Defenses and Criticisms of George R. R. Martin

Official post on a relatively recent Notes controversy

My opinion of GOT/ASOIAF since I communicate in pictures like the people in the book The Chrysalids now

There’s been a recent controversy on Substack due to George R. R. Martin criticizing some aspects of Tolkien and then a couple of people (according to my observation, generally authors of what I’d consider lowest-common-denominator fantasy which is generally synonymous with romantic fantasy e.g., Shanarra, Belgariad, and Dragonlance) coming in just to rip George R. R. Martin apart. I have criticisms of George R. R. Martin and I haven’t read any of his books because he hasn’t finished them and people are uncertain that he’s even going to finish them before he dies, and I think if he doesn’t this points to a structural problem with them because he’s not, say, designating finishing it to Brandon Sanderson like the Wheel of Time series was, and I think he has a good reason not to do that.

Does George RR Martin hate JRR Tolkien?

I would be interested in reading A Song of Ice and Fire if George R. R. Martin would actually finish the series. The complaints about it are manifold and occur on various levels. The main one seems to simply be the hipster criticism that his work is too popular and too commercialized so it must be bad and boring. In a distant second is all the moral complaints about the “boobs and beheadings” as the phrase goes. I don’t think either of these are a problem. George R. R. Martin knows a ton about fantasy and all the things he references are things that were on my reading list before I knew he referenced them. For example, when some characters get a sword and they ask what they want to name the sword someone in the crowd shouts out “Stormbringer!” which is a reference to the Elric saga by Michael Moorcock where there’s a sword named Stormbringer, which, for people who don’t know what that is but know about pop culture, it’s basically Frostmourne but better, it’s a demon in the form of a sword that eats souls to keep Elric, the last emperor of Melniboné which is a civilization based on the Norse elves, alive and strong as just basically a lich in a Faustian bargain. Lots and lots of plot elements are very clearly inspired by various aspects of the Elric saga but I don’t want to have people accuse me of spoiling the Elric saga, especially since Michael Moorcock is still alive and writing them.

I do think Michael Moorcock and George R. R. Martin share a minor vice of being slightly too hard on Tolkien though when I don’t think Tolkien is to blame for all the things the awful shallow romantic fantasy writers and even Christopher Tolkien his descendant did to try to milk Tolkien’s actual writing which was all good except the unfinished parts (which were undefined for good or bad since they were unfinished, but it’s Tolkien, it would’ve ended up good) for money, but then, Tolkien kind of complained about everything everyone else wrote including even The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis and Disney movies so that’s kind of just reciprocity even if I prefer to keep my head above it and see it for what it is (which, for the most part, seems to be some professors in humanities fields getting ticked off at the pulps despite the fact many of them have been declared officially literary at various points.)

He’s worked on an entire anthology called Songs of the Dying Earth where he and other authors write short stories in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth universe. This is the universe that originally gave us most of the things you see in Dungeons and Dragons, except people are always surprised when I tell them it was a work of science fiction, ioun stones were mined from the cores of dying stars by aliens and a spent ioun stone would give a psionic one psi point, spells are technology no one remembers how to use like the technology religion in A Canticle for Leibowitz that inspired the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer 40K and the methods for arcane and divine magic were laid out by the previous civilization, and monsters such as owlbears are abominations “created by ancient wizards” (i.e., genetic experiments from the height of civilization made in a lab and then allowed to roam free and naturalize as much as anything so out of harmony with its environment can.)

If you want to know what Vecna is, that’s also what Vecna is, Vance with two of the letters switched around because Gary Gygax got annoyed at working with Jack Vance to get things to use in his game. People shouldn’t think Vecna is female just because it ends in a anyway considering Joshua is a popular name. It also serves Gary Gygax right that he got annoyed since he basically just took open-source game rules and put them together to copyright them without even giving credit to the original creators of them, and this means David Arneson didn’t invent D&D either or the rules wouldn’t have already existed, what they did was just steal people’s stuff and corporatize it.

Even the term D&D I heard was originally just a slang for that type of tabletop roleplaying game, not a specific game, hence all the random rules for classes, monsters, spells, weapons, and even psionics floating around. Also in OD&D and AD&D psionics wasn’t a class, it just correlated with mental abilities so people who played wizards were the most likely to have it, but Conan the Barbarian was also analyzed as having it and that’s how stuff like the Riddle of Steel from the old Conan movie was implemented so any class could. All the Stranger Things stuff where the ESPers are called mages is not really because modern 5e spells would be a metaphor for it, no, it’s because that’s just how it actually would’ve been implemented in earlier versions, because the game used stuff that was actually cool instead of lowest-common-denominator romantic fantasy garbage… which was invented by the corporatists at TSR before they went out of business cranking out garbage Dragonlance novels that no one wanted but they wanted to write for ego reasons and then it got bought by Wizards of the Coast which, at the minimum, manages to be a much better corporation rather than them all being equally evil even if it certainly has some issues too.

As to all the “boobs and beheadings” in ASOIAF/GOT, see the article above. George R. R. Martin wanted to write a historical type of novel which is often pretty brutal since people are brutal. People often take this as meaning that he’s some lowbrow sensationalist at best or someone with secret evil desires at worst, and though I’m sure some people are attracted for some reasons, if that were the case, learning history would be lowbrow or evil. Even the Bible has actually been successfully censored rarely because of all the brutal content portrayed in it, never mind less-popular works portraying events documented by conventional historians. If George R. R. Martin wants to write about boobs and beheadings I don’t think worse of him for that even if it narrows the potential audience to older and more mature people by a bit.

George R. R. Martin has tons of what should count as hipster cred despite the fact he’s popular and just the books being rather mature shouldn’t be an issue. So if he doesn’t finish it why doesn’t he hand it off to Brandon Sanderson to finish it or someone else? I think this is the key: I think George R. R. Martin has a lot of knowledge of fantasy, and I don’t think he’s a hack or a sellout, but I think his project is extremely ambitious and more knowledge is not more understanding. I don’t think he understands what he wants to do with it or he could just be like “Hey Brandon Sanderson, if I die finish this for me.” I also don’t think he’s really that concerned about that himself because he doesn’t want someone else to write an ending he never would’ve written, even though he doesn’t know what he does want to write. I don’t think it’s very hard to write once you know what you actually want to write. People think about writing like it’s some kind of manual labor and you write a page a day or something else stupid, but it’s really not.

Writing is like punctuated equilibrium, and when you have ideas you don’t even get them quickly, you get them all at once, like what the nonfiction book Moonwalking with Einstein said about how memory works in chunks so that if you try to remember the number 091101 that might be a challenge but if you remember it as the date of the Twin Towers attack that’s all stored as one piece of information together. There are sadly limits to typing speed, but even then, I’ve actually been working on ways to try to get around that. I used to want an eye-tracking AR (augmented reality) device for that, but recently I’ve thought of much better options such as noticing that sometimes I can make my computer do things without clicking or typing anything which appears to be the result of an interference effect with things I’ve previously clicked and typed, and the plain old medieval method of coming up with acronyms and ligatures and then trying to get some kind of generative AI to decode those. Computing is all mental anyway, that’s what separates it from other kinds of machines such as vehicles, cranes, Rube Goldberg devices, coffee makers, and other contraptions made for physical labor which makes AI basically just a buzzword since in practice no one defines it as anything more specific than general computing like “machines with sapience or sentience” (and additionally can’t prove that machines don’t all have some kind of animistic or panpsychist consciousness regardless of their level of consciousness anyway, so it’s literally just a buzzword for computing with some different connotations that might be better or worse depending on the state of the two words.)

I think George R. R. Martin, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’t know how to end his books because he doesn’t know what he’s doing with them. He has an impressive and very respectable knowledge of fantasy writing, history, and other topics but just having information doesn’t mean he knows what to do with it. I don’t think that makes him just a hack or something but I don’t want to invest in a series that he isn’t making any concrete progress toward finishing while he gets apparently sidetracked by other projects, even if I also think the reason for that is his less-ambitious projects are easier to understand and therefore to write. I’ll happily defend George R. R. Martin from the uncreative authors of lowest-common-denominator fantasy while getting protests from hipsters and self-styled moral guardians alike, but I still need to see more before I actually read his books or even watch the shows. I think the concept behind them is very promising and it has piqued my interest but I see concrete signs it might not even get finished even if it’s not like it not getting finished is going to get me to read corporatist TSR novels or Belgariad sex offender generic marketing fantasy made so that the guy who couldn’t get a real job due to background checks would still earn income or Sword of Shanarra blatant ripoffs of the superficial style of Tolkien without any of the substance.

I hope the series can be finished and I’ve thought a bit about this topic off and on because I absolutely hate the fact that “fantasy” has largely become a marketing genre that means “not in the real world but not science fiction and also not horror, so make it unrealistic to the point of being incoherent, and unintimidating to the point of commanding no respect and containing no elements of potentially-frightening subversion or ambiguity whatsoever.” I partially want fantasy to go back to meaning what it used to mean, “not speculative fiction,” however, not forcing science fiction to conform to Nick Bostrom’s definition of “realism” likely has huge benefits and this problem has been around since Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles and kept insisting to all the people calling it science fiction that it’s just fantasy with aliens and other planets since it’s not intended to be speculative, so differences of opinion on what’s considered “realistic speculation” or not don’t even really matter regarding whether or not something is science fiction.