There is probably a lot of truth to the "we end up turning into our parents" cliché. When I tried to get my father to watch Lord of the Rings he said, "That's just silly. I'm not going to watch something that far-fetched."

As I get older, I find myself less able to enjoy fantasy, particularly of the more fantastic variety. More and more, I see that it's just silly, escapist and rapidly becoming synonymous with a class of over-educated underachievers who use it like a drug to just drop out of the real world for long stretches of time. Since actually becoming an adult, I have started very few fantasy series and come to hold in contempt most of what I read when I was in my teens and pre-teens (e.g., Wheel of Time). Aesthetically, stylistically and substantially, these books are usually shit. Rarely, I can ignore the limitations of genre fiction and indulge in a book or two as a diversion (e.g., the Mistborn trilogy).

However, I never really treated Martin as a full-fledged "fantasy genre" author. His books had realistic political intrigue, great plot twists, and the "no character is safe" reputation. They were also, thankfully, light on the fantasy elements. By and large, the world was composed of human beings who fought one another in a conflict that resembled the Wars of the Roses and in a world that resembled England, Wales and Scotland.

This book was a bridge too far for me. The fantasy elements have been blatantly thrown in, Deus ex machina style. Not only do we have wights and dragons, but now it seems that every third character is a warg, there are magic mists that transform people into zombies, lots of poorly described fake cultures (replete with the obligatory Arabic-style Q, tons of ae's, and too many names ending in -os or -is), self-aware trees, elves (or pixies, or whatever you want to call them), dead people coming back into the story, sorceresses and lots of other stupid shit. Martin stepped across the divide between "gritty political thriller in a believable alternate world" into "elves and fairies and pixies", and quite definitively.

His style has also been grating on me. He writes like an American, using American English conventions throughout most of the book, and then throws in Anglicisms without any sort of rhyme or reason, like using "arse" instead of "ass" (but note he still writes "color", "humor" and "dolor", the last in the utterly un-English "Dolorous Edd", which would properly be "Dolourous Edd") and continues to use (ad nauseam, actually) the terrible phrase "must needs", which is a tautological phrase to begin with - if one must do something, it is already of necessity - and in any event largely obsolete.

Added to this is a plot line that was boring as all hell. I found myself skimming, and skimming, and skimming, because the book was just that boring, rolling my eyes or gagging mentally a bit at another piece of tedious idiocy, then skimming more. I kept wondering when something was going to happen. I'm still waiting.

It is my conviction that, ten years from now, publishers will point to Robert Jordan and to George Martin when they tell authors, "We're not accepting series longer than three or four books unless you have the whole thing finished. These long series have a way of getting bogged down and losing their way. Look at Jordan, look at Martin."

I now have two unfinished fantasy series that I am reading to the end just by force of inertia and a sense of, "Well, I read through all of this so I might as well as find out how it all ends now." I will not start a third. Luckily, the Jordan series will (hopefully) soon be over and I can now banish Martin from my mind for another four years or so. The TV series, of course, has been decent so far. I suspect I will lose interest in it too, though, after the first four seasons or so.