Song of Fire & Ice book series.

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I am not sure if I should get into this or not. My book history is as follows.

Goosebumps (loved them as a kid.)

Potter (read 1-4 when film #1 came out and was ready for the launches of books 5-7 PSYCHED! for the FINALE in a few weeks!

Twilight (Say what you will but with #1 on DVD I bought into the hype not bad but looking back not OMG! excellent. Ok though.)

Millenium Trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,Girl who played with fire AND Girl who kicked the hornets nest.)

Very gripping crime drama had me on the edge of my seat!!

and finally what is known as a classic: MOBY DICK! Got half way in and it reminded me of RPGs (there are so many characters it jumps around too.) then finished it from 10:30AM-2:30AM (BUT I was already nearly half way when I decided to pull an all nighter.

Sadly I hear GRR the author of Fire/Ice is like Tolkein. LoTR bored me. It wasn't a story that gripped me although the films were epic. The build up in the books wasn't IMO suspensful and they drug on YAWN!! !

SO! With that reading history yall can tell I'm an avid reader would I like the Fire & Ice series? Please let me know I thought best judgement would ask fellow Aspies who might be book lovers too. I'll PM some WP friends as well.
THANKS!

Have you seen the HBO tv series adaptation? I thought it was great but it's definitely "adult" (plenty of sex and violence, very political). I hear there's actually more in the books, but I haven't read them yet. I'm waiting for the first one in the mail, so I'll be interested in the responses to this thread.

*Almost forgot. There are a lot of characters in the story. A lot.

Nope.

I'm very ambivalent about Martin. I would describe the books as, "good, but not great."

If you want a good fantasy series, I suggest Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy: (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road).

I think you would like the books. They are a bit adult in parts, but if you can handle the Millennium series you can handle a Song of Ice and Fire.

There are lots of characters in the stories, and none of them are 100% nice. In fact, they're all a mix of good and bad, which makes them a lot more interesting than Tolkien's characters. Also, there is a lot more suspense than LoTR because Martin isn't scared of killing off his main characters, and there is a lot of danger out to get them.

If you're still not sure about getting into them, you could read the first few chapters of a Game of Thrones. The first chapters set the tone for the whole series, so if you don't like the first few chapters, you're not going to like the rest.

Neither was Tolkien. He just didn't do it much in LotR. The Silmarillion is a bloodbath of main characters, albeit most of them are at somewhat greater remove*.

The (general - not specifically addressing your doing so) characterisation of GRRM as some gritty realist is beginning to annoy me; he ain't. He's a not-especially-bright TV scriptwriter with mediocre writing skills who lucked out, wrote one decent book and completely failed to capitalise on its promise with his attempts to develop it as a series because as a TV scriptwriter of the "Lost" school his ideas on plot development are fundamentally screwed towards introducing meaningless hooks and endless bloat. And while GRRM certainly does blood 'n' guts 'n' gore he does so from a scriptwriter's viewpoint which bears about as much resemblance to gritty reality as does a small rubber duck**.

But *shrugs* people lap it up. He's every bit as good as Stephenie Meyer. My advice is buy Game of Thrones and treat it as a standalone work that would've made a great series in the hands of a competent writer.

*though condensed from more detailed fragments.
**with apologies for gratuitous abuse of metaphor or simile or whatever the hell that is.

I think it's worth trying the first book at least and seeing how you get on with it. It's a lot less "high fantasy" than Lord of the Rings and the writing style is simpler. It takes a little while to set the scene, but because each chapter focuses on a different character it feels like it moves faster. Although there are quite a lot of characters, not all of them are important to remember and they are introduced gradually.

Personally I really enjoyed all of the books the first time I read them, but found that the second time they just didn't interest me the same way.

The Silmarillion is a great book. I prefer The Children of Húrin, which is even darker. But, for suspense, LoTR is not as good as many of Tolkien's other books, or Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. The fact that so few main characters die means that I was rarely worried that a character was in real danger. I like LoTR, but there's not as much suspense as there could have been.

I think your point about GRRM not being a gritty realist is fair. I don't think many authors are any good at gritty realism, especially fantasy authors.

I recognise the point you're making, but disagree as to the relative merits of the two; but perhaps it comes down to whether you treat LoTR purely as an adventure story, or in its wider context as a window onto the lifetime hobby of an obsessed philologist theologian who'd seen his own personal chunk of the Apocalypse. *grins* None of Tolkien's successors and imitators have had the same depth to draw upon.

Still and all, a lot hinges on whether and how ASoIaF eventually ends. If GRRM proves me wrong, sorts out his loose ends and wraps everything up neatly and in such a way as to justify the horrendous bloat, cool... ...but in the meantime I ain't buying any more of the books 'less I can get 'em cheap second-hand, and I ain't reading them unless I'm really bored. They can sit next to The Baroque Cycle.

I think I'm messing up my explanations. I wouldn't want claim that Martin is a better author than Tolkien, or that LoTR is not a rich book. I only want to say that LoTR has less suspense than it could have.

I think it might be because LoTR has main characters that have few moral weaknesses, and those that do redeem themselves. It's hard to kill off a hero. That's why so many action films are predictable - the hero can't die. And, when they do die, it's not for real, because they get back up again. That's the thing I like about Song of Ice and Fire. The characters are morally ambiguous, so any of them can die.

I sound obsessed with death!

Just started on the 5th book in the series (A Dance with Dragons). I've been waiting for it to come out for years. So far, it's just as brilliant as all the others