I'm starting to wonder if I will ever get around to reviewing A Song of Ice and Fire. (For those of you poor souls who aren’t familiar with it, it’s the epic fantasy series for which writer George R. R. Martin is world famous, and upon which is based the award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones [named after the first book in ASOIAF, A Game of Thrones]. It’s also my favorite series of books in the world, and I highly recommend it for anyone who doesn’t mind committing to over 4,000 pages of an unfinished series written by an author notorious for missing deadlines, and who can stomach these other considerations as well).
That’s because before I review ASOIAF, I want to get through at least one re-read of the series - which is so massive, dense and complex that I spent a good deal of my first (and only, so far) reading trying to figure out who was who and what was where, and following the wickedly unpredictable, heartbreaking, captivating plot (perhaps more accurate would be ‘plots,’ since the series includes a total of thirty one different point-of-view characters).
Retracing my steps through that behemoth will be a Herculean labor on its own. But the more immediate challenge for me is getting through the apparently endless ocean of supplementary material (which I'm reading before returning to the series, to enhance my understanding and appreciation) that exists for the already enormously detailed yet also breathtakingly broad world of ASOIAF.
ASOIAF is based on Planetos, a fictional planet that includes the continents Westeros and Essos (loosely analogous to the medieval British Isles and continental Europe). The history, geography, politics and population of Westeros is extensively developed throughout the course of the main series, as is the landscape of Essos (although to a lesser extent, given that only three POV characters have chapters there in the presently published books).
Five of the planned seven books in ASOIAF have been published, with the latest released in 2011. Martin, who is famous for taking his time with his books (a choice that I absolutely respect, don’t get me wrong), has not given a hard timeline for the publication of the next book, The Winds of Winter. So when I first finished A Dance With Dragons, the fifth and final published book, I felt the usual sense of loss from departing a fictional universe, only magnified in this instance by both the uncertainty of the next book’s publication date and the incomparable beauty, depth and detail of the world I was leaving.
Then I discovered that, in the nine years since the publication of A Dance With Dragons, Martin has been busy with more than just The Winds of Winter.
He’s worked with a cartographer to produce the 12 huge, high-quality maps of various parts of Planetos that comprise The Lands of Ice and Fire (2012). He’s written a series of novellas, collected into the 350-page A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015). He’s published an entire 300-page in-world (meaning it’s written as if by an actual Westerosi scholar) textbook of the history and cultural anthropology of Planetos, The World of Ice and Fire (2014). And, in 2018, he published Fire & Blood - a seven-hundred-page in-world history of the Targaryens, the royal dynasty of dragonriders who ruled Westeros for 280 years prior - yes, I’m serious - prior to the events of A Song of Ice and Fire.
The last Targaryen king was toppled by a rebellion (Robert’s Rebellion) that took place sixteen years before the first page of A Game of Thrones.
To the normal human unacquainted with ASOIAF, that an entire work equal in length to a book in the main series would be devoted to developing that series' history probably seems crazy. It seemed crazy to me when I first found out about it. But since then, especially after reading (and reviewing) The World of Ice and Fire, I’ve come to appreciate the ridiculous extent to which Martin has developed the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire.
It’s provided fans like me an opportunity to dive ever deeper into the story and the world, and to achieve levels of nerddom made possible only by the extraordinary volume and depth of content Martin has created for this universe. It’s made the world that’s home to the story we love so much become so much more real, and in doing so it’s somehow stopped that feeling of loss that comes from a story unfinished or characters left behind. Because Westeros is so real to me that it never stops existing, even when there’s no story actively happening in it.
It’s almost analogous to the way that learning about the history of the United States doesn’t give me a sense of loss, because I’m still living in the country where that history happened. After only having finished The World of Ice and Fire, I could already name the seventeen Targaryen kings (which include five different Aegons and two each of kings named Aerys, Jaehaerys, Daeron and Viserys) and describe their reigns more easily than I could the administrations of the first seventeen American presidents. And I could name all of their wives and kids, something I definitely could not do for our presidents. I could tell you more about the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, probably, than any seven of the United States.
(Note: I take my American history seriously and have busts of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton on my desk, so those comparisons do mean something…)
(Note Note: Perhaps fittingly, I also have miniatures of Tyrion Lannister, Brandon Stark and the Iron Throne on my desk. The analogy does not stop.)
In short, it would be an understatement to say that by the time I first opened Fire & Blood, I was in love with A Song of Ice and Fire and its world. So in love that Fire & Blood could have been the driest, most abstruse text I’d ever read, and I would have loved it.
It wasn’t.
For 706 pages (713, if you count the royal lineage and family tree included at the end), Martin delivers the most riveting work of history I've ever experienced. Fire & Blood is at enough of a distance to span 163 years (an exact number, since the universe of ice and fire has a dating system based on the Targaryen conquest of Westeros - a system that, conveniently, uses the prefixes BC and AC) and seven kings, while also zoomed in enough to give us the play-by-play action of the conquests, civil wars, and political scheming (and also plotting) of the most well-developed, complex and fascinating dynasty in all of fiction.
The World of Ice and Fire already includes an 80-page history of the entire Targaryen dynasty, so it’s not like any of the ultimate outcomes in Fire & Blood are a surprise. The joy comes instead from Martin’s beautiful prose and the rich details and nuance he furnishes upon each episode in this history. We see kings, queens, lords, ladies, smallfolk (Martin’s name for the common people) and dragons, developed not as old names in a dusty book but as living, breathing characters in the play of the past. Their virtues, victories, follies and foibles are as enthralling as the book’s dragon fights, duels, rebellions and assassinations.
Not only is the work in itself a masterpiece, and a reflection of the brilliance and richness of Martin’s constructed history, it also adds countless additional layers of meaning to A Song of Ice and Fire - a story already tied into knots with countless subtle connections, foreshadowing, and symbolism. Martin loves to make his story parallel not only real history (a significant inspiration for ASOIAF is England’s Wars of the Roses), but the history within the world of ice and fire. The book’s historical narrative, especially in relation to the Dance of the Dragons (a period of civil war between two rival branches of House Targaryen both claiming the throne), provides tons of material to adds to the complexities of events over a hundred years later in the main series.
In short, Fire & Blood is a gripping narrative work and a testament to the potential of history to be thrilling, cool, and relevant long after its time. I highly recommend it to any and all fans of ASOIAF.
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