Tag: writing

Of language versus substance

Let me be first perfectly clear about one thing.  I could not care less about the so-called “Christian” market.  I have never been a CBA author, I will never be a CBA author, and while I am an evangelical Christian, I am not of the evangelical Christian culture.  I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the modern authors who are popular within that world, and as a writer, I consider my peers to be George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven Erikson, not Jerry Jenkins, Ted Dekker, or whoever happens to be writing the books du jour in that market.

To me, a Christian novel is one that is written from a worldview perspective that contains the idea that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of Man in some form.  It doesn’t matter if the idea is overt or an analogy.  That’s it. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are clearly Christian works, as is Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story, “The Man”.  And yet, none of these three works ever so much as mention the words “Jesus Christ” or even portray various Christian activities such as baptism or communion.

My view is clearly not the most common opinion.  And while I certainly respect the right of my fellow Christians to place a more stringent series of requirements on what they believe is, or is not, Christian fiction, I really don’t care in the slightest what their opinion happens to be.  To a certain extent, I suspect that the divide centers on the idea that a Chinese novel must be either a) written by a Chinese man and set, at least in part, in China, or b) written in the Chinese language.

Now, I am a Christian, and the various books and stories in the Arts of Dark and Light series overtly utilize something that is clearly recognizable as Christianity in a manner that is historically consistent with the medieval milieu.  Some characters are observably “Christian”, others are pagan, others are simply… something else.  But I don’t write in what could be described as the contemporary Christian language.  And therein lies the difference.

I hadn’t intended to say anything about what happened right before A THRONE OF BONES was published, but as it happens, my publisher at Hinterlands has broached the subject in a surprisingly candid article about his decision to publish the book on the Speculative Faith Blog.  He writes:

Things were going along pretty well until two days before the book was to release. I got a note from the folks at a prominent Christian fiction writers group in America saying that if we released this book, they would take MLP off their list of approved publishers. That meant that all MLP books would not be eligible for their annual award.

As much as I believed in this book and its author and our goals, I was not prepared to let one book sabotage the chances of all my other authors receiving an award I think has value.

Oh, the drama. Was I going to cancel the book? Was I going to go through and remove everything this organization found objectionable? Was I going to hurt all my other authors? Was I going to succumb to what some folks said amounted to blackmail? (I didn’t think it was blackmail, by the way. I saw it as them adhering to their guidelines.) Remember, this was all happening 36 hours before the book was set to release.

I finally asked the organization if it would change anything if I created a new imprint and released the book under that imprint. They said, “Oh, yeah. If you did that, the problem would go away.”

“Really?” sez I. “All my other books would still be eligible for the award?”

“Sure.”

And thus, Marcher Lord Hinterlands was born, a brand new imprint for one book (so far).

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day released on December 1, 2012. It weighed in at just under 300,000 words and over 850 pages in hardcover. It is currently our overwhelming bestseller both in hardcover and in e-book.

I am one of those who saw the situation as something uncomfortably akin to blackmail.

Now, I should also mention that I am entirely happy with the solution; what author wouldn’t like having their own personal imprint?  Nor did I have a problem with the organization telling Jeff that my book would not be eligible for any of the awards they give out.  I also think that the way in which the situation was speedily resolved to everyone’s satisfaction was a testimony to the way that Christians with strongly differing opinions can come and reason together to find a way past their differences.

However, having been blackballed on at least two occasions at different publishing houses, (I’m not being paranoid, I was told as much by the individuals within the publishers who originally approached me and asked to publish my work; on more than one occasion I’ve been paid to NOT write a book), I think it is unwise for Christian organizations to be seen appearing to practice the same sort of blackballing, and worse, guilt by association, that I’ve seen in certain secular publishers.  On the one hand, I think it is wrong for secular publishers to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing their specific left-wing ideology on the market, on the other, I think it is wrong for Christian publishers and other professional organizations to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing a highly antiseptic view of what is, and is not, Christian, particularly when that view appears to be based more on cultural values than upon genuine spiritual or doctrinal issues.

The most problematic aspect of the situation, in my opinion, was that the organization asked to see the manuscript before it was published, thereby causing it to look as if they were behaving in an inappropriately censorious manner.  While they certainly have the right to act in whatever manner they see fit ex post facto, the attempt to intervene prior to publication was, in my opinion, totally unacceptable and amounted to the same sort of ideological policing that I have criticized in the SF/F market.  I tend to suspect that they were merely trying to anticipate a potential problem and head it off at the pass, which is what ultimately happened, but nevertheless, I don’t think that anyone except the author and the publisher should be addressing these sorts of issues prior to publication.

I leave it to the readers to decide whether my books are Christian fiction or not.  I don’t care.  I consider them to be epic fantasy, written in the tradition begun by George MacDonald and exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien.  And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion.  A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge.  It is intended as a literary rebuke.

I believe Martin and some of the other authors of epic fantasy have not extended the sub-genre so much as they have betrayed it.  And in doing so, even as they have attempted to make their works more “realistic” than those of their epic predecessors, they have actually made them much smaller in terms of the human experience.  In their colorblind rejection of what they suppose to be “black and white” morality in favor of their beloved “balance” and “shades of gray”, they have inadvertently turned their backs on the full rainbow spectrum of colors.  They paint ugliness, but no beauty.  They sketch images of hate, but none of love.  Their sex isn’t erotic, it merely the slaking of appetites.  Their work, for the most part, is quite literally and intentionally soulless.

I’m not at all interested in attempting to become their polar opposite, as some erroneously see it.  Still less am I trying to write some saccharine, watered-down version of their works.  Instead, I’m attempting to embrace the whole.  Good and evil.  Love and hate.  Joy and sorrow.  Beauty and ugliness.  Art and philosophy.  I am not saying that I have been, or will be, successful in this, I am merely pointing out that to claim that A THRONE OF BONES is an imitation of Martin, or any other author, is not only to miss the point, it is missing the entire conversation.

SFWA Platform: the first five points

As some of you already know, I have declared myself to be a candidate for the SFWA president in the next election, which takes place this spring.  Here are the first five points of my platform; I’m interested in any ideas for improving them:

  1. SPLIT THE NEBULA AWARDS: Science
    fiction is not fantasy. Fantasy is not science fiction. I propose
    doubling the number of Nebula Awards, and presenting awards for Best
    Novel, Best Novella, Best Novellette, Best Short Story, and Best
    Script in two categories, Science Fiction and Fantasy.
  2. AWARD A CASH PRIZE FOR BOTH BEST
    NOVEL AWARDS: A $5,000 prize will be awarded to the winner of Best
    Novel:Science Fiction as well as to the winner of Best
    Novel:Fantasy. The long term goal will be to work towards making
    the winning of a Nebula a more prestigious and financially valuable
    event than winning the Man Booker Prize.
  3. EXPAND THE MEMBERSHIP: The right
    to SFWA membership will be granted to all self-published and small
    press-published authors who have sold more than a specified number
    of ebooks to be determined, eligibility number to be confirmed via
    official Amazon report. It will also be granted to all SF/F-related
    computer game lead designers, senior designers, and writers with
    primary credits on two or more SF/F-related games.
  4. ELIMINATE THE APPEARANCE OF
    CORRUPTION IN THE AWARD PROCESS: Closing the nomination process to
    the membership and the public made the appearance of corruption
    worse, not better. Reducing the number of recommendations to reduce
    logrolling was a good idea, hiding the results from the membership
    created more harm than good.
  5. EMPOWERING THE NEBULA JURIES: The
    most prestigious and lucrative literary prizes are awarded by
    juries. The Nebulas should be no different if they are to attain
    equal prestige. I am entirely open to a debate about the best way
    to ensure jury integrity, but my initial thought is to randomly
    select the juries from the membership, with jurors barred from
    voting for works published by their publishers. In situations where
    the latter bar would lead to an obvious injustice being done, the
    SFWA President and Vice-President would have the ability to release
    a juror from the bar on a case-by-case basis if they both agreed
    such an act was justified by the quality of the work in question.

The left side of the arc

A number of readers have commented that A THRONE OF BONES is significantly improved, in terms of their perception of its literary quality, over my previous novels.  I myself have the sense that I know what I’m doing now in a way that I simply did not 10 years ago, and that while I feel too jaded and indifferent to be writing what could be described as “angry young man” commentary anymore – hence the column retirement – I feel extraordinarily energetic with regards to the novel writing.  Producing 7,500 words of fiction per week comes relatively easily now, whereas the weekly 750-word columns that used to flow like water had increasingly become difficult.

So, I found Steve Sailer’s analysis of PG Wodehouse to be very interesting in this regard, as it seems to indicates that one’s forties, fifties, and even sixties are the writer’s prime novel-writing season.

The consistency of ratings over time is the most striking fact. But a
few temporal patterns can be discerned due to the huge sample sizes of
raters. My Man Jeeves at age 37 was a rookie effort, falling 0.13
points below his career mean. Wodehouse hit a long peak from his early
40s into his early 60s with six straight Jeeves novels rated above his
career average, but his ratings slip only marginally in his old age….

The peak is probably 1938’s (age 56) The Code of the Woosters. The
topical political satire of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union
of Fascist Blackshirts, as Bertie’s nemesis Sir Roderick Spode, leader
of the Blackshorts, makes the book stand out. 
The next novel was 1946’s (age 64) Jeeves in the Morning (formerly Joy in the Morning),
which Wodehouse had a lot of time to work on while he was interned by
the Nazis (he was caught at his beach home in France in 1940). It has
equally high ratings as Code of the Woosters, although fewer raters. In 1982, Alexander Cockburn designated Code and Morning to be the peaks of the series.
Ring for Jeeves (age 71) is the most obvious dud, but Wodehouse rebounded well. For example, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, published when he was about age 81, garnered above average ratings from over 3,000 raters. That’s pretty extraordinary.

On the one hand, one could argue that I started writing novels too early.  Or, at least, publishing them too early.  Wasn’t it Hemingway who said that everyone had a million worthless words inside them that they had to get out before writing anything decent?  I’m finally past that point now, and it is encouraging to know that I’m likely on the left side of the career arc, and so long as I put in the effort, can anticipate continued improvement over the next twenty years.

How you like them sour grapes?

I’ve never quite understood those who genuinely appear to believe that I have any reason to be jealous of John Scalzi.  Yes, I am presently running for the SFWA position he is vacating, and sure, I do regularly lay the metaphorical crosshairs on him, but anyone who can fail to see the vast amusement that is regularly to be had with the author of l’affaire Rapey McRaperson falls very well short of being my ideal reader.  But be that as it may, the one thing to which various observers inevitably draw attention is something I’d always assumed was at least partially true, which is the assumption that Scalzi’s blog readership at Whatever is significantly larger than mine at VP and AG.  Longtime readers will recall that fans of PZ Myers also used to make a habit of pointing this out vis-a-vis Pharyngula, although we don’t seem to have heard much of that since the establishment of FreeThoughtBlogs and the inception of the low grade civil war presently raging between the anti-feminist New Atheists and the pro-feminist New New Atheists.

So it was informative to read this post, in which the SFWA president is impressed with the growing size of his blog readership.

“[H]ere are the stats for Whatever for 2012. WordPress’ stats software recorded 8.165 million views last year, which is up from 5.409 million in 2011, which is up roughly 50% over the previous year. That’s a pretty good jump for the year; as a contrast, the jump from 2010 to 2011 was 5.4 percent. I attribute the jump this year to a number of  blockbuster posts, most notably “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” The month with the largest number of views was May, with 1.1 million (not coincidentally the month of the “Straight White Male” post); The lowest number of views were in February, with 436,000….  To add to the confusion, Google Analytics (which I also have tracking Whatever) consistently reports lower numbers of views than WordPress; for example, in December, WordPress has Whatever getting 749,000 views; Google has it at 718,000.”

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Interestingly enough, the lowest number of combined views all year was in June, with 570,971.  In February, Vox Popoli alone had 494,534 views; combined views were 596,181.  Not only were both numbers considerably higher than Whatever’s 436,000 WordPress views for the same month, but on the basis of the reported December ratio, Whatever’s more directly comparable estimated Google views were probably in the vicinity of 418,000.  So, prior to the monster post in May that temporarily more than doubled Whatever’s traffic, this marginal “pit of manstink” appears to have had a readership that was 40 percent larger than the Great Hutch of the Rabbit People.  Moreover, last year traffic grew at a rate of 30.3%, from 5,969,066 in 2011 to 7,777,620 in 2012.

Doesn’t quite fit the rabbity narrative, does it?  In fairness to McRapey, I have to point out that he has never once attempted to play the traffic card himself, and on one or two occasions he has even attempted to explain to some of his more imaginative fans that the readership here, for all that it supposedly dwells in “the land of epistemic closure” is not quite as inconsiderable as some of them would like to pretend it is.  The reason for the mistaken perception on everyone’s part is innocent enough, though, as it appears to be based on the fact that WordPress offers the most generous view calculations while Sitemeter’s are the most stingy, combined with the fact that I make my Sitemeter numbers public while Scalzi only reports his WordPress numbers on an annual basis.  But Sitemeter is known to be at least a little unreliable; for example, there were several days earlier this year when I saw that it recorded no traffic at all.

So, corrected for the WordPress/Google ratio, here is how the annual traffic compares on the basis of Scalzi’s reported Whatever traffic and the Google numbers for VP (2009 through Feb 11) and VP+AG (Mar 11 through 2012):

The data indicates that Whatever needed that monster post just to keep pace with the continued growth of VP+AG.  I now await with no little interest to hear how the “sour grapes” theorists will explain that I am jealous of the traffic and exposure of a blog whose readership numbers my blog appears to have first passed up more than a year ago.  Now, it must be pointed out that Whatever did end up with 50k more total views in 2012, thanks to the aforementioned blockbuster post, but it should be readily apparent that VP+AG now have a bigger and more reliable readership base than Whatever.

By the end of 2013, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the occasional month pushing somewhere between 800k and 900k Google pageviews.  And if the Alpha Game traffic eventually surpasses Vox Popoli’s as I have always assumed it would given the higher level of interest in intersexual relations than in economics, SF/F, and my personal ideosyncracies, the two blogs may well surpass 1.1 million/month next year without requiring any well-linked monster posts.

An SFWA coverup?

Former SFWA president Michael Capobianco denies that the Nebula Award rules were changed in 2010 due to a perception of corruption.  He writes on Black Gate:

“The Nebula rules change was instituted not because of the
perception of corruption, but to change it from an award with multi-year
rolling eligibility to an annual award coinciding with calendar year.”

Is that so? Then why are the nominations no longer an open process and hidden from public scrutiny?  Why are nominations now capped at five per member when previously Active members were allowed unlimited recommendations? And, if we are to take Mr. Capobianco’s explanation seriously, how on Earth were those two changes required in
order to make the award coincide with the calendar year?

Since Mr. Capobianco claims that there is no issue of perceived corruption, I will send a request to the current President to post the full record of all the nominations for the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novel on the SFWA web site on a page that is open to the public.

A candidacy is announced

Yesterday, I sent a notice to the SFWA’s head of the election committee, announcing that I am running for the office of president of the organization.  It is highly unlikely that I will win, of course, but I would like to be able to say that I at least attempted to do my part to salvage an organization that is speeding rapidly into irrelevance.

One reason I am running is to restore the independence of what appears to have become a captive house award that Tor Books authors give themselves on an annual basis.  This may not be the case, but the statistical evidence suggests that there has been considerable corruption in the awards process in the past and that the 2010 rules changes have actually made the problem worse.

The other reason can be seen in these two quotes by its current president, the Tor Books author John Scalzi.  He condemned himself in the very words with which he criticized his predecessor, Michael Capobianco back in 2007.

“Simply put, the professional organization of speculative fiction should
not be headed by people who believe their job is to hold back the
future. I believe strongly that Michael Capobianco sees it as his role
to hold back the future and to maintain the status quo in publishing and
in speculative fiction. That battle has already been lost; the
publishing world has already irrevocably changed from when Mr.
Capobianco last published. It’s time that SFWA moves forward with
leadership who understands this….  


[T]he answer to whether I support membership in SFWA for people who are
not published writers is no.* That’s not going to change. I don’t think
it’s useful and I don’t think it’s needed. SFWA should certainly make
itself useful in helping aspiring SFWAns make the transition into
published status, and to a good extent, it does that now. But at the end
of the day it’s an organization for professional writers, and needs to
be composed of professional writers.” 

Scalzi is a dinosaur.  He fails to understand that “professionally published” has been rendered a meaningless term by technological development and that science fiction writing now goes well beyond the simple medium of printed books.  The most influential science fiction writers don’t even write books, they write games.  Scalzi should know this, considering that he very recently got involved working for a company in the industry in which I have been active for 22 years.  And under the current qualification requirements, some bestselling SF/F novelists, whose work outsells most SFWA members, cannot qualify.

Scalzi is also a fascist ideologue who actively attempts to shut down all debate he personally finds distressing at every opportunity.  Consider the way in which he proudly declared that in 2012, he managed to avoid permitting anyone to present facts or arguments that might have disturbed the tender sensitivities of the rabbity readers at Whatever.


This year I also managed to arouse the ire of a whole stack of racist, sexist, homophobic dipshits with the above posts as well as several others. If I did nothing else with my year, this would have made it delightful to me. They also gave the Mallet of Loving Correction plenty of use when they would drop by the site and learn to their surprise that the sort of smug trollery that passes for thought in the land of epistemic closure doesn’t get past the door here. This is not a delight to me — trolls are always irritating — but whacking them so that the conversational level here remains high has its own grim level of satisfaction.


There is something deeply amusing about a man who claims that people pointing and laughing at him in contempt somehow translates to “ire”.  But it is deeply problematic for an organization to have someone who actively prides himself on the overt and intentional silencing of dissent – and is either delusional or dishonest enough to project his own closed-minded perspective on his critics – as its head.


As proof that it is John Scalzi who dwells in the land of epistemic closure and not those who disagree with him, I note the subsequent comment from one of his readers: “Thanks again for making this a safe place to visit and comment.”  Whatever is a safe place for the Rabbit People to visit and comment precisely because Scalzi practices the very epistemic closure that he feigns to decry. The quoted statement is virtually a textbook illustration of psychological projection.  He sees ire on the part of those who feel none because he is angry with them.  He sees closed minds and smugness in others because he is smug and his mind is closed to competing ideas.  He can’t conceive of honest dissent because he is himself dishonest and inclined towards conformity.

Now, it should be made clear that John Scalzi is not the problem with the SFWA, he is merely one of the symptoms of the ideological disease that has been gradually killing science fiction and fantasy in the print world for the last thirty years.  Thanks to technology, SF/F will survive, but not in its traditional form if its self-appointed gatekeepers continue to stress mediocrity and ideological conformity over the dangerous new visions that once characterized it.


It is unlikely that I will win the election; even if I win it is unlikely that I can do anything to salvage the situation.  The myopic Neo-Luddism and anti-intellectual ideology in the organization appears to be both deep and wide.  But I will present my platform to the membership on February 1st so that at least no one will be able to say that things could not have been different if the organization, and the literary genre, continues its downward spiral.

Free will and fiction

Mike Duran lists the top five cliches of the Christian writer:

Having frequented Christian writing circles for some time now, I’ve
heard all the spiritualized slogans we believers like to regurgitate. Here’s my Top 5 clichés that Christian writers use.

5.) “God’s called me to write.” — Funny
how God never “calls” Christians to be sales assistants, lay reviewers,
work in circulation, be an advertising manager, or write obituaries for
the local newspaper. You’d think that writing novels was the top of the
Christian publishing holiness hierarchy.
4.) “It just wasn’t God’s will that I… (fill in the blank).” –
“God’s will” is a favorite “out” for Christian writers. Most often, the
saying is followed by things like “find an agent,” “sell a lot of
books,” “finish the manuscript,” or “advertize aggressively.” Poor God. I
wish He’d get His act together so your career can finally flourish.

I find the public profession of “God’s call” to be about as credible, in most circumstances, as the way in which people who recall their past lives always seem to have been some Egyptian princess or European queen; no one ever used to be a peasant girl who died of malnutrition and smallpox at the age of twelve.  It’s remarkable how often God is said to call people to do what they quite clearly want to do of their own accord.

As for God’s will, in this, as in so many things, we see the idea of divine omniderigence tends to remove both agency and accountability from the individual. 

Writing fiction is, in its own small way, an act of creation.  The author is the god of his own little world, which may be why the idea of writing fiction is so much more appealing to many would-be novelists than the actual act of writing it.  And yet, even the human author, who has complete and total control over his characters, often finds his control constricted by the desire to make them behave in a self-consistent manner.

In like manner, perhaps an all-powerful God might find Himself constrained, not by any external limits on His power, but rather by His desire for artistic consistency and aesthetic integrity.

The pig, she flies!

In which I actually agree with Ed Brayton for once:

I tend to bristle at the idea of judging a blog by its
comment section. As Jamie Kilstein said a few months ago, the comment
section at PZ’s blog is the 7th circle of hell. The one here is often
scarcely better. Even I cringe at what is clearly — yes — tribalism that
goes on in the comments section. It’s just the nature of the beast and
it’s happened to me on both ends. A quick story:

A few years ago I criticized Richard Dawkins for signing a petition
that would make it illegal for parents to teach their kids about
religion. The comment section was descended upon by hundreds of his
acolytes, saving me up one side and down the other. I was
misinterpreting the petition, they said, and how dare I criticize
someone who had done so much for atheism when I was just a lowly
blogger, and so forth. After a while Dawkins himself showed up and said I
was right, that he hadn’t read the petition closely enough, that he did
not favor such a law and he’d asked them to remove his name from the
petition. Even after that, many of his followers continued to excoriate
me.

I’ve had the same thing happen here on the other side, where someone
has shown up in the comments and criticized something I wrote. They were
hammered like mad by many of my readers and I had to jump in and say,
“Wait a minute, he’s actually got a point.” That makes me even more
uncomfortable than being on the receiving end of it. We are all prone to
tribalism and to shallow thinking, including those who regard ourselves
as skeptics who are above that sort of thing.

I’m not keen on judging a blog by its comment section either, except in that one can judge the character and self-confidence of the blogger by how he manages his comment section.  Here at VP, for example, there is actual debate among people who disagree with each other and with me.  In the posts this week alone, there are numerous regulars disagreeing with me about the limits of the Constitution’s ability to guarantee God-given rights as well as a vigorous debate on the permissibility of gun control between commenters.

PZ, as far as I have seen, is actually quite good about permitting critics to comment freely at Pharyngula, the problem there is not that he cannot bear dissension, but rather that his commenters are such a clueless collection of mid-witted ideologues that most critics stop uselessly banging their head against the wall of idiocy there before long.  I actually respect him much more than many other bloggers in that particular regard.

But Brayton is entirely correct to point out that the self-styled skeptics are every bit as tribal and superficial as those they make a habit of denigrating.  This is a point I have been making for literally years, and it is good to see that some of the more vocal members of the skeptic community are willing to openly acknowledge it.

Head’s up: free book

Now that A Throne of Bones is out, Marcher Lord Hinterlands has enrolled A Magic Broken in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which allows a publisher to give books away for free for a limited period of time.  So, starting tomorrow, on December 24th and 25th, Kindle users will be able to download the novella for free.  If you’ve been curious about my fiction but hesitant to pay the necessary price for one reason or another, tomorrow would be an excellent time to do it.

If you’ve already read AMB but hadn’t quite gotten around to reviewing it on Amazon, this would also be a very good time to pop your review up there.  In related news, if you’re willing to commit to reviewing The Wardog’s Coin when it comes out, most likely towards the end of January, please let me know via email.  I’ll be sending out review copies to the first 50 respondents upon the book’s release.  This will consist of two short stories, one of which features a character who is likely to be a new perspective character in the second book of Arts of Dark and Light.

Theories of collapse

Three rival theories seek to explain the decline and fall of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.  If you haven’t read the five books yet and are concerned about spoilers, don’t read this.  The first book has been out for 16 years now, so I think it can safely be discussed in detail.

  1. Martin simply lost the plot and is unable to handle all of his characters and stories.
  2. The seed of Martin’s nihilistic amorality finally blossomed into full flower.
  3. Martin made a foolish decision to change his approach to the story in mid-series and the structural changes that resulted have proven more than he can handle.

There is at least some truth to all three of these statements.  But which is the primary causal factor.  With regards to (1), that is more of an observation than an explanation.  He has lost the plot.  He is unable to successfully juggle all of his characters and stories.  But it doesn’t explain why.  Is it his age?  Is it his health?  Is it simple lack of interest?  Perhaps, but authors in mental decline usually produce work that is simpler and shorter; Agatha Christie’s last book has a vocabulary that contains 20 percent fewer words than her average novel.  NB: Christie cunningly avoided this being her last word on the subject by writing the final Poirot novel, and one of her best, Curtain, years ahead of time.  Since Dragons shows the same meandering bloat that first appeared in Crows, and since there are still flashes of excellence in both novels, I think a decline in Martin’s mental acuity can be ruled out.

What about the idea that Martin’s nihilistic amorality, always apparent, finally overtook the story, as per (2)?  There is some evidence of this.  The nihilism and amorality has certainly continued to increase as Martin kills off well-meaning Starks and replaces them with vicious new characters.  One reader claimed that the theory can’t be true because it was the nihilistic amorality that made the first three books appealing in the first place.  Even if that is what set them apart, (and there is an element of truth to that; no one will forget the scene where Jaime chucks Bran out the window… for love), that appeal can’t possibly explain the decline in the latter two books because Martin has undeniably cranked up the depravity in comparison with the preceding three.

The real problem with this idea is that we know all of this pointless viciousness is just a sideshow, filler for the events of the real story.  While it might explain why the filler is so nasty, it doesn’t explain why it exists in the first place.  And that brings us to theory (3).

As most Martin readers know, the books were originally supposed to be a trilogy.  Then, after the first book turned into three, Martin faced a five-year gap, during which time the dragons would grow and Daenerys would gather the forces necessary to challenge for the throne of Westeros.  (One would think a wedding between Daenerys and Joffrey would have been the obvious solution to the situation inspired by the historical example of Stephen and Maude, but never mind that.)  Instead of simply writing 10 pages of “here’s what happened in the intervening years”, Martin went back to write what was intended as one book, then became two, and has thus created an even more difficult challenge for himself by adding all of the new characters, many of whose stories are of little to no interest to the fans of the first three books.

Instead of proceeding with the 9 living perspective characters from A Storm of Swords, Martin now finds himself saddled with 21.  This is a structural challenge, and if Martin somehow surmounts it to produce books that are on par with the first three, it will be an epic literary feat indeed.  But the very fact that Martin faces it tends to indicate that he is not up to the challenge of defeating it.

Unlike many Martin readers, I very much doubt that Winds and Dream will be as bad as Feast and Dragons.  After all, Martin is now returning to the story that he originally intended to tell, so he probably has a much better idea of what he wants to do.  However, the unnecessary structural challenge created by all the additional characters and their stories likely means the last two – or three – books will not be as good as they would have been had he not given in to the temptation to go back and fill in the blanks of the required five-year gap.  And that is an excellent object lesson for all writers: don’t give in to prequelitis.  Look forward, not backward.  And don’t hesitate to leave some historical blanks unfilled; indulge the reader’s imagination rather than attempt to leave no stone unturned in explaining everything about everyone.

As for the theories of collapse, they may all be true and help explain each other.  The unfortunate decision to go back and fill in the blanks led to a long submersion into the depths of pointless nihilism, which ultimately proved as uninteresting to Martin as it did to his readers.