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First review of ADWD


Werthead

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What I'm afraid of is that because of the HBO show, he'll let that influence his story/writing and make the next two books more 'filmable', eg: cut down on the big battle scenes, or reduce how much dragons are a part of the whole thing, or dire-wolves, etc....

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What I'm afraid of is that because of the HBO show, he'll let that influence his story/writing and make the next two books more 'filmable', eg: cut down on the big battle scenes, or reduce how much dragons are a part of the whole thing, or dire-wolves, etc....

I think George mentioned that he will not be letting the "filmability" of things obstruct his writing. Getting it into film format is D&D's responsibility.

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I don't expect the next book to take 6 years again, but I do expect it to take a minimum of 3-4 years, which is still a multi-year gap.

Yep. I remember how naive I was after A Feast For Crows was released- someone suggested a 2008 release date for ADWD and I scoffed, as did many others. "Now that he's done Feast, which was the really hard part, everything will go much quicker!" Ya, we know how that worked out. Honestly, considering that Martin essentially took elecen years to figure out the Meereneese knot, and how many side projects he has... I'm not too sure how quickly Winds of Winter is coming.

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Well if there's one thing that review has accomplished is to decrease my expectations tremendously.

Fuck it, maybe you shouldn't read the damn thing. I mean, publisher's weekly obviously has it's finger on the pulse of SFF geekdom:

On Goodkind: 'a complex epic fantasy that crackles with vigor and magical derring-do. Author tour.'

On Kevin J. Anderson's fucking abortion of a Dune novel House Atreides: 'The attendant excitement and myriad revelations not only make this novel a terrific read in its own right but will inspire readers to turn, or return, to its great predecessor.'

On the travesty that was the Fifth Sorceress: 'to put Newcomb firmly in the George R.R. Martin camp of realistic fantasy as he creates a world where fully realized characters die, everyone is in the dark about something and sometimes things simply go wrong for no reason at all. Thanks to the author's passion for tying up loose ends, the finish is neat, but it leaves you wanting more. Fortunately, the planned sequels (at least two) will provide that, as well as ample room for further character development.'

Look at the source. When Pat, Larry, Aiden, or SFSite start destroying the thing i'll listen, but this is a bull shit synopsis from a bullshit source.

ETA: Did the NYTimes review of the show put you off of it? Was it accurate? Fuck no.

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Are book reviewers supposed to read the whole book before writing their review of it? Just curious, because that review sounded like maybe he just read the first x-number of chapters and then just skimmed around through the rest. The review just seems... incomplete, somehow.

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To be fair to PW, they are one of THE major trade reviewers that book buyers look at... and they source their reviews from a lot of staffers, so what one reviewer might say is not what another might say. Moreover, the length is pretty much what you'd expect for something kind of aimed at bookbuyers -- short, pithy, providing some sense of what to expect... but not necessarily being detailed.

I would not sweat the review, in any case. It will be one of hundreds, soon enough, but the best review of all is always the one you yourself make.

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I don't see how any of you can read reviews for ADWD before reading the book itself. I've only been waiting about a year, ever since I picked up A Game of Thrones on a friend's recommendation, but I know a lot of you have been waiting several years for this thing to be released. I'm too afraid of some asshole of a reviewer dropping spoilers to even look.

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I don't see how the review actually matters to anyone here. 99.9% of us are going to buy the book. I'll buy it and read it over and over again.

I would expect books 6-8 to take ten more years total. And yes, I am convinced there will be eight. Every book post-ACOK has expanded beyond GRRM's expectations. I expect this trend to hold.

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I'm expecting a better novel than AFfC, which itself was not a bad novel, just the weakest of the bunch thus far.

I believe that the inclusion of, IMO, the main characters of the story will move the overall plot along much more than Feast did. I feel that after this book my anticipation for TWoW will be much higher than my anticipation for ADwD.

Just think, in another ten years the story will be done. What the hell are we gonna do then??????

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Not 'all' of the material in AFFC and ADWD, no. The stuff GRRM needed to include from 'inside' the five-year gap was stuff like Brienne's adventures and the stuff on the Iron Islands and in Dorne. Pretty much everything else was going to happen post-five-year gap anyway (Cersei's downfall and the return of the Faith Militant, most notably, plus we can assume most of Jon and Dany's adventures in (ADWD)

Wert -

Yeah, I stand corrected. Now that you mention it, I do recall that being the case. I think my larger point still stands, however, that AFFC was and had to be a lot of set-up, and ADWD will likely do more of the same. Even if those events were not meant to fall in the five-year gap, they are still events that need to happen to set up the final story. For example, if the next big planned action piece for Dany is to land with the Iron Fleet in Dorne, married to Quentyn Martell and Young Griff, with Tyrion as her Hand and dragon master and Marwyn as her maester/counselor, we probably need a bit of story to get there and make it believable.

And the fact is, there are parts of AFFC where a lot does happen, just not with swords and deaths. The Cersei chapters move the story forward considerably, for example, as do Arya's. Others (Brienne being the prime example, and Dorne as well) don't do anywhere near as much, so the story feels a bit flat. So if we get a lot of Brienne-like chapters in ADWD, I will be upset. If we get a lot of Cersei-like chapters, I think the book will be very good.

In the end I expected ADWD to be well written and move the story into position for the closing act. From that review, it sounds like it does precisely that. I'm not as concerned about the level of action as I am with whether the story appears to be moving forward. My only fear is that ADWD could be like one of the myriad Wheel of Time novels where, 800 pages later, not much has changed.

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I think the point to take away is that plot progression is not the same as plot resolution. Moreover, no fan of the series expected major plot resolution in ADwD. We expect that in Book 7. What's "major" to a casual reader is different that what is "major" to a fan.

To fans of the series, resolution of comparatively lesser plot threads is a much bigger deal. Will we see Dany land on Westeros, have Jon's parentage revealed or see the Battle for the Dawn with the Others occur?

No. Were we expecting this? No, again.

My point: significant "plot progression" to a fan is a very different thing than "plot resolution" to the casual reader. While it's possible that GRRM contracted a serious case of WheelofTimeitis over the past decade -- I highly doubt it.

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Fuck it, maybe you shouldn't read the damn thing. I mean, publisher's weekly obviously has it's finger on the pulse of SFF geekdom:

On Goodkind: 'a complex epic fantasy that crackles with vigor and magical derring-do. Author tour.'

On Kevin J. Anderson's fucking abortion of a Dune novel House Atreides: 'The attendant excitement and myriad revelations not only make this novel a terrific read in its own right but will inspire readers to turn, or return, to its great predecessor.'

On the travesty that was the Fifth Sorceress: 'to put Newcomb firmly in the George R.R. Martin camp of realistic fantasy as he creates a world where fully realized characters die, everyone is in the dark about something and sometimes things simply go wrong for no reason at all. Thanks to the author's passion for tying up loose ends, the finish is neat, but it leaves you wanting more. Fortunately, the planned sequels (at least two) will provide that, as well as ample room for further character development.'

Look at the source. When Pat, Larry, Aiden, or SFSite start destroying the thing i'll listen, but this is a bull shit synopsis from a bullshit source.

ETA: Did the NYTimes review of the show put you off of it? Was it accurate? Fuck no.

I know the point of those excerpts was to show how out-of-touch PW's reviews can be, but it's also striking that those snippets were all more positive about the books they described than this review was toward ADWD. I'll hold off on setting my expectations bar at any level before reading thoughts from named reviewers.

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I'm expecting a better novel than AFfC, which itself was not a bad novel, just the weakest of the bunch thus far.

I believe that the inclusion of, IMO, the main characters of the story will move the overall plot along much more than Feast did. I feel that after this book my anticipation for TWoW will be much higher than my anticipation for ADwD.

Just think, in another ten years the story will be done. What the hell are we gonna do then??????

I was hoping for more of a ASOS book, than a AFFC book. I guess with all the talk of it being of similar size to ASOS, I was kind of expecting that kind of book, too. Silly of me, I guess.

But really, I think I'm more excited for the HBO series right now than the books. At least we'll get a new season every year or so from them (assuming the show gets picked up for multiple seasons *knocks on wood*), instead of waiting 5 or 6 years for TWOW.

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Yep. I remember how naive I was after A Feast For Crows was released- someone suggested a 2008 release date for ADWD and I scoffed, as did many others. "Now that he's done Feast, which was the really hard part, everything will go much quicker!" Ya, we know how that worked out. Honestly, considering that Martin essentially took elecen years to figure out the Meereneese knot, and how many side projects he has... I'm not too sure how quickly Winds of Winter is coming.

Really, you thought this? You must be the only one. Because nobody I know thought AFFC was the harder part of the original book book. It was obviously the easier part that he had finished and was able to release while the harder part that he was still struggling with was delayed into book five.

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Really, you thought this? You must be the only one. Because nobody I know thought AFFC was the harder part of the original book book. It was obviously the easier part that he had finished and was able to release while the harder part that he was still struggling with was delayed into book five.

I think the point of difficulty then wasn't the Meereenese knot, it was the five year gap.

And yes, I, and many others to be sure, did think that ADWD would go easier because he had already written a great deal of it. In effect while writing AFFC he had written 1 1/3 of a book, and now he had 2/3 left. And it isn't as if the plot in AFFC was episodic or incomplete on its own terms; Martin made a decision to cut certain POVs and grouped the first set for story coherence not because some POVs were easier to write.

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Really, you thought this? You must be the only one. Because nobody I know thought AFFC was the harder part of the original book book. It was obviously the easier part that he had finished and was able to release while the harder part that he was still struggling with was delayed into book five.

Mostly everybody thought this, as Gaston said, due to most assuming that the problems with the five year gap had been worked out. George even encouraged this line of thinking by stating that he expected ADWD to be along next year. Now to be sure, not everyone thought that AFFC would be out in 2006, but most fans gave the book two years tops to be done, and those who guessed 2008 were in the strict minority. I can't remember anyone thinking it would be out in 2011, and there was a definite sense in the fan community that the hardest work had been done and that ADWD would be nowhere near as difficult.

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