Worse than that, the story has gotten out of control, with the author churning out passage after passage of meaningless prose that makes Stephen King look streamlined. Back before A Feast for Crows, the fourth in the series, was released in 2006, Martin seemed unstoppable. When I read A Storm of Swords it was impossible to put down. I literally read the entire 1100+ pages all day non-stop, even in the shower, and it took me less than 3 days to finish it. It's that good.
Then we had a massive time gap before the next one, A Feast for Crows, was released. Five. Long. Years. That's bad enough but when you read it, NOTHING HAPPENS! Now, I know that's a bit of hyperbole, but not really. It's a stretched-out, thinly plotted book, with only half the characters of Westeros participating in the proceedings. See, the plan was to write one book, A Dance with Dragons, and that's it. As the manuscript's size spiraled out of control, however, Martin decided to split it into two volumes and then release the actual A Dance with Dragons separately, another 6 years later.
Even more frustrating is that many of the cliffhangers set up in Feast are not resolved yet. Compounding this further is the fact that the author refuses to continue the story with any semblance of proper pacing. This happens to us all, Marty, it's called story bloat and you must have the discipline to trim and omit needless words. The Bard himself said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." There's no more soul or wit in this series; it's characters walking around and eating and screwing and peeing.
The series will overtake the books; it's almost guaranteed, and that's really too bad. Who would want to read a book about a movie after the movie comes out and you've seen it? Imagine if this happened to Harry Potter. Rowling was still writing the final books in the series when the movies were already being made. In fact, she had only written four of them when the first film came out yet she managed to knuckle down and finish them all. She's a real writer.
Yeah, I'm a Fanboy and I'm mad. When you find something so good, and the first 3 books of A Song of Fire and Ice and portions of the next 2 are very, very good, it upsets you when it goes downhill (here's looking at you, Lost) and you want so much for it to be great again. I'm turning my attention to the TV series because the books are finished in my eyes; I won't waste anymore time on them. I don't care how Martin ends it because the show runners will do it better and have an actual ending that makes sense based on the spirit of the story. If the author wants to wait until the next decade to finish the novels, that's fine because season 5 of Game of Thrones is right around the corner.
Am I being too harsh? Do people still care about and read the novels? Sound off below.
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