George Martin Still Loves You
or, I'd rather die than disappoint everyone; or, fists clenched in dirt can't raise to the sun; or, a song of elation and devastation
The first time I ever gasped aloud while reading a book was when REDACTED had his throat cut while I was sitting in a classroom where fifteen eight year old Korean students were taking an English test I had written half an hour before they arrived at the Hagwon. I didn’t just make a mild noise of surprise. I gasped so loud that all of them stopped taking the test and stared at me in the way that only children can stare at an adult.
Years later, I would begin watching the show with Chelsea while we were on opposite ends of the continental US and I remember the utterly strange and indescribable glee of watching REDACTED’s throat cut open like a new mouth while the credits played silently, blackly, Deathly. Exquisitely haunting and excruciatingly brutal but filled with awe and majesty because they did it. They really, truly did it. The madmen did it!
They made the most surprising and devastating scene I’d ever read and brilliantly put it to film, allowing non-readers to experience what I experienced while I was a different person, living a different life on a different continent.
Of course, we all know how this ends. We were all there when the wheels fell off, when a show that became so popular they began airing it live at the same time across the entire world abandoned its sense of self and became a show we would all collectively hate so bitterly that it has been near erased from cultural consciousness in the few years since that sad finale.
But George RR Martin is still here. He still loves us. And his books are still real. Still good. Still there for you to enjoy.
Even if we never see the ending as he sees it now, so clear in his skull that he wishes we could be there too, it does still exist.
Martin is famously not our bitch but I think even he is pretty bummed that he may never finish the story he spent the last thirty years writing. I mean, this is his magnum opus! This is his legacy! And instead of his vision that will live on past all of us, it will be the sad conclusion to a TV show that we all believed in once.
I have read THE DISCOURSE and I can say without a doubt that the internet is full of absolute freaks. Just today, I read someone say that George Martin would lose all his fans and riches if he was just honest with himself about never planning on finishing this series.
I have a lot to say about this specific shriekingly hot take:
You think he doesn’t want to finish the project he’s been working on for thirty years? Buddy, I’ve written a lot of novels and I can tell you that two weeks into every single one, I wish I had been done at least a week ago.
Do you think the immensity of his wealth would shrivel up and dissolve because he tweeted I quit?
The poor tubby old man called this his magnum opus over a decade ago: you think anyone wants an Opus unsung?
If you can’t be satisfied with 5,000 pages of a great story, then we cannot be friends. I don’t even want you to know my phone number anymore.
Dude, George Martin had to watch the final season of Game of Thrones too. You think that didn’t knife his heart to ribbons?
We are all George Martin’s Boy and we hear him shouting into the rafters of a wooden church in the early 20th century covered in oil every single day that occurs without an announcement for the next novel in his series.
On top of all that, the man has not exactly not been doing anything. He’s edited dozens of massive, themed collections and his ongoing series Wild Cards. He’s also written and published two gargantuan works of fictional history set in Westeros. Not to mention the fact that he has become his own media juggernaut. Studios are falling over themselves to adapt his work or have him consult on some project.
Which would be a lot for even a regular media company!
But he’s just an old dude who writes on an internetless computer that honestly looks like a joke. The man is old. He was beginning to be old when he started this series that he definitely did not think would take the rest of his life to (not) finish.
We may never see the end to his Song of Ice and Fire, but that’s okay. We can be Big Boys about it instead of little babies. It’s a shame, absolutely, and even more of a shame since the ending we have for this series was so poorly executed, but life will go on.
It’s been eleven years since I read his books. I’ve never reread them, but I do still think about them from time to time. Think about the surprising humor of them, the raw humanity of them, the shock and awe and even beauty contained in those pages. Despite what people say about A Feast for Crows, I think it’s maybe one of the best novels dealing with the ugly scars of war carved into a landscape, into a people. In truth, I loved it even more than A Storm of Swords, which is his most ghastly and gasp-inducing work.
We may never see how this ends, may never be able to read all the dreams he put to paper but never finished, but we do still have his books. All five of them. And a career of short stories and novels that predate them. You could always read those (they’re pretty good!).
I say this because I’m about to restart the series. I had been waiting all this time for the announcement of the sixth book before I went though them again, but I miss this world. Miss this story. It’s been long enough that I may be able to come to it almost new.
And you can too. The books are here for you. You probably already even own them or know someone who does. The library surely has dozens of copies.
I’ll be writing about them in the months ahead: probably one book per month for the next five months. So feel free to join me. Think of it even as a bookclub, I guess. Might be fun to see what all of you think of these books as well.
So remember: there was a reason you loved George. And it’s because, once upon a time in a world of dragons and bastards, he loved you too.
Dissenting opinion:
George R. R. Martin is the perfect example of a writer who was incredible (read: first three books of Game of Thrones) until his editors became too intimidated by his fame (read: books four through the "end" of Game of Thrones) and everything went off the rails.
It's never helpful for a writer to get too famous. He's not the first, and he won't be the last.