Frankly, I don't see what you can do about false information. People have screamed themselves hoarse in defense, but people will continue to believe that CoT is one long bath scene and that GRRM is gorging on popcorn as he watches movies all day instead of writing aDwD.

Frankly, I think we can see a trend here. From limited participation in fantasy message boards, I can see that bitching and moaning about various authors is a powerfully addictive pass time. Be it Tolkien's apparently questionable handling of race and women or Jordan being a sellout or Martin being disenchanted with aSoIaF or plain lazy, and similar accusations against Rothfuss and Lynch, there seems to be a realization among the internet community that if they raise a furor over the issue, someone higher up in the publishing grapevine will notice, or else loyal fans will be pissed, and in the yelling matches that follow, the cynics can be snide and sneery and come out thinking they've made a big point.

By all means, I don't think every skeptic or critic is this way. But certainly, you see this kind of criticism go out of hand way too often. The utter looniness of saying that an author may die before he completes the series in his own blog is astonishing, yet it has happened.


Yup. Personally, I was a great fan of the five year gap. Martin's statement that too much would have to be explained by flashback always seemed a little thin to me.
Imagine returning to characters you knew so well, or thought you did, after five years in their life. The basic characteristics may still be there, but the changes in their persona offer a vast chance for an author to keep the reader strongly engaged, wondering what happened to cause such drastic changes. He can give out information in dribbles, plant mysteries and motivations in the past, and in general, make a rich and interesting story.
Not that it would be easy, but I think aSoIaF, with its strong characters, would have benefited vastly from this kind of spacing in the story. It also has the excellent advantage of letting the author do literally what her wants with regards to the placement of his characters.
Sad that GRRM chose to abandon that path.


Its thorny. Some, of course, would say the problem is endemic in epic fantasy, and both authors should simply have trimmed the number of PoV characters. But I admire the complexity and depth both have been able to give their world and story, and that has been achieved primarily through the means of a very diverse cast.

For Jordan, things might have worked out if he had simply left out some characters from certain books, like Perrin from WH and Ekayne from CoT. But maybe not, since his leaving out Mat in tPoD was not well received either.

Certainly, I don't see a five year gap making sense in WoT. The story is too continuous to be able to take that, though it would have been great to see the cast after five years.

As for re-editing, I think the only thing editable with the last few books are certain characters and the amount of time Jordan spent on them. By themselves, their stories are still good and coherent. They just mesh horribly together, and what filler is there is positioned very unfortunately.

With Martin, we cannot comment till aDwD comes out. While I can speculate, I'm entirely uncertain which players GRRM wants interacting before the end. Unlike WoT, they do not have the advantage of having grown up together. He will need to give time for new alliances to mature and make sense, for new conflicts to fit within the overall plot of his story. And if the five or more years he takes to figure all this out helps him resolve the issues, then more power to him. But I'm afraid that if aDwD were to be below par in the way aFFC was, entirely too many people will claim aSoIaF is a doomed series.


In the long run, though, fewer people will read the latter WoT books or aSoIaF books after long gaps where anticipation grows to fever pitch. And that will go a long way in removing tage like "worst fantasay book of all time" from books like CoT, and aFFC will also be more positively viewed, IMO. These books aren't like Erikson's, where timelines, plots and characters seem to have no connection at all with events in previous books. Read as a whole, I think both series will stand strong enough that their long term popularity is more or less assured.


I cannot believe they will literally "suck". They might not match aSoS, say, but that is entirely acceptable. A series with one such book is rare enough.
As for the "trouble" he will face, I think it will be short lived. The characters and stories in aSoIaF are iconic enough that over time, minor quibbles over delays and supposed drops in quality will not matter so much.