• Facebook question for GRRM:What was your intent in providing such female characters of strength in a genre that typically reduces them to witches, wives, and whores?
• George R. R. Martin:To be fair, I have my share of witches, wives, and whores. But I try to make them fully fleshed out human witches, wives, and whores. It all goes back to what I said earlier about common humanity. It seems strange that I have to say this, as a sort of weirdly radical statement, but women are people and they are driven by the same desires that drive men, I think. A desire for respect and power, a desire to protect your children. Greed for money, for acclaim, everyone wants to be loved. It is all common humanity. I just try to write my female characters as I write my males characters. I do take into account it is a very patriarchal society. They are limited to certain roles, some of them fit comfortably within the roles their Westerosi society assigned them. And some of them cannot fit comfortably into those roles, and therefore encounter a certain amount of rejection, or tension, or ridicule as they try to pursue their own dreams or as they frustrate their own dreams. All this is great, all this is conflict, it is character tension, it is what story is all about, the human heart in conflict with itself once again. One of the things that pleases me to no end is that I have so many woman readers. They do write me, all the time, that they do like my female characters, and I am very pleased with it.

I’m at roughly the halfway point of A Song of Ice and Fire (middle of the third book) so here goes my spoiler-free five minute review:

A Song of Ice and Fire is the good stuff. It is what you hope for every time you pick up a new author, look twice at an intriguing cover, skim a cover flap with hopes that the book is as good as the summary. It is not over hyped, its praises are fairly sung. Epic fantasy is word diluted, but this series delivers as promised. Readers enter a saga meticulous in detail, yet played out a grand scale.

The details make the books and as George R.R. Martin jumps between characters, the story remains consistant and well woven, true to the small as it is to the large. He expertly plays the reader’s loyalties against themselves, leaving a taste of bitter defeat for every victory, a peek into the true world of conflicted allegiance.

I say the true world, not the real world. The real world is for the factual. The true world is where our great myths live, where our songs, villains, and heros mix together in rainbow puddles, living off the real world like gasoline shimmering on water. Here the fuel drips across the page, the books full of fire and sword, songs of ice and of fire.

The Frostfangs were as cruel as any place the gods had made, and as inimical to men. The wind cut like a knife up here, and shrilled in the night like a mother mourning her slain children. What few trees they saw were stunted, grotesque things growing sideways out of cracks and fissures. Tumbled shelves of rock often overhung the trail, fringed with hanging icicles that looked like long white teeth from a distance.

Yet even so, [he] was not sorry he had come. There were wonders here as well. He had seen sunlight flashing on icy thin waterfalls as they plunged over the lips of sheer stone cliffs, and a mountain meadow full of autumn wildflowers, blue coldsnaps and bright scarlet frostfires and stands of piper’s grass in russet and gold. He had peered down ravines so deep and black they seemed certain to end in some hell, and he had ridden his garron over a wind-eaten bridge of natural stone with nothing but sky to either side. Eagles nested in the heights and came down to hunt the valleys, circling effortlessly on great blue-grey wings that seemed almost part of the sky. Once he had watched a shadowcat stalk a ram, flowing down the mountainside like liquid smoke until it was ready to pounce.

‘I envy those eggs,’ he said. ‘I could do with a bit of boiling about now. If the kettle were larger, I might jump in. Though I would sooner it were wine than water. There are worse ways to die than warm and drunk. I knew a brother drowned himself in wine once. It was a poor vintage, though, and his corpse did nothing to improve it.’

‘You drank the wine?’

‘It’s an awful thing to find a brother dead. You’d have need of a drink as well, Lord.’

‘There are men that call themselves mages and warlocks,’ Maester Luwin said. ‘I had a friend at the citadel who could pull a rose out of your ear, but he was no more magical than I. Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and in their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at the mountains an call them eternal, and so they seem… but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

‘Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.

George R.R. Martin speaks with a deep voice, born up from the chest. He orates alone in a great drafty hall that, unbeknownst to him, is crowded with spooks. His lecture echoes and rings, reverberates off corner stones, and is born back in whispers by a ghostly host of hundreds.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle-Earth.

(Source: fourcolorfanboy, via nudityandnerdery)