...and his Ice and Fire series. A Dance With Dragons is finally coming out. George R. R. Martin's update.
It isn't meant to be the last book in the series, but it will be the current last one. Martin keeps increasing the number of the books in the series whenever he gets asked how many. I worry his cast of characters will grow so big that he won't be able to write a proper ending to the series.
Without giving away to much, the last book in the series is going to close the main storyline in the first book, right? I'm in the middle of the first book, I might be so naive to think that it doesn't get anymore complex.
All the books continue the same storyline. Without spoiling anything, a lot of the characters from the first book are in the others, at least those that don't get killed.
I'm pretty sure him and Joe Abercrombie take great delight in making their readers miserable vicariously through their characters. The Last Argument of Kings by Abercrombie and his character Bayaz...dear sweet Odin H. Christ...
It's also one of the toughest things. I keep reading thinking "alright, it has to get better soon...things have to start looking up..." but they never do! It makes me sad.
He overdoes the killing in my opinion, but hey....it want stop me reading this. He'll probably die of a heart attack or old age before the next one though.
I agree about the killing, but it's mostly just because I'm a crier, which gets really exhausting when I'm reading his books. That's true. It seems like all my favorite characters just get dumped on constantly, though. Sigh...I should stop getting so attached to fictional beings.
I don't think anyone is going to live happily ever after in this story. There are no good guys, unless you count Dany. All the nobles squabble like children over toys, the men on the Wall can barely hold themselves together, and the Maesters are probably the worst of them all because the claim to be neutral, yet they are involved in just as many schemes as anyone else. I'm only reading the series now just to see the bad guys all get boned in various and hopefully very painful ways.
I love Martin's works. It's frustrating when events seem contrived just to ruin a protagonist at the worst possible moment, and that happens a couple of times in the books (especially with Arya Stark). And I had to read the summary for "Feast for Crows" when nothing interesting was happening. But don't get me wrong; he is definitely a masterful storyteller, and I cannot wait for "A Dance with Dragons", or for the HBO series based off the books.
I began reading this whole series and finished the whole thing when I was about 14 or 15, I'm 20 now and starting it all over from scratch with A Game of Thrones, and forgot how good the book was. I'm afraid this newest one will be just as large of a disappointment for me that a feast for crows was though. AFFC and ADWD were supposed to originally be one super large book I've heard. Martin instead split into into these two books to extend the series or something. I'm not exactly sure what exactly was the reason though. However, I would have preferred to have read one extremely large book with good chapters, characters, and flow than I what I read in a Feast for Crows. AFFC was slow, tiresome, and felt mostly like filler. I'm starting to become disappointed that Martin. Killing his characters was one of the dark, gritty, interesting things in his work that made it so different from common fantasy. Now, it seems just lazy, like he doesn't know how to continue and thus just kills them off. Not to mention the amount of times he's set up something for an extremely interesting plot thread, and then just lets it die out, hoping we'll forget about it later. And the fact that NOTHING ever goes right for the characters we've come to like, is actually becoming more tiresome than interesting. There's a certain point where Martin's gritty and dark world is becoming simply sadistic. Its not enjoyable, and I feel like one thing Martin's forgot is that though bad things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people as well. Well that's my rant. Its not like I'm not gonna read his book, his series being one of my favorites of all time. He's still a great author, I just hoped he listened to the very loud criticism A Feast for Crows received. anybody else feel the same way?
I'm only like a quarter of the way through A Feast for Crows (trying to drag it out so I don't have to wait for the next book to come out ), so I can't really comment on all of that. I can sympathize with your complaint about the characters we like constantly being dumped on, but I don't find it tiresome, it just makes me sad for them. I guess we'll see if my opinion changes after I finish the book.
I'm only just starting the second book now. In general, I'm getting a little frustrated with the fact that many of the fantasy authors I'm reading seem to be planning on dying before finishing their series...but oh well.
I'm just about to finish AGoT, and can't believe Martin did what he did (can I post spoilers?). I'm debating whether or not I should finish the series. When I read a book, I want a happy ending (same with TV/movies). To take up that much time in my life and to not have a happy ending is disheartening.
At least the Game of Thrones miniseries starts on HBO come April. Pity Sean Bean will only be in that one and not any others, if they make them.
I can relate to that, though I sometimes appreciate it when things don't go as I expect. What I'm mostly concerned about with regard to the rest of the series is that Martin will end up killing characters off because he doesn't know what to do with them anymore.
You can post spoilers, just put spoiler in brackets [] in front of your post, then /spoiler in brackets after. Now post them, because I want to know what specifically you're referring to.
