Dreamsongs of Ice and Fire: Part One

[Phylum of Alexandria]

I’ve recently finished Dreamsongs for the first time and I want to collect my thoughts on how themes and plot details from these older short stories could have possibly informed the ASOIAF series. 

This post will be the first of several posts on GRRM’s previous stories and ASOIAF. Obviously plenty of others have done this before, though not to my particular satisfaction (at least the ones I’ve encountered).  

If you’re hankering to wax hypothetical about GRRM’s larger oeuvre, this is a good place for you. 

Let me state my own particular biases up front: I take GRRM’s statement that Planetos is not part of the Thousand Worlds at face value. Borrowed ideas and recycled themes across stories, sure. Cameos within ASOIAF from anyone other than the Pale Child statue, almost certainly not.  I also tend to look for parsimony in explanation. Obviously we all need a little bit of Shade of the Evening when we speculate like this, but the fewer unsupported assumptions made for an explanation, the better.
Anyway, here are some thoughts about Gods and Hive minds. What we know about the weirwoods thus far suggests some sort of psychic hive mind interpreted as gods.

And this happens to be a topic that GRRM has written about quite a bit in his other stories, so perhaps there are things we can learn. The stories that seem most relevant to me are: A Song for Lya, And Seven Times Never Kill Man, Sandkings, Nightflyers, Guardians, and The Men at Greywater Station. I’ll review them all separately, but will synthesize when it makes sense to do so.

{Spoilers for these aforementioned stories below}

A Song for Lya

Psychic talents Robb and Lyanna learn that the Shkeen worship a plasmic parasite called the Greeshka: a pink blob of slime that seemingly exhibits no signs of conscious thought that the psychics can pick up on. And yet, the Greeshka seems to generate and perpetuate a psychic hive mind for all of the Shkeen and humans that is has devoured. For all intents and purposes, the Greeshka offers its followers an actual afterlife, one filled with bliss and true unity. 

One thing I should point out is that many narrative details remain unexplained by the story’s end. We don’t know for sure if the Greeshka had some sort of consciousness that was simply out of the bounds of the psychics’ power, or if it truly was an unconscious matter that happened to generate an emergent collective consciousness from the minds of the fallen Shkeen. To that effect, it’s also not totally clear if Lya’s dream visit to Robb was actually coming from her mind via the collective consciousness, or if it was a psy-lure from the Greeshka, as Dino suggests.

I lean toward the psychic hive mind constituting a real afterlife. Of course, even if it really was Lya reaching out to Robb rather than the Greeshka, the effect is the same. The only difference is that Lya takes part in the psy-lure. We certainly know that in ASOIAF, skin changers can feel the psychic remnants of others living on in the animals, and green seers long dead can be felt in the weirwood net’s collective astral plane. 

So, in both stories, the religious belief of gods tends to have a genuinely supernatural explanation, albeit one that feels more clinical and self-serving rather than inspiring. In Song for Lya, GRRM does present the afterlife with a measured sense of ambivalence and ambiguity. In contrast, Bran Stark’s chapters in the weirwood feel extremely dark in tone. I don’t think the tone of Bran’s chapters necessarily means that the weirwoods and children are malicious, but instead to replace the ideal of beneficence with cold self-interest, and to warn readers about possible ways such powers can be abused. Bloodraven seems to be himself, but he, like Lya, could be unwittingly acting in the interests of a hivemind that happens to thrive on spilled human blood.

And Seven Times Never Kill Man!

In the conflict between the Jaenshi and the Steel Angels, we seem to see the prototype for ASOIAF’s children of the forest, and the various armies of superstitious humans who posed a threat to the weirwoods (the First Men, the Andals, the followers of R’hllor). The Jaenshi exhibit the same selfless, dispassionate, balanced approach to life that the Children describe to Bran. What’s interesting about the Jaenshi is that this trait only seems to have emerged once they started worshipping the pyramids—and the Steel Angels also exhibit this self-culling style once they too embrace the pyramids. We don’t learn anything about the nature of the pyramids, beyond the ability to seemingly read the minds of those nearby and reveal objects of love and devotion in its statues. Still, while it’s unclear if there is a collective conscious like Song for Lya and ASOAIF, the pyramid power does create a hive mind of sorts among its followers. For GRRM, this is religion itself.

In all three stories, there is the notion of cross-species conversion into the religion, with humans willingly taking on some alien godhead. Of course, the First Men converted to the religion of the Children, what is now referred to as the Old Gods. Interestingly, the Steel Angels converted to the religion of the pyramids rather unwittingly. This “tailored” conversion does raise questions about what may have been changed to get humans to embrace the weirwoods. Is the weirwood creature at the Black Gate something closer to what the Old Gods were before they started to resemble trees? We don’t know.

Sandkings

Speaking of variation and change, in Sandkings we get four rival organisms of a hive mind species, with each organism consisting of multiple mobile bodies and an immobile queen, which serves as the brain and the stomach. The mobile units also undergo several stages of metamorphosis, with no predetermined endpoint in morphology. It’s therefore also somewhat of a strategic shapeshifter, at least in fixed stages. 

At this point, we don’t know if these details are relevant to ASOIAF, but I must say I find them rather tantalizing. Obviously the weirwoods can rope in converts like the First Men, and possibly also the CotF. But what if there are actual walker units for this species? What if the green men are walkers hiding away on the Isle of Faces? What if the Others are white walkers for some queen in the Heart of Winter? After all, the sandkings warred against each other and took on distinct shapes over time.

One reason I like this notion is because it seems to tie together several details that otherwise are quite puzzling. See my Trichromatic Theory of Magic post for more detail there. But I fully admit that right now this is fully speculative.

What we do know is that Cress’ manipulation by the sandkings is a clear case of psy-luring. This is a potential danger for Bran, Bloodraven, and anyone who visits the psionic astral planes of Planetos. 

Guardians

Here we have another multi-component hive mind species. Like Sandkings, the mudpots have mobile guardian units that they can engineer and change according to their needs. So, another case of shape-shifting mobile creatures, another case of a singular organism that’s mistaken for separate entities, and another case of a strategic mother-brain that wrongfully dismissed as mindless. 

In this story, a peace was eventually brokered between the mudpots and humans, assisted by a psychic intermediary. That somewhat resembles the Pact between CotF and humans, and is certainly a possible resolution for ASOIAF with respect to the Others, although I happen to think the end will be much more dramatic, devastating, and bittersweet than that.

The Men at Greywater Station

Two main takeaways from this one. First, the most prominent example of a simple lifeform, mold in this case, exhibiting strategic offenses against humans. Second, the offense included the psychic manipulation of said humans, to pit them against one another. 

Nightflyers

Nightflyers doesn’t concern gods per se, nor does it technically constitute a hive mind, but there are some ideas explored that might be relevant for ASOIAF’s hive mind gods. 

Royd is a physically frail Romantic psychic who spies on everyone around him, and thus clearly gives off a Bran/Bloodraven vibe. Royd Eris doesn’t share the same mindspace as anyone else, like Bloodraven shares with the other greenseers. Instead, he is a gender-swapped mind-copy of his mother, and they both exhibit psionic powers. Not to mention that the ship itself, a space taken for granted as background, is in fact controlled by Royd's mother, and is therefore sentient and dangerous.

The idea of auto-reproduction is fascinating, given the clear motif of incest for preserving magical blood in ASOIAF. We don’t yet know how those bloodlines got started, but some sort of fusion with a supernatural species was likely the origin. We know the weirwoods are powered by blood, and we know that the Others use human babies for some sort of strengthening, or maybe reproduction. We also know that developing firewyrms or dragons are able to gestate in the magically hot blood of Targaryens. Beyond that, we don’t know much. 

 

Wrap-up

Are those noble trees in Westeros really as passive as they seem? Are they simply enablers of a psychic afterlife realm, as Lya thought of the Greeshka? Or do they actually have their own interests, motives, and strategies to get what they want? I am leaning towards the latter, though perhaps we’ll never know that one for sure.

However, I do think the mystery of reproduction is something that GRRM will eventually reveal by the end of ASOIAF, and it will offer a key insight into the nature of magic, and how to eliminate it.

In the meantime, I will continue to stew on it. Thanks for humoring me and letting me rant. Feel free to share your thoughts!

[Ran]

Always fun to see people reading George's other works. I'm quite fond of "And Seven Times Never Kill Man" (a story, BTW, that had artwork commissioned by the magazine that published it... and said artwork proceeded to be a source of inspiration for the Wookies in Star Wars!)

[AlaskanSandman]

12 hours ago, Ran said:

Always fun to see people reading George's other works. I'm quite fond of "And Seven Times Never Kill Man" (a story, BTW, that had artwork commissioned by the magazine that published it... and said artwork proceeded to be a source of inspiration for the Wookies in Star Wars!)

And Seven Times Never Kill Man, and Meat House Man are some of my favorites. I like his "1000 worlds" narrative with his scifi books

[Springwatch]

I read Lya and Nightflyers and the one about the spiders - years and years ago - but I find I can't read horror anymore, even delicately written sci-fi horror-lite. This is going to be awkward, but I'm absolutely certain the Others will draw from the those early models. And we're going to see a lot of them. I don't know what I'll do.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

2 hours ago, Springwatch said:

I read Lya and Nightflyers and the one about the spiders - years and years ago - but I find I can't read horror anymore, even delicately written sci-fi horror-lite. This is going to be awkward, but I'm absolutely certain the Others will draw from the those early models. And we're going to see a lot of them. I don't know what I'll do.

Yeah, I think there's plenty of horror to come! I think, for all his blending of genres, GRRM is at his heart a horror writer. His fantasy stories are almost always gothic fantasy; his Sci-Fi content feels much closer in tone to Alien than to Dune.

Act 3 of ASOIAF seems guaranteed to ramp up the more supernatural aspects of the story, but I think that means a concomitant ramping up of the horror.