A Game of Thrones (Kindle)

by George R.R. Martin
-A Song of Ice and Fire, Book One-
(New York: Bantam, 2003)
Kindle eBook, 864 Pages, 2075 KB, Fiction
ASBN: B000QCS8TW, US$8.99

My Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom's protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

My Review: Back in April, I was in San Antonio, Texas, to present a paper at a conference. The first couple of nights that I was there, I suffered from some pretty extreme insomnia and so I started flipping through channels and came across the HBO adaptation of Martin’s series. Little did I know what I was getting into. I immediately downloaded the sample to A Game of Thrones to my Kindle, and devoured that over breakfast the next morning. By then, I was hooked and as soon as I could afford it, I started downloading the series.

Book One, A Game of Thrones, immediately sucked me into the world of the Seven Kingdoms and I am loathe to leave. I know I must sound like a gushing fanboy, but in reality it is rare for me to find a fantasy series with a created world that is believable enough to me to jump in with both feet. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Rowling’s world of Harry Potter, and Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis’ world of Krynn from the Dragonlance series are the only ones that I can think of that I willingly gave myself over to. Now, Martin has drawn me in in much the same way.

What I found most appealing about what Martin has done is that he has not sacrificed character for world building. All-too-often an author dabbling in these sorts of stories will create a massive and detailed world but will not put hardly any effort into the characters, resorting to the standard tropes that one might find in any high school game of Advanced Dungeon & Dragons. Martin’s characters, however, are fully-realized, seemingly living and breathing people who inhabit the space with you as you begin reading. I was especially taken with the Stark family (which is really no surprise, given that the book is designed to manipulate you to take the Starks’ point of view and sympathize with Eddard, Catelyn, Sansa, Arya, Bran and Jon Snow) and keenly felt each victory and defeat that they experienced. That Martin is able to accomplish that with me, someone who considers himself a rather jaded reader of fantasy fiction, was a very nice surprise. It allowed me to find pleasure in reading again after two years of grad school and intensely studying literature for that whole time, and for that I will always be grateful to George Martin.

That said, I don’t know that this series is for everyone. It is long and sprawling—none of the books are under 750 pages and they require a pretty big commitment in terms of time, effort and brain power expended in trying to keep track of everything that is going on. The searchable text of the Kindle helped in that respect (as did the fact that I did not have to carry around a monster-sized paperback) but on the whole, you really have to decide if you want to fork over the time to really give your all to this series especially when one considers the fact that Martin has stated that the Song of Ice and Fire series will in fact be a septet, and there are only five books so far (with a five year gap between Books Four (A Feast for Crows) and Five (A Dance with Dragons)) and according to reports Martin only has about 100 pages of Book Six (titled The Winds of Winter) down on the page. If you think you can commit like that to a series of books, then by all means, pick up A Game of Thrones, you won’t be sorry.