Free Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago by Unknown
Authors: Unknown
decades of discussion, it’s inevitable some fans will have guessed those answers already, but for those who have, it’s a tribute to the skill with which the author assembled those mysteries and seeded clues to their resolutions in the story.
It’s unlikely that all the mysteries will be solved, however. Larger questions about the nature of magic and religion in the world will surely remain, and rightfully so. Westeros itself is a place built upon unreliable time and fractured history, so for the series to end with mysteries still shrouding the landscape would only be fitting.
ADAM WHITEHEAD is a British blogger resident in Britain’s oldest town and ancient Roman capital, Colchester. He is the founder of the Wertzone blog and the Game of Thrones wiki. He has also served as a moderator on the Westeros.org website since 2005. He was nominated for the inaugural SFX SF Blogger of the Year Award in 2011, for his work on the Wertzone.
GARY WESTFAHL
BACK TO THE EGG
The Prequels to A Song of Ice and Fire
AS ANYONE WHO EXAMINES the results can attest, a multi-volume fantasy epic requires an enormous amount of writing, and one might imagine that authors in the midst of such projects would focus their undivided attention on completing their tasks. Instead, they are often diverted into writing prequels, stories taking place before the original works begin, which may add to the depth and complexity of authors’ creations but do nothing to advance the series toward the conclusion that readers are eagerly anticipating.
To be sure, the phenomenon is not limited to fantasy: in the field of science fiction, Isaac Asimov wrote his last two Foundation novels about Hari Seldon, the psychohistorian whose life predated the original trilogy, and the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s final Future History novel was the mother of the series’ central character, Lazarus Long. But fantasy writers seem especially prone to looking backward into their epics’ prehistory: among other examples, before and after finishing The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), J.R.R. Tolkien famously kept working on a never-completed chronicle of the events in Middle-earth that occurred long before his trilogy, assembled after his death by Christopher Tolkien as The Silmarillion (1977) and other works; David and Leigh Eddings wrote two prequels to their series that started with Pawn of Prophecy (1982); Terry Brooks has written several prequels to his original trilogy that began with The Sword of Shannara (1977); Robert Jordan interrupted his Wheel of Time series to produce a prequel novella, “New Spring” (1998), later expanded into a novel (2004), and intended to write other prequels before his death. And today, while writing his series A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin has paused three times to produce novellas featuring the characters of Dunk and Egg, who lived a hundred years before the epic began, and has announced plans to write a fourth novella, assemble the existing prequels as a novel, and write additional stories about the pair. Yet readers of the series, who waited five years for its fourth installment and six years for its fifth, might well prefer that Martin focus exclusively on completing the epic’s final two novels, instead of working on side projects.
Of course, it is hard to enter the minds of writers to determine precisely why they might write prequels. We know that Jordan and Martin were prodded to write their first prequels by Robert Silverberg, who solicited original novellas set in famous authors’ fantasy worlds for his anthology Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy (1998), and that Martin’s second prequel was written for Silverberg’s successor volume, Legends II: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy (2004). Both writers could have fulfilled Silverberg’s assignment with stories occurring in the present or future of their worlds but chose instead to
It’s unlikely that all the mysteries will be solved, however. Larger questions about the nature of magic and religion in the world will surely remain, and rightfully so. Westeros itself is a place built upon unreliable time and fractured history, so for the series to end with mysteries still shrouding the landscape would only be fitting.
ADAM WHITEHEAD is a British blogger resident in Britain’s oldest town and ancient Roman capital, Colchester. He is the founder of the Wertzone blog and the Game of Thrones wiki. He has also served as a moderator on the Westeros.org website since 2005. He was nominated for the inaugural SFX SF Blogger of the Year Award in 2011, for his work on the Wertzone.
GARY WESTFAHL
BACK TO THE EGG
The Prequels to A Song of Ice and Fire
AS ANYONE WHO EXAMINES the results can attest, a multi-volume fantasy epic requires an enormous amount of writing, and one might imagine that authors in the midst of such projects would focus their undivided attention on completing their tasks. Instead, they are often diverted into writing prequels, stories taking place before the original works begin, which may add to the depth and complexity of authors’ creations but do nothing to advance the series toward the conclusion that readers are eagerly anticipating.
To be sure, the phenomenon is not limited to fantasy: in the field of science fiction, Isaac Asimov wrote his last two Foundation novels about Hari Seldon, the psychohistorian whose life predated the original trilogy, and the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s final Future History novel was the mother of the series’ central character, Lazarus Long. But fantasy writers seem especially prone to looking backward into their epics’ prehistory: among other examples, before and after finishing The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), J.R.R. Tolkien famously kept working on a never-completed chronicle of the events in Middle-earth that occurred long before his trilogy, assembled after his death by Christopher Tolkien as The Silmarillion (1977) and other works; David and Leigh Eddings wrote two prequels to their series that started with Pawn of Prophecy (1982); Terry Brooks has written several prequels to his original trilogy that began with The Sword of Shannara (1977); Robert Jordan interrupted his Wheel of Time series to produce a prequel novella, “New Spring” (1998), later expanded into a novel (2004), and intended to write other prequels before his death. And today, while writing his series A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin has paused three times to produce novellas featuring the characters of Dunk and Egg, who lived a hundred years before the epic began, and has announced plans to write a fourth novella, assemble the existing prequels as a novel, and write additional stories about the pair. Yet readers of the series, who waited five years for its fourth installment and six years for its fifth, might well prefer that Martin focus exclusively on completing the epic’s final two novels, instead of working on side projects.
Of course, it is hard to enter the minds of writers to determine precisely why they might write prequels. We know that Jordan and Martin were prodded to write their first prequels by Robert Silverberg, who solicited original novellas set in famous authors’ fantasy worlds for his anthology Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy (1998), and that Martin’s second prequel was written for Silverberg’s successor volume, Legends II: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy (2004). Both writers could have fulfilled Silverberg’s assignment with stories occurring in the present or future of their worlds but chose instead to
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