Vox Day, the novelist behind A Throne of Bones and Rebel Moon, recently explained where he believes George R.R. Martin failed with his A Song of Ice and Fire series or more colloquially called Game of Thrones.
A Throne of Bones (2016), Castalia House
Towards the end of a livestream with fellow novelist Jon Del Arroz, Day shared, “I don’t think [George R.R. Martin’s] writing changed that much. His style didn’t change that much. It wasn’t like Colleen McCullough, where she literally lost her fast ball. She hit the wall as a writer like nobody I’ve ever seen. I didn’t even her recognize her as the same writer.”
He then responded to a viewer who asked where Martin went wrong, “But where Martin went wrong … where he went wrong is that he was not disciplined with his number of perspective characters.”
Day continued, “The problem with introducing a new perspective character in an epic fantasy–. And writing an epic fantasy is very, very different than writing a series of normal length books or a long series of shorter books.”
“It’s much more difficult and that’s why there are very few epic fantasy writers and that’s why a lot of them don’t even finish their series or can’t keep it up,” he shared. Because the stories are very complicated.”
Game of Thrones (2003), Random House
He then compared it to mixing music, “They’re very much more interwoven and you have to balance–. It’s almost like mixing music. You can’t have too much drums. You can’t have too much of Jon Snow and too little of Daenerys and that sort of thing.”
“In addition to the plot problem, the plot complexities, the main thing is that you have to continue a story of a perspective character. Readers do not accept it when there’s a perspective character whose story doesn’t resolve somehow. And so I realized this pretty early on because I was thinking, ‘Why is Martin losing the plot?’ And I mapped out how many perspective characters he had. He had like nine in the first book and 22 in the second book. I think it got up to 25 or 30 by the third or fourth book.”
A Clash of Kings (2012), Random House Publishing Group
“So that’s why he can’t finish it. He has no hope of finishing it,” Day alleged. “He can’t wrap the story up in any way shape or form without just abandoning it.”
Day then brought up the criticism that Martin kills off too many of his characters, “It always makes me laugh because people say, ‘Oh, Martin kills too many characters.’ No, Martin’s problem is he doesn’t kill enough characters.”
A Storm of Swords (2002), Random House Publishing Group
From there Day shared what he would do to wrap up A Saga of Ice and Fire, “If somebody came to me and said, ‘Okay, you need to wrap the story up. You need to finish the Game of Thrones story up and you need to do it in one or two books at most.’ I would absolutely have the most epic battle as early as I could. As early as I could set it up. I’d have an absolutely massive battle and half the characters would die in that battle. It would be epic. It would make the Red Wedding look like a minor spat at a tea party. And most importantly it would fix the fundamental infrastructural problem of the series.”
“I would get it down to like 12 at most, preferably nine or ten perspective characters, and then you could wrap the book up. Then you can wrap the story up,” he said.
A Feast for Crows (2007), Random House Publishing Group
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A little later on, Day declared, “What Martin achieved is much greater than what most authors will even attempt. But he still failed. There’s nothing wrong with that.
“I consider my book, Summa Elvetica, which a lot of people like a failure because I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve. Is it a good fantasy book? Sure. It laid the ground work for A Throne of bones and A Sea of Skulls. So I love it, but I was trying to do something very complicated there and it didn’t work. I just couldn’t do it,” he concluded.
Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy (2017), Castalia House
Martin has claimed he’s been tirelessly working on Winds of Winter, the next book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, but he’s been making that claim for years bringing many to doubt he’ll ever finish it.
In a blog post in July 2023 Martin shared, “And, yes, yes, of course, I’ve been working on WINDS OF WINTER. Almost every day. Writing, rewriting, editing, writing some more. Making steady progress. Not as fast as I would like.. .certainly not as fast as YOU would like… but progress nonetheless.”
Martin had previously claimed the book would be finished back in 2020. He wrote on his blog, “If I don’t have THE WINDS OF WINTER in hand when I arrive in New Zealand for worldcon, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done. Just so long as the acrid fumes do not screw up my old DOS word processor, I’ll be fine.”
George R.R. Martin via Game of Thrones YouTube
What do you make of Day’s explanation as to where Martin went wrong with Game of Thrones?
