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A Feast for Crows, by George R. R. Martin (2005) | |
I have blogged about it several times though, most notably about Malaya and me meeting GRRM himself at a book signing in The City. Read on to hear about that, and even to see some photos. Entries are posted chronologically, and a full review will be added once I get a chance to read it and write one.
To Meet the Greatest Living Fantasy Author... Excitement is building
here in Casa Malalux with George
R. R. Martin's SF book signing coming up later today. The signing is
downtown at Stacey's
Books, at noon. There's one in the evening too, but we figured that
one would be even more crowded, and since I'd have had to miss Kali
class to attend, noon time it is. The bad news is that they say books to
be signed MUST be bought in the store and that they'll be
checking receipts. I would have liked to get Martin's ink in some of my
old Wildcards paperbacks (he edited them), and of course in the Song
of Ice and Fire books as well, but apparently that's not possible.
Not even in the new hardcover UK edition of Feast of Crows that I
haven't even had a chance to read yet. Why can't we get that one signed?
It's not as if they'll even be selling that edition there!
mentioned late last
night, we did BART over into The City on Thursday morning, arriving at
Stacey's Books at 11:30 for the 12:30 George
R. R. Martin book signing. It was a good time to get there, since
the signing was on the second floor of the large bookstore, and they had
about 50 chairs set up. There were maybe 20 people there ahead of us, so
I grabbed two seats in the middle while Malaya was downstairs buying A
Feast for Crows and two other older Martin books about which I know
nothing. By noon all of the chairs were filled and at least 50 more
people were lined up, and by the time he got there around 12:35, there
were at least 150-200 people in the area, filling the side aisle, the
center aisle, and several rows of books to the side. I couldn't get a
good estimate since I was sitting in the middle with high stacks of
books beside me, but it was a good sized-crowd.
The guy on the right there has a Ice and Fire t-shirt on, with the Night Watch's pledge on the back. Fan boy sighting! There was at least one other guy there with a themed t-shirt, but they certainly weren't boys; Malaya and I were among the youngest people there, and she and a few other Asians were the only non-white people. Martin was very cool. Not old in sound or look; it's the beard that makes him seem aged. He's a tiny little guy though, at least a head shorter than me, and very rotund. The size, coupled with his joking, witty mannerisms really make clear that the character in his series most like him is... Tyrion. Not that Martin's deformed or as vicious and hardened as the Imp, but he's short and he's the jester, a personality likely evolved as a defense mechanism, much as Tyrion's is in the series. I'd never heard him speak before, and enjoyed it. He's funny, eager to self-deprecate (Tyrion again), witty, tells a good story, and gives thought-out, wordy answers to all sorts of questions. I'd have happily sat through a much longer Q&A session, but they kept it to about 30 minutes, and then the book signing stampede began. Before we left the condo that morning, I called the bookstore (an impressive achievement, given that I'd gone to bed around 6:30am and gotten up at 10) and asked about their book signing policy. It turned out that, dire warnings on their website to the contrary, they did allow you to bring in your own books. You just had to buy one copy of the new one there to get your own signed, and they said they'd be checking receipts. At it turned out they did not check receipts, but we'd already bought a new hardcover Feast for Crows by then, and we wouldn't have been janky and picked up a new copy, had him sign it along with our other books, and then put the new one back on the shelf. Martin's personal rule was that he'd sign three books per person per trip in line. So you could get more than three things signed, but you had to go to the back of the line and come through again. I didn't see anyone do that, or anyone with some ridiculous stack of books, but I wasn't watching the line that closely. I was a little disappointed that no one was in cosplay attire, but after all, it was a lunchtime signing in the business district of downtown SF. I imagine his evening signings have a bit more festive flair to them. We did get three books signed, and he wrote a little personal message on them, along with his huge, looping signature. So we've got a signed US Feast for Crows, a signed and personalized UK Feast for Crows (the US version has a much more detailed map on the inside front, while the UK version is about an inch thicker, despite having approximately the same page count), and a signed and personalized (to me) copy of Fevre Dream, an older novel of his about vampires. At least that's what Malaya said; I know nothing about it, though I'm obviously going to read it at some point.
The niftiest news of the signing was new as of yesterday, and it was the fact that his publisher had called him yesterday to tell him that Feast for Crows was going to debut at #1 on the NYT Bestseller list. He was pretty tickled about it, if too modest to show it obviously. His previous best was #12 for Storm of Swords, the previous book in the series, way back in 2001. If there were any justice in the book buying world, book 4 would stay on top for a few months, while the three previous novels popped up on the list as well. Hell, Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and several of his other pot boilers did that when The DaVinci Code first hit so big, and A&D is blatantly the same book as DaVinci. Martin's are wildly different, even as they continue the same epic saga. He'll never sell a fraction as well as the Harry Potter series; Song of Ice and Fire is way too serious and adult and intelligent and dark, but at least he's having some richly-deserved success. He didn't talk that much about the books, and most of the questions were general issue ones, rather than anything too detailed about the series, for which I was thankful. I was more interested in the process, and besides, I'm not letting myself read Feast for Crows until I finish my novel, a milestone I'm hoping to reach before 2006, so I really didn't want to hear any big spoilers at the talk. And I didn't. The most interesting question was something to the effect of, "How are you able to be such an asshole to your characters?" I thought the question was more generally about how Martin created such interesting, alive, and sympathetic characters and then put them through such terrible ordeals, even to the point of killing them off unexpectedly. Martin answered it solely on the "killing them off" angle though, likely because he hears that a lot. (If you've not read the series, it's exceptionally wrenching in that numerous characters die, including major ones, including good guys you can't believe aren't going to triumph. Plenty of horrible characters die too, though, so don't think it's any more unfair than real life.) Without going into specifics, he was clearly proud of his willingness to make his characters pay the ultimate price, and his metaphor was of a roller coaster. We all (well most) enjoy riding them, and they're thrilling and fun, but you know you're going to live. (I thought the punchline here was going to be an aside about how that wasn't always the case at smaller local fairs, but he did not go there.) He compared that sort of tame thrill to the fear people feel during war, or being held at gun point, or mugged, or whatever, and said that he tried to write the equivalent of real fear. You could pop him for being bold enough to compare his stories to the terror war veterans feel when they're actually being shot at, but I thought the metaphor was apt, and it's something I've long gripped about, if not in quite those terms. After all, Hollywood films are the worst offenders, but lots of novels (and movies, and TV shows, and etc) do the rollercoaster thing, where there are some ups and downs, but you never really fear for the lives of the main characters, or the triumph of the good guys. They follow the formula religiously, with minor adventures leading up to a showdown, an apparent defeat for good, a stunning recovery, and the ultimate triumph. There may be a casualty or two on the good guys' side, but it's virtually never a main character, and you never doubt that good will win, in the end, no matter how bleak things look. It's far from original, but lots of readers and viewers enjoy that, and want the safety of knowing nothing too scary is going to happen, and that the story will tuck them comfortably back into bed in the end. Martin strives for just the opposite effect, and it's one of the things I really enjoy about his series and admire about his writing. And I just wish I had more main characters in my nearing-completion fantasy novel, so I could bump a few more of them off when the reader least expects it. Next time I'll write one with a bigger cast, to give me more leeway! Seriously though, (I was being serious...) it's quite a challenge for the writer to do that, simply because you've got to make the characters interesting and you've got to have enough of them to keep the story going despite the death of principle actors. You almost have to do a series, to have time to introduce numerous characters, have them do things to make the reader interested in them, and then dispose of them anywhere before some huge grand finale. One thing I did miss about the signing was internal. I didn't feel any huge boost of writing energy this time around, and I was kind of hoping I would. I did write some decent stuff tonight though, putting off this blog entry until very late/the last thing, which is at least partially why it's so disjointed and all over the place. I'll perhaps add another post about the signing later on Friday, when I'm more awake and my thoughts are organized. At this point I'm just hoping to see this publish without red X's for images, so I can get into bed. Three point five hours of sleep last night and an hour nap before Thursday evening kali class shouldn't have kept me going until 6am, and with Malaya out all day and evening tomorrow I'll have no excuse not to get substantial writing done. I'm even hoping to bang out my much-delayed BlizzCon-themed Decahedron, tomorrow in the day before I get going on the fiction.
November 19, 2005 The Joys of Martin I thought some of the comments
from yesterday's post about the George R. R. Martin book signing
were interesting, and wanted to reply with more words that would fit
neatly into a comment of my own. So here I go. I read the first two books, but I guess I couldn't stand the...um... brutal realism, if that's the right phrase for it. I feel so unsophisticated... :(This is another objection I see to Martin's series, and I'm not going to argue it. There is definitely an overdose of brutality, much of it largely grounded in realism, and it's not what we're used to seeing in the usual romanticized depictions of life in the Middle Ages. Martin regularly depicts humans at their absolute worst, and when you've got warring men operating without any laws to govern their conduct or behavior, they're going to do horrible things. The massacres and murders and intimidation and scheming that is discussed in morally-neutral tones is definitely strong enough to turn off a lot of readers, regardless of the quality of the overall work, and that's the price he pays for his "brutal realism." I often find things shocking and cruel, but that doesn't turn me off or make me want to stop reading. I can easily imagine it would, for some people. My mom's reading the series now, and I'll frankly be amazed if she finishes it. She couldn't read even light horror stuff fifteen years ago, but she's gotten more comfortable with her dark side in the years since then, and if she gets through this series, much less enjoys it, I'll be amazed at how far she's come. This isn't a criticism of her or other people either; everyone has different tastes, and while I love gore and suffering and such in fiction, I realize that other people are much more sensitive than I am about it. I can't sit through lots of sappy stuff that other people eat up, and that doesn't make me weak anymore than their choosing not to subject themselves to horror and gore and brutality makes them pussies. There are surgeons and paramedics who enjoy romance fiction to unwind and get away from the ugly reality of life, and goth horror lovers who faint at the sight of their own blood and who capture bugs and release them outside rather than swatting them. Fiction is not an endurance contest. Here's another comment, this one posted anonymously: I read the first book, but I just found it, well...uncompelling. There wasn't anything brilliant I noticed or remembered. The writing may be excellent, but I wasn't really interested in that. But I'm planning to read the other books sometime.As you can see in my review of the first book (Game of Thrones), I agree. This is basically how I reacted to that novel on my first read, though I was intrigued enough to continue on to book two, which immediately pulled me in. I liked Martin's writing, though it wasn't brilliant, and I found much of the novel interesting, while being far from blown away. I got bored with the endless court scheming and power struggling, and wanted more adventure, combat, and magic. Plus I couldn't keep the dozens of names straight, and didn't know or care who most of the minor characters were. I did get one thing 100% correct in my review, though. I said it would be a better book the second time through, and when I read it for the second time this summer, I was amazed at how much more I enjoyed it. Simply knowing who all of the characters were was a huge help, (I'm terrible at remembering character names, even in my own writing.) but it was also great to see how all of the characters and plot lines were introduced, and to revel in the depth and detail Martin worked into his world and society. So yes, Martin's series is bloody and brutal and all too realistic at times, and the first book is sort of slow and it's heavy lifting to remember all of the names and relationships... but it all starts to pay off incredibly in book 2, and I loved that one the first time I read it. Book 3 is even better, as the plot threads twist and turn, and characters we know so well interact in frequently astonishing ways. And yes, I'm raving like a fan boy, but it's really that good. Check my reviews section; I never enthuse about anything like this, with the possible exception of the LotR films
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
espite
going so far as to obtain an English edition of this book in hardcover
in early November 2005, simply because it was available three weeks
before the US release, I have yet to read the damn thing, as of February
2006. I told myself I couldn't start it until I finished the rough draft
of my novel, and since I'm not done yet, no Feasting Crows for me.
