Woe in Westeros: The Game of TV Thrones [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

SPOILERS BELOW FOR GAME OF THRONES THROUGH LAST SEASON

The battle ax of success is a two-bladed bitch. Take George RR Martin for example. He wrote for decades, publishing award-winning science fiction, novels of fantastic depth of character, and even worked in television for a time. Now with the success of The Game of Thrones, GRRM has everything. The fattest bestsellers, the hottest cable show, the possibility of a feature film. Martin has even won the name "The American Tolkien." How many of us haven't wished for that kind of success?

But that ax has a second side, remember? That sharp edge has shown itself recently as execs at HBO have turned up the pressure on George to write the sixth book of what will be his seven-part masterwork. Martin has told avid readers before that it takes him two years to write one of his Song of Fire and Ice books. And therein lies the rub. TV shows are made every year, not every two. So what does Martin do with this kind of JK Rowling-level pressure?

He could do two things I hope he'd never do: 1) let other people make up the next season (as HBO has threatened to do), or 2) hand in some quickly written crap. Both of these choices will produce a sad end to what has been an amazing run of television. Hacks (even talented ones) watering down Martin's vision would be the low road to another Legend of the Seeker. Martin quickly throwing together the last two books could lead to storylines that remain unfinished or faltering like the mysteries in Lost. HBO should think carefully on all of this.

I think I have a solution. There has been some discussion around how many seasons the show will go. The producers say seven. HBO says ten. George says, "Let's see." So what will they do after the seven bestsellers? My answer is TALES FROM WESTEROS, an anthology show based on the larger show. Imagine it. Ten episodes about different characters in different parts, different times, of that amazing world. These, of course, would be written by others under GRRM's watchful eye, with Martin providing the last and best episode (probably about the dragons). This would buy HBO and GRRM another year. And whenever they needed more time, do another one. Or after all the regular books are done, fill out the ten years with more. (Martin was producer on the new Twilight Zone and edited a tribute book to Jack Vance set in his world, The Dying Earth, so he has experience at this kind of thing.)

Some episodes I'd like to see would include:

Another nice part of this idea is we could see some past characters return, like Ygritte played by Rose Leslie, who died in last season's storyline. I'd love a smaller story about Ygritte and Jon Snow before he left the Free Folk. More info on the dangers of the land beyond the wall, please.

Arya and the Hound traveled together for most of Season Four. Lots of opportunities for stories on that journey. The same for Brienne of Tagarth and Jaime Lannister as they made their way south. This would be before Jaime lost his hand, perhaps? Jojen and Meera Reed, Brandon Stark, Hodor's journey to the frozen north has plenty of room for things to happen too.

Grey Worm and the Unsullied have tons of potential still. I'd like a story without too much Daenerys Targaryen or dragons in it (I'm probably in the minority there.) Jorah Mormont is a favorite so he'd be in it for sure. If Jason Momao would return as Drogo, a Dothraki tale would be as welcome too.

Nothing says you have to stay within the current time frame either. Theon and Asha Greyjoy as children is intriguing. Of course, you could do this for lots of characters, but the bizarre Greyjoy childhood would work well. The Lannisters as children is another way to go but not as interesting to my mind. (The opening scene of Season 5 featured a young Cersei Lannister and a friend visiting a fortune teller. Imagine same but as part of an hour drama.)

Bronn and Tyrion Lannister are probably the best buddy team since Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. (Though in Season Five, it's Bronn and Jaime Lannister!) You could do an entire show about these two. Petyr Baelish and Varys are naturals for a convoluted story of matched wits. Of course, you'd have to include Pycelle because Julian Glover is Fantasy royalty. There are plenty of other groups of characters matching wits. You could even bring Joffrey back (Don't wait too long. Jack Gleeson is a growing boy, of course. You want a avoid any Harry Potter stubble.)

In a show with a zillion characters (and there will be new ones this season), small episodes around two or three of them would not be hard to do as long as you gave the viewer some way to know when in the chronology they are watching. Smaller stories could allow the show to explore different kinds of narratives: romantic encounters, horror tales, magical and mysterious questions, military and martial matters. The smorgasbord of storytelling could be as wide as Westeros itself. Unlike allowing HBO writers to finish the series, these episodes are contained within Martin's greater vision and would not lead to anything as awful as Lena Headley in a skin-tight leather suit carving up white walkers in slow-mo. (Legend of the Seeker fans, you know what I mean!)

George, HBO, I hope you're listening.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Battle of Five Armies: Of Orcs and Epics [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

As I sat watching the last of The Hobbit trilogy of films I realized something. We take so much for granted in the 21st Century. Imagine if I had a time machine and could go back to 1936. I'd step out (fighting the desire to find a newsstand and buy copies of Weird Tales in pristine condition) and meet some fan of Fantasy (after a very long search) and we'd talk. We could discuss Lord Dunsany, perhaps the recently deceased Robert E Howard, or ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Then I'd mention something about vast orc armies and I'd get a strange stare. Of course, Tolkien's The Hobbit hasn't been published yet. My mistake.

But it isn't the word "orc" that is the problem. It's the entire concept of vast, epic battles between men and orcs that is the stumbling block. The Battle of Five Armies is the first of these. My 1936 companion may be ready for the idea, but he hasn't got it yet. I jump back into my time machine, whispering one beautiful word in his ear, "Hobbit," and disappear. (Unfortunately the experience of seeing me disappear in my time machine drives him to read Amazing Stories or Astounding instead and we lose him from the Fantasy pool. What can you do?)

Eighteen years later my machine takes me to see Tolkien give us more with The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's vast ideas are starting to light new fires like Carroll Kendall's The Gammage Cup in 1959, with its army of mushroom warriors. I jump another ten years to see the campuses of America (along with an unauthorized paperback edition) drive Tolkien's popularity to the point where Led Zeppelin is singing of Gollum and Ringwraiths. We are approaching critical mass...

In 1972, Gary Gygax is about to sit down with a bunch of buddies and Dungeons & Dragons is on. Those stats-driven warriors need something to fight. Of course, it has to be a goblin. After Tolkien's estate and Gygax hash out the copyright of certain terms, the deal is done. Pairing this with the success in 1977 of the Tolkien clone, The Sword of Shannara, epic fantasy is now set to boil. The creation of Derivative Fantasy! Anybody can write of such creatures! The world of Fantasy now has its generic monster, the Orc. In any video game, any book, any RPG, the orc is the opponent in armor that warriors face everywhere.

But it wasn't always so. That is my point. The idea took a long time to get here. As scholars such as Michael Drout point out, it began in 1872 with a children's book by a Scottish minister. The book was The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald. Scholars and fans make a lot of noise about William Morris starting off the Modern Fantasy genre with his pseudo-Medieval novels like The Wood Beyond the World (1894), and he was vital in insuring that Fantasy would become a genre dominated by novels. But it is Macdonald that gave us the goblin foe; who gave Tolkien the leg up to write The Hobbit; who gave CS Lewis the inspiration to write of animal and monster armies in Narnia. Macdonald's tale of Curdie and the princess Irene seems quaint by today's epic, grand scale. A common boy and a restless princess discover a plot by the goblins to attack the castle, which eventually leads to an armed conflict. Despite the fight being appropriate for children, it did open the door to Fantasy tales in which humans are versed against an inhuman army. Eddison would use it to create two human armies in The Worm Ouroboros (calling them Demons and Witches), but it was Tolkien's The Hobbit that cemented the idea for all time.

And one hundred years later that, resulted in the genrification of the orc as common military assailant. World of Warcraft; Orcs Must Die!; the latest hack Tolkien-esque bestseller. It's everywhere and its not going away any time soon. For better or worse, Fantasy has an epic scale today. The quaint, personal-sized Fantasy tale, be it the glorious works of Thomas Burnett Swann or even the Howardian tale of the lone barbarian, is awash in a sea of orcs and battle. There's not much you can do...

For example, back around 1988, I met L Sprague de Camp at a convention in Calgary. I spoke with him about a project I had abandoned, that of converting his Novaria novels to an RPG setting. He thought I should keep at it, but I knew ultimately it wouldn't work. Why? No orcs. No elves. Novaria is a Fantasy world filled with humans. There are demons and magic, but all the armies are men. You can't fight the tide with your bare hands.

So there I sat this Christmas, watching what I felt was the best of the three Hobbit films, thinking: all Fantasy writers today have to make their peace with Tolkien and his orc armies. Either you accept them as part of what you are writing or you have to reject them and write something that is inherently anti-Tolkien. There is no middle ground any more. A book I read over the holiday made this even more evident to me. It was Conan the Invincible (1980) by Robert Jordan. In that rather pedestrian tale, Conan's enemy wizard has a race of scaly-skin henchmen called the S'Tarra. They are hidden in his castle fortress, breeding and preparing for the taking over of the world. Is it any surprise Jordan gave up writing Conans for pseudo-Tolkien in The Wheel of Time series?

Another author of note, one who shares Tolkien's double middle initials (Raymond Richard, not Ronald Reuel), is George RR Martin. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice shows a new ingenuity with this Tolkien dilemma. Martin has combined the two most commercially successful Science Fiction (Dune) and Fantasy (Lord of the Rings) franchises to create the Game of Thrones books. This sounds like I am disparaging him but this is far from the truth. I have the highest respect for GRRM. First off, for his amazing story writing before Game of Thrones with classics like "Way of Cross and Dragon" and "Sandkings," but secondly for his masterful control of character, which allows us to watch or read a story with dozens of distinct characters, each worthy of a tale of their own. So I glibly say "combined the political essence Dune and the fantastic world of LOTR," but go ahead; try it.

Really what George was doing was that thing we must all do as modern Fantasy writers. Dealing with Tolkien. I believe GRRM has chosen to accept Tolkien, and though we haven't seen much of it yet, "Winter is Coming." What does that mean? Orc (or White Walkers and Wildings) armies. Tolkien is coming and George has the cajones to make us wait through six fat books for it. Long live the orc! He's going to be with for some time yet.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Awesome List: Game of Dungeons & Dragons

Game of Thrones photos



I couldn't make it through George RR Martin's Game of Thrones, but that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to HBO's TV series. /Film has a ton of pictures from the show and I fully expect it to join the list of filmed adaptations that are better than their books. [Boy, that's a lot of links for two sentences.]

Valid questions about IDW's Dungeons & Dragons comic



Comic shop manager Mike Sterling quizzes an employee about the new Dungeons & Dragon comic:

Mike: “I understand this new Dungeons & Dragons comic is actually supposed to be pretty good.”
Employee Aaron: “Yeah, it really was.”
M: “So are there any gelatinous cubes?”
EA: “Sorry, Mike, but no.”
M: “How ’bout displacer beasts? At least one?”
EA: “Not one.”
M: “Okay, fine…mind flayers?”
EA: “No.”
M: “Beholders. There has to be a Beholder in this comic.”
EA: “There sure isn’t.”
M: “This is a Dungeons & Dragons comic, right?”

Sterling's only getting started with the questions in that snippet. He hasn't even gotten yet to alignments, saving throws, and thieves doing quadruple damage using sneak backstab attacks. The interrogation continues at Sterling's blog and convinces me that if anyone was born to write a D&D comic, it's him.

I Give Up: A Game of Thrones

Bookgasm has a rule that's changed my reading life. It's the 100-page rule: "If it’s not good by page 100, quit reading."

I gave George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones about 150 pages, and while no one could ever call it "bad," it failed to grab me. It's the first book in an epic, but it's epic itself in the number of characters that it asks you to keep track of and care about. Keeping track of them all isn't so hard -- Martin does a fine job of making them all memorable in some way -- but I can't care about them all. So I found myself impatiently reading about a spoiled little daughter of nobility and her tomboy sister, for example, when I really wanted to know what was going to happen to their bastard half-brother whose only future seems to be defending a bleak, wilderness wall against terrifying, unseen creatures (but you just know that bigger things are coming for him).

I don't want to suggest that Martin made a bad call in bouncing between members of his large cast. I don't want to suggest anything that makes it sound like Martin's a bad writer, because he clearly isn't. It's just that where my head's at right now, I need a tighter story. I don't know for sure where Martin's taking his Song of Ice and Fire series (of which A Game of Thrones is the first book), but it's obviously somewhere big. And probably somewhere interesting.

There's a lot of intrigue and political manouvering going on in A Game of Thrones and I'm halfway interested in seeing where it all ends up. But I'm much more interested in finding out what happens to that bastard kid and the crippled nobleman who accompanies him to the wilderness wall. I also want to read more about the former princess whose brother sold her to a barbarian warlord in return for military support in an endeavor to regain the brother's throne. Boy, I have a feeling that the brother's going to regret that.

I also have a feeling that I'll be coming back to A Game of Thrones when I'm able to be more patient with the parts that I'm not as into: the strained friendship, for instance, between a king and his right-hand man. Or the training of a young nobleman whose father has left the family holdings to fulfill his duty elsewhere in the kingdom.

But for now, I need something that moves faster and is more plot-oriented. I'm hoping that Terry Brooks' Armageddon's Children does the trick.

Updated to add: It didn't.