I do like ‘High Fantasy’, having read The Lord Of The Rings for the first time at age 11. Back in my teenage years, many fantasy series had comments on their cover referencing Tolkien to encourage people to buy those lesser works.
For example, The Sword Of Shannara had ‘For those looking for something to read after finishing Lord of the Rings’ in prominent lettering on the front. I did read it, and several other of the Shannara books, but I did think that they fell far short of Tolkien, and have not bothered with Terry Brooks for many years.
Another series had ‘Comparable to Tolkien at its best’ on the cover. I do not recall, 40 years later, whether it was Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, or Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles to make this claim. But it was a bold claim.
Of course you can both compare Donaldson and May to Tolkien at its best. You can compare both and say that they are far worse.
I did not finish either Donaldson or May. Thomas Covenant was an anti-hero who committed a rape early on in the first novel, and that was it for me (I believe that ultimately the agony stretched on for at least seven books). I do not remember whether I gave up on Julian May during the second novel or the third, but I do know that I did not bother with the final novel in the quartet.
It does sometimes take me a while to cut my losses.
Let’s take Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time series. I was on a train in late 2007 when I found an abandoned copy of New Spring, the prequel to what was then still an incomplete series.
I read it, and found it sufficiently engaging, unlike Donaldson or May, to start reading Wheel of Time.
He did take a long, long time to get the series going, and I did find it increasingly tiresome, with succeeding novels each having sillier names. I finally gave on at Book 8, The Path of Daggers, thus sparing myself the tedium of the next 6 novels, including the last three which were phone book sized tomes completed by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan’s death.
I probably should have done some online digging and discovered that Jordan was mortally ill and unlikely to finish his story in his lifetime and cut my losses earlier on. His widow and publisher agreed that they did not want to leave readers hanging, so they hired Brandon Sanderson, who is a very prolific fantasy (and Sci-fi) writer, to finish off the series for them.
These days, in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of some book stores, Sanderson in his own right enjoys more space even than Tolkien (who usually has about 3 feet of shelf space), for his own confusing series (I use this as a plural) of high fantasy.
Which gets me to George RR Martin, probably the only high fantasy writer to approach the cultural impact of JRR Tolkien, probably through the HBO Series (now completed) of his own high fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, which was filmed under the name of the first novel, A Game of Thrones.
Everyone has been talking about GoT (as it is known) over the past decade, even those who, like me, have not seen the TV show. I did see the ‘Red Wedding’ episode on the flight back from Italy in either 2016 or 2019, and found it amusing in a dark way, not too dissimilar to the way I found Titus Andronicus or The Road Runner cartoons amusing.
I will say that circa 2010 or thereabouts, I attempted to read the first novel, A Game of Thrones. I cut my losses about 100 pages in, when Bran surprises two of the royal houseguests in his family’s castle having incest, and gets thrown to his doom (he is only crippled). It struck me as a little too bleak and nasty, and the writing style seemed rather turgid to me.
So I decided that Life Is Short, and I can do other things rather than persevere with reading the whole series.
Perhaps one day, I will borrow someone’s Stan streaming password and watch the TV show. It seems to be a story which is better watched than read, and I have no regrets so far about doing neither.
Since joining Facebook in August 2023, I find many of Martin’s comments and opinions circulating on a range of topics around the plot lines of other fantasy series.
One of his opinions, which really baits out Tolkien fans, is that Gandalf should have remained dead after falling in Moria.
That one does show a very different (and bleaker) world view from that of Tolkien, who as a devout Catholic, was a believer in resurrection, and whose Wizards were actually angelic beings (Maiar) sent as messengers from the supernatural rulers of Earth to fight Sauron.
Another is his claim that Jamie Lannister would beat Aragorn in battle.
He is being provocative, and we must remember that it is all just fiction, of a high fantasy variety.
However, I also keep in mind that Tolkien actually did finish The Lord of the Rings. George RR Martin has not completed A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book was published in 1996, and the fifth book was published in 2011, 14 years ago. At least two more books are forthcoming.
But when? Martin is now 76 years old. If he does not get a move on, there is an increasing chance that he will either be too infirm to complete the novels, or die before he can complete them.
And then what? Will his estate do a Robert Jordan and hire Brandon Sanderson or someone similar to finish off the series. Sanderson is similarly verbose to Martin, so we would be assured of suitably hefty tomes. But Sanderson is also, being a Mormon, nowhere near as dark in his world view.
Of course, Martin does employ researchers, some of whom have since started their own careers as fantasy writers. I expect that those probably share sufficient of Martin’s bleakness to write something which would be acceptable to his literary executors.
And if you accuse me of burying the body before it is even cold, then the only real answer is that George RR Martin needs to get off his butt and finish what he started.
Lost For Words! 