A Defence of Dragons, Part 2

Actually, this post title is a bit of a misnomer. The intent here is not to talk about or 'defend' the controversy but to actually look at the work itself. Between the howls of the denied and the rationalisations of the defenders, the actual book itself and the complexity involved in writing it tends to be forgotten.

Last time, I revisited the point that the fourth book in the series, A Feast for Crows, was never supposed to exist in the original plan for the series. Instead, there would have been a five-year gap with the original planned Book 4, then called A Dance with Dragons (this is where confusion sets in; I will refer to this version of ADWD as ADWD v1), picking up afterwards. GRRM's motives for this writing decision seem to be pretty straightforward: he regretted making the younger characters so young when the series started, and wanted to be able to write about Dany as a 20-year-old, Jon in his early twenties, Arya and Bran later in their teens, Rickon would be older than Bran was when the series began and so on. However, several problems presented themselves. Several storylines still in motion when Book 3, A Storm of Swords, ended seemed to require more immediate resolution. It seemed unfeasible that Brienne would spend five years wandering around Westeros without learning something about Arya or Sansa, and more to the point, it was unlikely that Dorne would sit still for five years after Prince Oberyn's death without taking action. Readers and fans have also pointed out that after five years of relative peace, the realm would have been able to recover somewhat from the war and also that Dany's presence in Meereen would have become common knowledge and neither situation would really fit in with the idea of the series escalating and building to a climax.


So A Feast for Crows was introduced to the mix. Originally, all the characters were together in AFFC, and A Dance with Dragons was still intended to be the book that followed it. For the interests of clarity, I shall refer to the version of AFFC with all the characters in as AFFC v1 and the version of ADWD intended to follow after AFFC v1 as ADWD v2. At this point you may start to understand where the complexity and confusion issues begin to arise.

AFFC v1 was supposed to follow immediately after the end of ASoS and chronicle the adventures of all the previously-established POV characters. It does appear early on that a problem emerged: the stories that 'needed' to be told in the former gap seem to have been written pretty straightforwardly. These would be Cersei's, Brianne's, Dorne's, the Iron Islands' and so forth. The ones that didn't, weren't. GRRM wrote several Daenerys and Jon chapters early on, but seemed to revisit and revise them constantly. Chapters from these characters read at conventions as early as 2002 show noticeable changes and shifts between different versions. It can be surmised that GRRM felt that the interim stories, the stories of 'the gap' as it were, which needed to be told immediately were for those characters primarily in southern Westeros in the aftermath of the War of the Five Kings. This makes sense. This was the main theatre of action, both military and political, in the first three novels and where the situation was left unresolved at the end of ASoS. However, Jon and Daenerys' stories were 'plateaued' at the end of ASoS. Jon was now Lord Commander of the Night's Watch and Daenerys was now Queen of Meereen, intending to learn the art of rulership before returning to Westeros. It was clear that the next logical move in both their stories is to pick up on them five years later, with Jon now an experienced Lord Commander ready to face the threat of the Others and Daenerys as an experienced ruler, ready to embark on her grand expedition to return home, or perhaps being forced into it by outside forces.

AFFC v1 was split in May 2005, and GRRM announced that the 'new' AFFC (v2, the published version) would only feature the POV characters in the south of Westeros, as those were the chapters he had finished. This was reasonable. However, at the same time he announced that those characters not included in the book would now be moved into a new novel, but that book would still bear the title of A Dance with Dragons (v3, the version that will be published hopefully in the not-too-distant future). At the time I remember the announcement being met with both relief and bemusement, but not a huge amount of discussion on the significance of the title for the next book in the series being retained. When GRRM released the page-counts for how much material he had amassed for the ADWD characters, an interesting picture emerged.


When GRRM split the book, he had over 1,600 manuscript (MS) pages ready. Approximately 500 of these were cut off and held for Book 5, whilst the other 1,100 form the published Feast for Crows (1,100 MS pages roughly equal 700-odd pages of an actual novel in hardcover, not counting the appendices and maps). With Book 5 also intended to come in at the 1,100-page count, GRRM thus had almost half the book already in hand. That still meant he had to write half of a full novel, and as the months passed there were indications that the planned fifth book was going to be longer (maybe 1,300 MS pages, maybe more), shrinking the completed material to maybe a third of the total book. Then, as discussed in Part 1, it appears that most of that material was comprehensively rewritten.

It's at this point that the chances of the book making it out comparatively quickly after AFFC disappeared. Clearly GRRM had changed his plans for the new book from simply being the other half of the story told in AFFC v1 into something else. The fact that the new book retained the same title as the one meant to succeed it suggest to me that GRRM had decided to merge the two together. My conclusion is that the version of ADWD (v3) that is to be published is the story of what would have happened in the former version of ADWD (v2) after 'the gap'. It will now simply be happening a few months after the end of ASoS rather than five years. This process clearly began in the published AFFC: Cersei's downfall and arrest by the Faithful would likely have come after the five-year gap in the original plan, as would the arrival of winter and Brienne's capture by Stoneheart. ADWD will likely take this to new extremes by downplaying some of the 'gap' material in favour of moving the story forward more dynamically (although we do know that some of the 'gap' material, such as Dany consolidating control of the city, will be retained).

But do we have any additional proof that this is the case, not just supposition? We do. GRRM has continued his practice of reading chapters from the novel at convention appearances, and last year there were opportunities to compare some of these chapters to earlier iterations (all such chapter readings are collected here for easy reference). Of particular interest were the chances to hear both the latest versions of the prologue, which GRRM has admitted struggling with since its introduction after the split, and also of Jon's second chapter (the first is currently up on his website). Both are noticeably superior to their earlier versions, especially Jon's second chapter. The original version of this chapter was as well-written as ever, but notably slower in forward storyline developments and consisted of lots of discussion, and planning. The newer version is more dynamic and features a (relatively) major character death which I suspect a lot of readers would not have been expecting for some time yet. The result would indicate a ramping-up of the stakes and of the pace of the series in the newer, revised version of the book.


To conclude, the primary reason for the delay in A Dance with Dragons is an intent to make the book better. This is a complex process, since GRRM has to achieve the following goals all in the same volume:

• To begin the process of convergence that will be needed to get all of the POV characters back in one volume for The Winds of Winter and, not only that, but to also ensure the timelines match up. GRRM has previously stated that ADWD will cover more time than AFFC, which makes re-synching the storylines for Book 6 tricky.
• To ensure, for both the publishers and possibly HBO, that the series does not expand to eight volumes. GRRM has said that if the story demands that the series does expand once more, he will do it but I'm guessing this would not be the preferred option. How the stories in ADWD unfold will likely be crucial in determining if this happens or not.
• Whilst meeting the above technical and structural goals, to simultaneously deliver a reading experience that lives up to the series' heritage which includes, lest it be forgotten, a novel (ASoS) that vast numbers of fans have proclaimed the best individual epic fantasy book since Lord of the Rings.

So, no pressure there, then.


In the acknowledgements section of A Feast for Crows, GRRM says that "This one is a bitch,". I suspect stronger language may be used for A Dance with Dragons. This book started out as the second half of a book that was never supposed to exist which then got folded into storyline developments planned for later in the series and is now running out-of-synch with the other half of the cast of characters. Bringing the entire thing back on track without it sprawling out of control Wheel of Time-style is an immense undertaking, and the fact that the author has gone several years over his projected timescale with it is not surprising. Whether the author succeeds or not in resolving these issues and delivering a worthy fifth novel in the series can only be determined when the book is finally published, but the indications we have so far are extremely positive.

Note: This article is somewhat speculative in nature than Part 1. It is a conclusion drawn from GRRM's comments over the years and changes in those chapters which have been made public. None of this is based on any kind of inside knowledge. I may be way off-base with some of this speculation. Nevertheless, the problems I outline that resulted from the ditching of the five-year gap and which need to be overcome to bring the series to a successful conclusion are definitely real, and are certainly the primary reason for the delays on the book. The purpose of this article is to illuminate that fact, which is often forgotten by the critics who simply think that this was just another book and could be written in a matter of weeks if the author chose to do so.

A Defence of Dragons, Part 1

Over on Suvudu, Shawn Speakman has presented a fairly lengthy essay on the ongoing wait for the fifth volume in the Song of Ice and Fire series. This wait has sparked a long-running and increasingly irate flame war between fans, 'antifans' and even exasperated people in the middle on numerous websites across the Internet. The article is an interesting piece which fairly accurately reflects many of the issues involved, although the author does miss out on a few factual points which could be of value.


For those not in the know, the situation is as follows:

A Song of Ice and Fire is an epic fantasy series written by American science fiction, horror and fantasy author George R.R. Martin (popularly known as GRRM). Prior to this series, he was well-known as the editor of the long-running and popular Wild Cards shared world superhero series (which began in 1986 and is still going strong today) and also as a scriptwriter, penning episodes of Beauty and the Beast (late 1980s Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton horror/romance series) and The New Twilight Zone. Before then he had won a string of awards for his novels and short stories. This background is important because many epic fantasy series are written by newcomers to the genre, whilst for GRRM it was another, if much more ambitious, project embarked on after he'd already been a professional writer for over a quarter of a century.

GRRM started writing the series in 1991. Originally envisaged as a trilogy, the story proved to be much larger than the author had conceived and it was eventually expanded to seven volumes. Book 1, A Game of Thrones, took the better part of five years to write (although GRRM did write a TV pilot in the interim which was not picked up, taking out a year or so of that time) and was published in August 1996, although it was completed some months prior to that. Book 2, A Clash of Kings, was published in October 1998 and Book 3, A Storm of Swords - the longest book in the series to date - in August 2000. So far, so reasonable.

However, after this point problems emerged in the writing of the series. The original plan had Book 4 starting five years after the events of Book 3, but as GRRM tried to write the book he found that far too much had happened in the interim to be dismissed in flashbacks or narrative asides. In particular, he had sent one of the characters - Brienne - on a quest at the end of Book 3 that it seemed implausible would take five years to resolve. After much debate and trying to get the book to work for over eighteen months, he abandoned the novel in the summer of 2001, announcing at the Philadelphia Worldcon on 1 September 2001 that instead he would be writing a new book called A Feast for Crows, which would fill in the events of the gap. At the time there were some concerns over the move, as suddenly throwing a new book into the series and trying to course-correct in the middle of a complex narrative seemed to be a recipe for trouble. However, GRRM's judgement had proved sound so far and he was a professional editor as well as a writer, so the fans waited to see what would happen with the new book.


The new book took about three and a half years to write. Coupled with the time lost from trying to make the old book work, this meant that A Feast for Crows was published, possibly ironically, five years after A Storm of Swords, in October 2005. But during the writing process, again problems had crept in and the book had come in as being far too long to publish in one volume. The decision was apparently taken to split the book in two and publish the two volumes at one-year intervals. GRRM even put an afterword at the end of AFFC (and, bemusingly, it's still there even in the most recent reprints) to this effect, although he was careful to word this as a hope, not a promise. He also confirmed on his website that the second volume, now entitled A Dance with Dragons, was not yet complete and a lot of work would be required to bring it to completion, but he was hopeful that this would be doable within a year or so.

Obviously that didn't happen. AFFC, as it is published, was completed in May 2005, almost four years ago, and ADWD is still not with us. And, compared to the regular and detailed updates (complete with page counts) GRRM provided on the writing of AFFC, his actual updates on ADWD have proven infrequent. At the same time that his news on ADWD started tailing off, he also set up a blog on which he would post about merchandise related to the series, the development of HBO's TV adaption of the books and personal comments about football and politics. This is where a lot of the 'antifans' anger set in, with venomous attacks on the author on his own website becoming very frequent very quickly. The situation grew so bad that the semi-official forum dedicated to the series (of which I am a moderator) had to ban discussion of the issue to avoid major flamewars and having to ban people (on both sides), a move that was taken reluctantly given how tolerant the board is of constructive criticism of the author (unlike some other author forums out there).


One of the problems is that the pretty decent reasons for the delays on ADWD have actually been given (both by GRRM and his publishers) but have not really been collected into a single source before. These reasons can be summed up as:

• 1. GRRM undertook 'structural changes' in the writing after AFFC was published. Whether this was to the series overall or to ADWD in particular is unclear. However, I strongly suspect it was to the series overall. GRRM appears to want to reign in the 'creep' that has seen the series expand from three to seven books, and I imagine that HBO are keen to keep the series to seven books as well, making it easier for them to adapt to television in a timely fashion. These changes likely took some time to implement, although their extent remains unclear.
• 2. GRRM rewrote most, if indeed not all, of the material he had left over from AFFC. Pat's Fantasy Hotlist interviewed representatives from Bantam USA some time ago in which they confirmed this is the case and GRRM confirmed on his blog that all of Jon's material had been rewritten. In between two conventions, GRRM also rewrote the book's prologue, and keen-eared fans were able to compare the two versions (spoilers, obviously) and show the changes between them. The effective loss of the AFFC material, which would have made up over 35% of the published novel, therefore added months of writing time to the book.
• 3. After putting in the note at the end of the AFFC manuscript, GRRM was asked by his publishers to undertake a book tour of the United States, Canada and the UK. This tour turned out to be extremely long and ambitious, and effectively removed six months from the writing of ADWD (actually meaning the chances of it coming out a year after AFFC were killed very early on, although unfortunately not early enough to pull the afterword from the fourth book). His Spanish and Portuguese publishers also asked him to visit Spain and Portugal in the summer of 2008 and he complied, losing an additional month. However, GRRM did turn down a request by his Chinese, Korean and Japanese publishers for an extended book tour of Asia on the grounds that that would take far too long out from the writing of the new book.
• 4. GRRM is, by his own admission, prone to over-optimism.
  

Of course, if this was the whole story than the 'antifans' wouldn't really have much of a leg to stand on. Yeah, the author said he thought he couldn't get the book done in a year and he was wrong. It happens, and a lot more often than you might think. The substantially newer and younger authors Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch have run into significant problems with the second and third volumes of their debut series, and both books will be published at least one-and-a-half years behind schedule, maybe closer to two. Literary SF fans have been waiting for Christopher Priest's occasionally-hinted new novel since 2002. Jean M. Auel fans wail at the decade-long gaps between the later volumes in the Earth's Children series. Melanie Rawn fans seem close to giving up on her Capital's Tower series ever being completed.

However, a key weapon in the 'antifans' arsenal is that whilst GRRM hasn't been able to bring ADWD to completion, he has been able to write at length on many other issues on his blog and, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, this provokes anger from them. After all, the time spent writing a blog is the time that would otherwise be spent writing the book instead, right?

Well, no. There are many people on the Internet with blogs (ahem). Most people who have them also have full-time jobs, and write their blogs in the evening when they are at home, or maybe in their lunch hour at work or at the weekend. In fact, since the computer GRRM uses to write ASoIaF is apparently powered by a steam engine (aka DOS) and is located in another room to his Internet machine, it's actually a pretty logical conclusion that he writes his blog in his spare time when he is not working on the book. As for what he chooses to blog about, that's entirely his decision. As GRRM himself has said, substantial news about ADWD will be posted on his website's Song of Ice and Fire update page, not on his blog. So, if you are totally uninterested in his other blogging subjects, unbookmark his blog and instead check his update page regularly. If it hasn't been updated, even for a year or more, then there's been no substantive news about the books in that time. Otherwise the author is free to write about what he wants to write about on his blog whenever he wants, as indeed I am or any other blogger is.


Some of the other popular complaints:

But no-one cares about Wild Cards!
False. Wild Cards has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. It was a huge success back in the 1980s and the current 2000s revival is doing good business for Tor Books and attracting many new fans to the series. A lot of people care about Wild Cards and a surprising number of them consider ASoIaF to be a distraction from GRRM's work on that series. It was also Wild Cards' immense success that made publishers eager to pick up GRRM's new fantasy novel way back in the mid-1990s. Finally, with Heroes seemingly disintegrating under the weight of its own ineptitude, Hollywood seems to have taken an interest in the property (or at least possibly in Melinda Snodgrass' movie script based on the setting), so it's definitely doing something right.

He's abandoned ASoIaF to write other books!
Like what? GRRM's contribution to the enjoyable Hunter's Run was written in 1981, or fifteen years before AGoT was even published. Dreamsongs is a collection of his older fiction. Fevre Dream and The Armageddon Rag were published in the early 1980s.

But he spends all his time hawking tat on his website!
As mentioned earlier, what GRRM blogs about on his website is up to him. If you purely want info about ADWD than visit his Update page on his website, not his blog. Also check out the forum, because I can assure you that that second news of ADWD's completion makes it out, it will be posted and discussed there. Also, merchandise based on the series sells (otherwise it would stop pretty quickly) and lots of people are interested in it, so GRRM feels obligated to talk about it.

But he's editing other books!
That certainly is true. However, it's been true right through the entire series to date as well.

This post is getting long, so I'll leave off this subject for now. The next time I revisit it I will be discussing what actually the problems with ADWD could be from a series structural point of view, and why there is tremendous reason for optimism based on some of the more recent news to emerge about ADWD last year.