.) 

But there are entire genres out there where the writing is just better as a matter of routine. A good entry point from fantasy is, say, historical fiction, or crime. Thrillers, even. There are worlds and worlds. And even capital-L literature. Most discerning readers would find Martin just exactly passable. (I remember being somewhat embarrassed reading the first few hundred pages of Game.) 

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I set aside epic fantasy for a bit when I got a tad too into an Unbearable Lightness of Being phase.  Glad I returned to the genre in recent years.  Not that I shun literary fiction or anything-- far, far from it. Just that I kind of arrived at a point where I'm pretty comfortable with my tastes.  Give me Hobb, Wharton, Wolfe, Tartt.  I think I'll pass on more Marquez and Cook, just to name a couple entirely disparate writers that didn't quite work for me even though I can see why they gained various levels of acclaim.

That's why Moorcock is one of my favorites.  Love that the guy gave the world both Mother London and Hawkmoon. 

 

 

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12 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

The bloody romance genre, for crying out loud, is running circles around us. Heaving bosoms and all. We are the dregs.

Eh? 

Admittedly, I'd agree with the sentiment that Martin is basically historical fiction with a fantasy twist (specifically, it's the War of the Roses meets I, Claudius, with cool stuff like dragons and ice zombies). I'd argue though that the fantasy genre generally is considered more sophisticated than romance, crime, or thrillers, if only because romance operates on a strictly formula basis and characterisation takes a back-seat to plot in crime novels and thrillers. At least one horror genre figure has said that their genre is considered "one step up from pornography" by the mainstream.

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12 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

o.O I uh, disagree.

If you strictly stick to "epic fantasy" perhaps. Lots of other types of fantastical works that are not at all laughable. Bujold, Kay, Peter S Beagle, Tanith Lee etc. But if your main thing is Salvatore, Moddesitt, Eddings, Paolini then yes..erhm...

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Historically, the burden of "fantasy" responsible for its poor reputation is that one major strain started as pulp in the early 20th century and since the 1980s it was often heavily influenced by some juvenile aspects of RPGs. Sure, there were a few "middlebrow" books all along but they were few and far between (and before LotR not very influential, I think).

NB I do not think that all or most fantasy today is terrible, pulpy and juvenile. But it does have that reputation for very good reasons.

Whereas historical fiction was often solidly middlebrow (Sienkiewicz of Quo vadis fame got a Nobel for such stuff...) and only watered down later. And crime/mystery also had a strain of middlebrow stuff early on.

And while there is horribly bad historical fiction out there, I do not think that a lot of it reads like a script for teenager's RPG sessions...

Science fiction also has a tradition of pulp and juvenilia but the science part gives it a little better reputation. There is also no denying that some SF authors, mediocre prose and everything, were fairly smart to super smart people (e.g. Asimov) with often brilliant speculative ideas in science or social relations.

 

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I don't know. I read a lot, and I read ASOIAF before GoT was even a sordid :P twinkle in HBO's eye. Yet, this fucking story has its hooks in me. I just have to know what happens in the end, and sometimes I feel silly about it; it isn't the BEST SERIES EVER by any means, after all. 

For fantasy, I second Cornwell (I read the Arthur trilogy and loved it), Abercrombie, Bullington and personally I like N K Jemisin. I found Rothfuss unbearably dull and self indulgent.

I'm currently reading a series I'm obsessed with. Not fantasy though. The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante. Gorgeous. 

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