| jonager said:
also if you like epic fantasy you should read A song of ice and fire. Best series ever for me.amazing characters and story , and unexpected events. it's quite different to the ones above. but if you are into epic fantasy you'll probably love it. |
I really enjoy Song of Ice and Fire but Martin has massive flaws with his writing.
First, he needs an editor. In a BIG BAD way. His plots have gone kudzu in a way that would make the Lost writers cheer in excitement. Some characters are useless for several books and he continues devoting hundreds of pages to their stories. Arya spends two books doing nothing more than wander around aimlessly. Sansa is nothing more than a vessel for other characters. Brienne, the Onion Knight, and others draw the reader in but then disappear for ages.
And he continues to add more to the story without taking anything away. It's creating a cumbersome world where I have the feeling that everything is going to continue to go to hell and fragment until the last 100 pages of the seventh book, where everything magically comes together for a super-duper finale that pisses me off because it could have happened 2,000 pages earlier without all the "intrigue" of having characters near-miss one another, wander around for books on end, or just do flat-out STUPID things.
Third, this isn't Mississippi Burning. It's fantasy. Killing your characters and having bad things happen just for the sake of bad things happening doesn't make for an interesting read. It creates a boring, frustrating, and irritating environment for the reader. Readers make an emotional commitment to characters and the writer should respect that. If characters are going to die in droves, make it count. Don't do it just to show that you can. It's a lazy, confrontational style of writing that just isn't very good.
Fourth, the FIRST BOOK'S PROLOGUE deals with the Others killing members of the Night's Watch. Four THOUSAND pages later, we still haven't seen the invasion. He's on course to pack way too much into the last two books by leading his characters around aimlessly for too many pages and too many books.
Don't get me wrong, the world he created in books 1-3 was wonderful. The writing is engaging, the world is massively complex, and many of the characters are great. But then he killed almost every character worth reading about. And then he wrote books 4-5 and tied up virtually nothing since book three. On top of that, he added 3-4 more divergent storylines to the series. He's on the verge of writing himself into a corner because at this point, it feels like he's masturbating onto the page instead of focusing on telling a tightly-knit, finely honed story.
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