This is probably the best argument I've seen for why Martin is taking the approach he's taken with the series - and especially with the fourth book. I've always wondered why he didn't just skip 12 years so the Stark kids can grow up, come home and kick ass, but when you think about it in terms of depicting event after event after event it seems sensible not to.

Of course, the problem with writing about a series of events and trying to make them feel like history is that history never stops. Sure, you can write about the Wars of the Roses, but there'll be all sorts of plot strands which won't get tied up for most of the Tudor period, which will throw up problems which don't get sorted until the Civil War, which has interesting ramifications for the Georgian period, which sets the tone for the Victorian era, which...

Ironically this is precisely why I've lost patience with GRRM - I want to read books not chronicles of the events in an imaginary kingdom....

One thing you MIGHT want to change, Dan, is your reference to the as-yet-nonexistent fifth book of GRRM's series-- despite my grown indifference to the series, I found myself compulsively checking on Amazon.com to see if I'd missed it coming out *g*

And yes, it seems to be really hard for authors to find a balance between telling a story about characters and a history about someplace. It seems to me that character stories can't be very long unless they acknowledge that that's what they're about-- I forgive Lois Bujold every time Miles Miraculously Pulls Through because, well, the Vorkosigan series has him at its center, and she's unapologetic about it. And you almost *have* to focus in as an author, because there's nothing more boring than history with no connection to the people experiencing its events. But I think that owning the degree of focus on your characters is the best way to go-- if Martin was like, I'm writing a history, guys, then maybe it would be easier to read the series and take in the deaths of main characters.

Have any of you read Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon? It's one of the only examples of an interesting, thought-provoking imagined history I've come across. (Specifically, it's a history of the human race from the mid-20th century to billions of years in the future, over the course of which the species changes unimaginably several times.) It's pretty much devoid of characterisation - no character could possibly have a lifespan covering even a fraction of the time periods involved - but it's still fascinating as an intellectual exercise, not least because of its brevity; Stapledon has a knack for judging what portions of the history he needs to linger on and perhaps flesh out with a vignette or two, and which he can gloss over.

And the thing that Stapledon understood was that creating imaginary histories is an intellectual exercise, and an exercise which is almost entirely different from writing a story. (For a start, you're focusing more on societies and nations than individuals and characters). Martin, on the other hand, is writing an imaginary history using the same techniques he uses to write novels, and it only works as long as we're fooled into thinking it actually is a story.

Before you start bashing fictional histories, don't forget that fictional chemical analyses seem to have done pretty well for themselves...

Though it should be noted that Asimov wrote up thiotimoline up in a pseudo-academic paper, not in a series of brick-sized novels about a scientist discovering thiotimoline...

Granted -- I'm not saying it works as a story, just saying that it does seem to work. I'm not entirely sure how.

One thing you MIGHT want to change, Dan, is your reference to the as-yet-nonexistent fifth book of GRRM's series-- despite my grown indifference to the series, I found myself compulsively checking on Amazon.com to see if I'd missed it coming out *g*

I read the series in paperback, so I read A Storm of Swords in two volumes, and as a result I tend to think of Feast for Crows as book Five.

I've been thinking about this... one of the things that sucks about death in real life is that it's so arbitrary and, at least sometimes... sort of, cruelly empty of meaning. I think in a way this is one of the nice things that escapist fiction can offer us an escape from. It doesn't have to mean that nobody ever dies, or that nobody important ever dies. But typically we expect of a story that when someone dies, there will have been some foreshadowing, or there's a tragic flaw which has made it inevitable, or justice is served, or any of a number of things. But there's a sort of... set of "accoutrements of death" which fiction can give us to make sense of someone's death in a way that real life mostly doesn't. Now, sure, there might be reasons to break out of that mold, like you want to write something more realistic or that somehow challenges the readers expectations, &c &c, but the question is, what do you lose and gain in the process of doing that? In Martin's case, I feel like the choice is being made basically because he likes fucking with the reader's expectations, except that, as you point out, he goes so far that he ends up ruining the enjoyment of the story. Maybe if he were documenting (or writing a fictionalised history of) real events, that could be justified because there would be a pleasure in the reader's (possibly false) sense of engaging with the "real", unvarnished thing. But with fantasy? He's really just working with a different kind of varnish... and if the result is less satisfying, less engaging, than the "normal" way of writing death, then it's a backward step. Hmm. The thing you said at the end about writers imagining that they're confronting their audiences with the reality of bereavement... I think you're onto something their, about a certain kind of vanity that's a danger for a writer. If they think they're going to push the reader into seeing something that the author has decided they ought to see, the reader is going to feel manipulated, pushed... and less "confronted" than irritated. If something is really going to speak deeply about the universality and inescapability of death, it needs to be... well, sincere or something. Hmm.

I've been thinking about this... one of the things that sucks about death in real life is that it's so arbitrary and, at least sometimes... sort of, cruelly empty of meaning.

I've been giving this a lot of thought myself. People keep trotting out the "but death *is* arbitrary" line in response to all the pointless, arbitrary, cheap deaths in things like Buffy, Serenity, Harry Potter and Six Feet Under.

Of course in a sense they're right, but I think it's massively important to distinguish between something that is pointless and arbitrary, and something that explores the ways in which a thing can be pointless and arbitrary.

Something Martin does very *well* is create a sense of the arbitrary, it's something he puts a lot of work into. People seem to think that portraying the essentially arbitrary and unfair nature of death is as easy as killing off random characters, and it isn't. Meaninglessness, I think, needs to be explored just as carefully as meaning. If you want to show that sometimes death is pointless and ignoble and doesn't achieve anything then you actually have to show all the things it doesn't achieve. Rowling is really bad at this, because she presents the battle against Voldemort as something totally worth dying over, but at the same time seems to want to confront the injustice of war, and you can't confront the injustice of a war when said war absolutely just and necessary.

There might be an article in this actually - Meaning in the Meaningless: the Careful Consideration of the Arbitrary.