game of thrones book review ny times

The New York Times

Artsbeat | george r.r. martin on ‘game of thrones’ and sexual violence, george r.r. martin on ‘game of thrones’ and sexual violence.

The fantasy series “Game of Thrones” has set off a wide-ranging debate about rape , and whether this popular franchise — which includes  best-selling novels, a hit HBO television adaptation, a line of comic books and more — trivializes sexual violence with its frequent and often graphic depictions.

George R. R. Martin , whose “Song of Ice and Fire” novels are the foundation of the “Game of Thrones” series, answered email questions from The New York Times about why his books contain scenes of sexual brutality, and responded to some of the criticism that these moments have elicited. These are his responses in their entirety.

Why have you included incidents of rape or sexual violence in your “Song of Ice and Fire” novels? What larger themes are you trying to bring out with these scenes?

An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day. To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.

Some critics of the books have said that even if such scenes are meant to illustrate that the world of Westeros is often a dark and depraved place, there is an overreliance on these moments over the course of the novels, and at a certain point they are no longer shocking and become titillating. How do you respond to this criticism?

I have to take issue with the notion that Westeros is a “dark and depraved place.” It’s not the Disneyland Middle Ages, no, and that was quite deliberate … but it is no darker nor more depraved than our own world. History is written in blood. The atrocities in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” sexual and otherwise, pale in comparison to what can be found in any good history book.

As for the criticism that some of the scenes of sexual violence are titillating, to me that says more about these critics than about my books. Maybe they found certain scenes titillating. Most of my readers, I suspect, read them as intended.

I will say that my philosophy as a writer, since the very start of my career, has been one of “show, don’t tell.” Whatever might be happening in my books, I try to put the reader into the middle of it, rather than summarizing the action. That requires vivid sensory detail. I don’t want distance, I want to put you there. When the scene in question is a sex scene, some readers find that intensely uncomfortable… and that’s ten times as true for scenes of sexual violence.

But that is as it should be. Certain scenes are meant to be uncomfortable, disturbing, hard to read.

As your novels have been adapted for TV, comic books and other visual media, do you think these scenes of sexual violence that you described in oblique and indirect ways are becoming more explicit and more shocking? Is that a potential problem?

The graphic novels and television programs are in the hands of others, who make their own artistic choices as to what sort of approach will work best in their respective mediums.

What's Next

About the Book

A Game of Thrones

By george r. r. martin.

From an intricately well-streamlined story to realistically-depicted characters, great detail in settings, excellent description of events, and well-crafted dialogues, ‘A Game of Thrones’ is undoubtedly one of the best stories in the fantasy genre.

Written by Joshua Ehiosun

C2 certified writer.

As of April 2019, A Song of Ice and Fire has sold 90 million copies worldwide. It exists in more than 45 languages. George R. R. Martin’s epic tale of family, war, history, dragons , and blood has become an inspiration to upcoming writers and an undeniable source of entertainment to readers.

‘ A Game of Thrones ’  became popular because of its story. Its intense attention to detail in an extensive universe made it easy to follow the characters on their journey of identity, honor, and sacrifice. 

George R. R. Martin introduces the reader to an abstract concept, the White Walkers. The introduction of the monsters in the prologue creates a feeling of intensity and looming danger. The story begins, and Martin puts the reader on a pedestal where they watch as the primary characters try to overcome their problems.

The first character to face a problem is Ned Stark. As the lord of Winterfell , he receives a letter that puts him in a dilemma. He learns the king, Robert Baratheon , is coming to visit and learns of the death of his dear friend, Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King . Ned’s dilemma grows as Robert asks him to become the new Hand of the King . Though he realizes the gravity of the position offered to him, he agrees to become the Hand of the King, a decision that changes his life forever.

The story’s introduction of more than one conflict into Ned’s life hooks readers as they want to know what happens next. When Ned follows Robert to King’s Landing , he discovers that the world of politics does not respect honor. However, he decides not to adapt; this leads to his death.

When Ned dies, the reader enters an uncomfortable position where they realize that Martin’s universe has no pity for its heroes and does not follow the logic of moral values.

The story of ‘ A Game of Thrones ‘ puts other primary characters in dilemmas they do not wriggle out of easily. Jon Snow joined the Night’s Watch to become a warrior with an identity. However, he realizes that his oath has put him in a position where he can not help any of his family. The dilemma forces him to abandon everyone he once loved.

Daenerys, on the other hand, was a young girl of 13 thrown into the world of pain, tears, and suffering. At the young age of 13, her brother gifts her like a piece of jewelry, and even though she rises above the first hurdle, her life comes crashing down as everything she loves, her husband, her unborn child, and the people she feels attached to leave her. She becomes a shadow of happiness and realizes that the world does not revolve around kindness. 

Sansa, a lovely and elegant girl, believed that the world is a place where knights fought dragons and defeated the bad guys. However, she realizes that the world is cruel and dark and it does not care for lords, knights, and even kings. Tyrion, the dwarf son of Tywin Lannister , gets placed in a dilemma that puts his head on the line. However, the story shows how he craftily wriggles out of the dangerous situation. It also intentionally shatters the dream of its characters and forces them to admit to reality.

The intentional gradual introduction of dilemmas into the characters’ lives makes the story realistic in a way that makes the reader reflect on the rules of morality, honor, and love. The reader gets forced to change their perception regarding fantasy as the story makes them admit the reality of the consequences of actions and choices made by characters.

‘A Game of Thrones’  uses an extensive list of characters to propel its story forward. The use of limited prescience according to the characters’ perceptions makes the story transcend as the characters grow. It puts its characters in dilemmas that make them choose between morality and survival; this adds an overwhelming sense of realism to the consequences of the actions taken by the characters.

For primary characters like Ned, Bran, Sansa, Arya, Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, and Catelyn, the presence of conflict forces them to change their perception of the world. Ned was an honorable man who believed in family and friendship. However, he learns that honor sends a man to an untimely grave when he does not adapt to a society of corruption. 

Bran’s accident forces him to realize he will never be a knight , no matter how hard he tries. He faces reality and has to start thinking about how the loss of his legs will affect his future. Sansa, a naïve girl who believes in elegance, comes to grips with reality after watching her father lose his head. Jon, a bastard son, realizes that his insatiable desire to get his identity cut him off from his family.

Jon learns that because he decided to join the Night’s Watch, he can no longer help his brother in the war against the Lannisters. Daenerys had to admit that the world never cared for her. After losing everything in the blink of an eye, she faces the harsh truth that life throws darts of reality and forces one to reevaluate themselves. 

Another crucial aspect of characterization in the story is the value of minor characters.  ‘A Game of Thrones’  features over 50 valuable minor characters. The intricate design of each minor character adds depth to the overall story as the characters help propel the story while assisting the primary characters through motivation and antagonization. Minor characters like Mirri Maz Duur , Syrio Forel , Bronn , and Sandor Clegane impact the primary characters’ lives as their actions change their perception of life.

‘A Game of Thrones’  uses excellently crafted dialogues to push its plot forward and give its reader a better understanding of Martin’s fantasy world. The use of dialogue to describe characters, explain concepts of morality, and narrate the history and how it affected the present world of Westeros makes it a pillar of the story. With each dialogue, Martin emulates the voice and being of the characters when they converse with others by showing their faults, aspirations, and thoughts on morality, fairness, and justice. 

Martin’s unique vocabulary makes the dialogue resonate with an anciently historical tone; this makes the novel addictive as the readers get dragged into the conversations between characters and choose if each interaction has real-world value. When Tyrion meets Jon Snow, he gives him a piece of advice that stems from his experience with life. Tyrion tells Jon that a dwarf has little value in the world. He makes Jon realize that reality treats everyone differently and is never fair.

Writing Style and Conclusion

‘A Game of Thrones’  employs a limited third-person perspective to lure the reader into its world. George R. R. Martin’s use of limited prescience adds the element of uncertainty to the story as the reader gets put through a roller-coaster of events that goes against the heroes and favors the antagonists. Though it sometimes helps the protagonists, they get forced to experience the overwhelming burden of failure, regret, and pain.

In its conclusion,  ‘A Game of Thrones’  ends on a cliffhanger. The story’s conclusion makes it one of the best novel endings ever because it makes the protagonists reevaluate their stance on morality and sets a tone of anticipation for the next story.

Is A Game of Thrones a good story?

‘A Game of Thrones’  is an incredible story. The characters are realistic, and the dialogues are intricately influential on the plot. The presence of consequences with caliber makes it an intriguing read as it puts one on a rollercoaster of emotions and action.

Is A Game of Thrones better than Foundation ?

While  ‘A Game of Thrones’  tells a story of knights, kings, and dragons,   ‘Foundation’   tells a story of a race to save humanity from collapse. The former uses many characters to propel its story, while the latter uses fewer characters.

What are the similarities between GOT and the novel?

Game of Thrones  is closely similar to the novel. Its plot line follows the story as many events, like Ned Stark getting beheaded and Daenerys getting three dragons occur in the show.

A Game of Thrones Review: Winter is Coming

Book Title: A Game of Thrones

Book Description: 'A Game of Thrones' by George R. R. Martin is a complex tale of power, corruption, and dragons.

Book Author: George R. R. Martin

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Bantam Books

Date published: August 1, 1996

Illustrator: Jeffrey Jones

ISBN: 978-0-553-10357-8

Number Of Pages: 694

• Lasting Effect on Reader

‘ A Game of Thrones ‘ tells the story of many people on the continents of Essos and Westeros. It follows their lives’ journey as they discover the secrets of a world filled with corruption, power, and dragons.

• The characters are well developed
• The story is interesting
• The ending is remarkable
• The dialogues are intricately soothing
• The novel is lengthy
• It may be hard to keep track of the characters as they are many

About Joshua Ehiosun

Joshua is an undying lover of literary works. With a keen sense of humor and passion for coining vague ideas into state-of-the-art worded content, he ensures he puts everything he's got into making his work stand out. With his expertise in writing, Joshua works to scrutinize pieces of literature.

Cite This Page

Ehiosun, Joshua " A Game of Thrones Review ⭐ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/george-r-r-martin/a-game-of-thrones/review/ . Accessed 23 March 2024.

The Game of Thrones section of Book Analysis analyzes and explores the Game of Thrones series. The content on Book Analysis was created by Game of Thrones fans, with the aim of providing a thorough in-depth analysis and commentary to complement and provide an additional perspective to the incredible world George R.R. Martin created in his books.

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14 Biggest Changes 'Game of Thrones' Made From the Books

A great many things differed between 'Game of Thrones' and the book series that inspired HBO's flagship series.

Over a decade since its debut, HBO's Game of Thrones remains one of television's most groundbreaking series. Westeros's cultural footprint can't be overstated, criticisms of the series finale notwithstanding, the Targaryen-centric prequel series House of the Dragon did numbers for the streaming cable giant and returns for its second season in the June 2024. Most fans know Game of Thrones is based on author George R. R. Martin's epic high fantasy book series A Song of Ice and Fire , which currently consists of five books ( Martin promises two more ...fans hang suspended in ever-waiting limbo). As with any book-to-screen adaptation, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss made many changes to Martin's text. Some enhanced certain scenarios , streamlined events for a visual medium, or were just befuddling . Here are some of the biggest fundamental differences between A Song of Ice and Fire and its HBO counterpart.

Game Of Thrones

Nine noble families fight for control over the lands of Westeros while an ancient enemy returns after being dormant for millennia.

Catelyn Stark Lives — Sort Of

Viewers who endured the emotionally calamitous Red Wedding know it marks the blood-soaked end of both Robb Stark ( Richard Madden ) and his mother Catelyn ( Michelle Fairley ). Although Robb stays quite dead in the books, a rebel group called the Brotherhood Without Banners retrieves Catelyn's corpse from a river and brings her back to life — in a way. Character resurrection is rare in Martin's universe and always comes at a high cost.

For Catelyn, her half-decayed body reflects her mutated spirit. She becomes a revenge-consumed figure unconsciously reminiscent of her daughter Arya ( Maisie Williams ), devoid of empathy and driven to exact justice against those responsible for her family's suffering. A mother always motivated by her love for her children, that's all that remains of Catelyn , and it's a corrupted instinct. The merciless, silent woman (thanks to her slit throat) renames herself Lady Stoneheart .

Robb Stark Didn't Marry for Love

Martin's a great lover and an even greater architect of dramatic irony. Few examples are more wrenching than the cause of book Robb's demise. Instead of having a passionate affair with healer Talisa Maegyr ( Oona Chaplin ), Martin's Robb falls into bed with Jeyne Westerling, a lord's daughter, after she comforts him when he learns of Bran and Rickon's supposed deaths. Unlike other Westerosi men, Robb refuses to leave the girl with a sullied virtue and a potential bastard. He feels honor-bound to marry her, displaying the same streak of goodness that doomed the father ( Sean Bean ) he swore to avenge. A forbidden romance plays well on television, but in doing so, Robb becomes selfish rather than selfless and his story loses the cyclical irony tying Robb and Ned's fates together .

The Entire Dorne Plotline

Game of Thrones translated Pedro Pascal's Oberyn Martell nigh-flawlessly , but the purpose and motivations of Dorne within the larger A Song of Ice and Fire universe were lost along the way . For one, the showrunners removed a point-of-view character: Arianne Martell, the daughter of Prince Doran ( Alexander Siddig ). She's the undisputed heir to Dorne, brilliantly intelligent, politically savvy, and beautiful, using the latter to her advantage while she schemes to place Myrcella Baratheon on the Iron Throne. The eldest three Sand Snakes, meanwhile, are dignified warriors with brilliant intellects much like their fiery father, while Ellaria Sand ( Indira Varma ) begs everyone to break the cycle of revenge and not take retaliatory action for Oberyn's death. Her pleas are in vain; Doran involves Arianne in his long-game plans to claim vengeance for his sister Elia as much as Oberyn.

Arya and Tywin at Harrenhal

You just don't waste Charles Dance . Calling this HBO's best addition may be hyperbole, but placing Tywin at Harrenhal alongside Arya when he wasn't present in the books doesn't affect any outcomes. The scenes between the two are some of the most engaging and satisfying of the series , as they allow breathing room and insight into two radically different yet similarly ruthless people.

Aging Up the Cast

This primarily affects the Stark children, who range from three years old to fifteen in book one; Ned and Catelyn are thirty-somethings . It makes sense to streamline production with older child actors, and after eight seasons and eleven years, it's impossible to imagine different actors playing the adults. (I mean, Peter Dinklage . Come on.) However, this change impacts enough to matter . Part of Ned and Catelyn's tragedy is their youth, and the same goes for Bran ( Isaac Hempstead Wright ), Arya, and Sansa ( Sophie Turner ) in particular; their stories are more horrifying for their tender age. Robb, meanwhile, relies upon Catelyn's strategic mind because he lacks expertise in war. He's a deconstruction of the King Arthur mythos: a frightened boy thrust into leadership far too young, and the weight of a crown crushes him.

Sansa and Ramsay's Marriage

Perhaps the most contentious alteration is the fate of Sansa at the hands of the unfathomably sadistic Ramsay Bolton ( Iwan Rheon ). Ramsey does marry in the books, but his wife is Sansa's former friend Jeyne Poole , who the Boltons pass off as Arya as part of a political power move. As of A Dance with Dragons, Sansa's still in the Eyrie with Littlefinger ( Aidan Gillen ) and her journey to independence is gaining full steam. While the brutality of Sansa's wedding night has defenders, it's yet another example of the show's oft-criticized track record of exploiting women via sexualized violence. Sansa is a survivor, but she didn't require additional abuse to grow stronger .

Daenerys’s Visions in the House of the Undying

Dany's ( Emilia Clarke ) dragons are never captured, nor does the Stormborn girlboss her way through a "dracarys." In A Storm of Swords, she visits the House of the Undying in search of knowledge. While both depictions of this moment include Dany seeing visions, the book features a multitude of imagery foreshadowing events like the Red Wedding and revealing past tragedies, i.e., her brother Rhaegar's death. The most important is the simple sight of a sweet-smelling blue flower growing out of ice . Fans believe this foreshadows Jon Snow's ( Kit Harrington ) Targaryen heritage and the two's destined meeting as the physical manifestations of the Song of Ice and Fire. Hopefully, that partnership plays out differently in the final two ASOIAF novels. After all, despite outgrowing her naivety and hardening herself accordingly, book Dany retains her innate kindness toward others .

Adding the Night King

In Martin's universe, the Others (aka the White Walkers) lack a leader . A figurehead providing concentrated narrative menace isn't in error , and a figure called the Night's King — a human Lord Commander of the Night's Watch seduced by a female Other — did exist. Still, thousands of Others united in their goal to destroy human lives without an overseer is just as chilling.

Jaime's Redemption Arc (or Lack Thereof)

As with many other characters, Jaime Lannister's ( Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ) fate sits unresolved . But returning to Cersei's side seems doubtful at this point. Once Jaime learns his sister's been sleeping with their cousin Lancel, it severs the last tie between them. Cersei writes Jaime a letter begging him to defend her in a trial by combat — a letter Jaime reads and then discards into the fire . The Kingslayer has much to redeem himself for and countless obstacles in his path, but after actively choosing to discard Cersei's contaminating influence, the chance at least exists.

All the Stark Children are Skinchangers

If you thought that controlling an animal's mind was exclusive to Bran, well, that's just Bran hogging the attention per usual. All the Stark children have either skinchanged into their direwolves or had dreams of doing so. It's an interesting plot point that's a pity to lose; in general, the stronger high fantasy elements integral to Martin's world never made it onto television.

Wait, There's Another Targaryen?

During Tyrion's misadventures in A Dance with Dragons, he happens upon a sellsword dubbed Griff and his son, Young Griff. In actuality, the boy claims to be Aegon Targaryen , the son of Rhaegar, whom the Mountain supposedly murdered as an infant. If Aegon truly is alive, that challenges Daenerys' succession. "Griff" is Jon Connington, a man who adored Rhaegar and intends to protect Aegon with his life. Connington also has grayscale, a plot point Game of Thrones passed onto Jorah Mormont ( Iain Glen ) instead. And if anyone were to rampage across King's Landing after hearing the toiling bells, it's Connington. He survived the Battle of the Bells, one of Robert Baratheon's ( Mark Addy ) first military successes during his Rebellion against the Targaryens , and his failure to win the city for King Aerys haunts him.

Everything About Euron Greyjoy

The King of the Iron Islands couldn't resemble his television persona ( Pilou Asbæk ) less if he tried . Physically, Euron rocks a 1970s rock band look with messy, shoulder-length black hair and an eyepatch covering his left eye. Emotionally, Euron's sadistic enough to give Ramsay a run for his money. He tortures his family psychologically for entertainment and was exiled for sexually assaulting his sister-in-law. Euron intends to conquer Westeros by controlling Daenerys's dragons with an ancient Valyrian dragon horn capable of binding the independent creatures to his will. Euron's uncanny ability to manipulate others is unparalleled and just as dangerous as his hold over the Ironborn fleet. Throw in some stolen dragons, and Euron's a release-the-Kraken-sized threat to Starks, Lannisters, and Daenerys alike.

Tyrion, Tysha, and Jaime

Before Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) goes on the run, Jaime confesses the truth about Tyrion's beloved wife, Tysha. For years, Tyrion believed that Tysha was a sex worker who lied to Tyrion about her humble background and her love for him; Jaime reveals this was a lie spread by Tywin to punish Tyrion for his unsanctioned marriage. Not only is this the inciting incident for Tyrion to kill his father , but the revelation shatters the brothers' mutual affection; Tyrion strikes Jaime and spits every painful word he can concoct. Without any lingering love for his siblings, Tyrion wouldn't have dragged his feet over Daenerys's invasion of King's Landing. And that would have made for a remarkably different outcome the world over .

Shae Is a More Well-Rounded Character

While the major plot points remain unchanged, Shae's (Sibel Kekilli) character is nearly unrecognizable. In both the books and the show, he falls for Shae, a sex worker following their camp. Taking her to Kings Landing against Tywin's orders, Tyrion continues spending time with her, but the two versions become drastically different . Though both have Shae serving as a maid to Sansa after her marriage to Tyrion, the show develops a friendship between the two women, with Shae growing protective of the younger girl. In the books, she remains indifferent towards her lover's wife. The relationship between Shae and Sansa makes Shae a more important character, as Sansa has so few friends in King's Landing, and it shows a different side of Shae as she displays compassion for the unfortunate Sansa Stark. Another major difference in Shae is her relationship with Tyrion. While the books make it clear that she never loved him, the show creates a tragic romance between them, which Martin admits he likes better . While Shae still betrays Tyrion, and Tyrion still kills her, the dynamic is wholly different. — Kendall Myers

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Game of Thrones

Dreamsongs, Volume 1

A Song of Ice and Fire

A Game of Thrones

A Clash of Kings

A Storm of Swords

A Feast for Crows

A Dance with Dragons

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s Game of Thrones

About halfway through A Clash of Kings , the second installment of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire , a refugee princess—she is fourteen years old but already a widow, has silver hair and purple eyes, and happens to be part dragon—stands exhausted before the walls of a fabulous, vaguely Babylonian citadel called Qarth. The last surviving scion of the deposed ruling family of a faraway land called Westeros, she has led a ragtag band of followers through the desert in the hopes of finding shelter here—and, ultimately, of obtaining military and financial support for her plan to recapture the Westerosi throne. Her first glimpse of Qarth leaves her bemused:

Three thick walls encircled Qarth, elaborately carved. The outer was red sandstone, thirty feet high and decorated with animals: snakes slithering, kites flying, fish swimming, intermingled with wolves of the red waste and striped zorses and monstrous elephants. The middle wall, forty feet high, was grey granite alive with scenes of war: the clash of sword and shield and spear, arrows in flight, heroes at battle and babes being butchered, pyres of the dead. The innermost wall was fifty feet of black marble, with carvings that made Dany blush until she told herself that she was being a fool. She was no maid; if she could look on the grey wall’s scenes of slaughter, why should she avert her eyes from the sight of men and women giving pleasure to one another?

However difficult it may be for Daenerys (“Dany”) Targaryen to make sense of the exotic city and its people, anyone familiar with Martin’s slowly metastasizing epic—it began as a trilogy in 1996 and now runs to five volumes of a projected seven, each around a thousand pages long—will find it hard not to see in the Qartheen decor a sly reference to the series itself. What drives A Song of Ice and Fire is a war story: clearly inspired by the Wars of the Roses, the series traces the internecine power struggles among a group of aristocratic clans, each with its castle, lord, “sigil” or heraldic arms, and lineages, following the not entirely accidental death, in the first novel, of King Robert I of the Seven Kingdoms. Robert had seized the throne from Daenerys’s father at the end of a previous civil war, thereby ending the Targaryens’ three-century-long rule. The civil wars that follow Robert’s death will stretch from Westeros—whose culturally diverse regions, evoked by Martin in ingenious detail, form the Seven Kingdoms—across the Narrow Sea to the exotic East, where Dany Targaryen, as we know, plans to make her own power play.

These bloody struggles take place in a world whose culture is, on the whole, familiar-looking—Martin gives the civilization of the Seven Kingdoms a strong medieval flavor—but whose flora and fauna remind you why the novels are classified as “fantasy.” Westeros may have castles and drawbridges, knights, squires, and jousts, “sers” and ladies, and a capital city, King’s Landing, that looks and smells a lot like late-medieval London, but it also has giants, shape-shifters called “wargs,” blue-eyed walking dead known as “wights,” seasons that last for decades, red-faced “weirwood” trees that grow in sacred groves called “godswoods”—and, of course, dragons. At the end of the first novel, Daenerys emerges from a fire holding three newly hatched specimens that, you suspect, will greatly improve her chances of gaining the throne.

Against this wildly inventive natural (often supernatural) backdrop, the books’ characters engage in a good deal of unsentimental fornication that is not without a certain imaginative élan of its own. “In a cushioned alcove,” one not atypical scene begins, a drunken man “with a purple beard dandled a buxom young wench on his knee. He’d unlaced her bodice and was tilting his cup to pour a thin trickle of wine over her breasts so he might lap it off.” The pubescent Dany, as she herself acknowledges, is no innocent: deprived of the attentions of her dead husband, she now and then accepts the ministrations of a teenaged handmaiden. Why avert her eyes, indeed?

War, fantasy, sex: averting one’s eyes from at least two of these became a hot issue when Game of Thrones , the hit HBO television adaptation of Martin’s books, began airing in April 2011. From the start, the show’s graphic representations of violence (you lose count pretty early on of the times blood pumps out of gaping throat wounds) and of sexuality—of female nudity in particular—have led many critics and viewers to dismiss the series as “boy fiction.” (Thus the New York Times critic; the climactic section of a shrewder, more appreciative review by the New Yorker critic began, “Then, of course, there are the whores.”) 1

And yet the show has been a tremendous hit. This is, in part, a testament to the way in which fantasy entertainment—fiction, television, movies, games—has moved ever closer to the center of mass culture over the past couple of decades, as witness the immense success of the Lord of the Rings adaptations, the Harry Potter phenomenon, and the Hunger Games books and movies. What’s interesting is that the HBO Game of Thrones has attracted so many viewers who wouldn’t ordinarily think of themselves as people who enjoy the fantasy genre. This has a great deal to do with the complex satisfactions of Martin’s novels, whose plots, characterization, and overall tone the series reproduces with remarkable fidelity—and whose mission is, if anything, to question and reformulate certain clichés of the fantasy/adventure genre about gender and power.

At first glance, A Song of Ice and Fire can look like a testosterone-fueled swashbuckler. The first novel (and the first season of the TV show; until recently, the show was tracking Martin’s books at a pace of roughly one book per season) introduces the ambitious patriarchs who were on the winning side of “the War of the Usurper”—the rebellion that had rent Westeros asunder and ended with the murder of the mad, bad King Aerys Targaryen, young Dany’s father—and who, along with their clans and feudal allies, will struggle for power once again.

The present king, Robert of House Baratheon, is Henry VIII–esque in temperament—he is always roaring at terrified squires and bedding buxom wenches—but Henry VII–like in his historical role. It was he who led the rebel forces against Mad King Aerys, whose other children and grandchildren Robert’s men brutally slaughtered after seizing the throne. Robert’s wife, Queen Cersei (pronounced “Circe,” like the sultry witch in the Odyssey ) belongs to House Lannister, a wealthy, golden-haired, black-souled clan who are the Boleyns to Robert’s Henry VIII: the patriarch, the coldblooded Tywin Lannister, endlessly schemes on behalf of his unruly children, nephews, and siblings by whatever means may be called for.

The royal marriage was, indeed, one of political convenience: the Lannisters supported Robert’s rebellion with money and arms, and Tywin aims to see his descendants on the throne. As the first novel unfolds we understand that the marriage has failed—not least because Cersei prefers her twin brother, the handsome knight Jaime, who is in fact the father of her three children. The most interesting member of the Lannister family—and by far the most interesting male character in the series—is the other brother, Tyrion, a hard-drinking, wisecracking dwarf whose outsider status gives him a soulfulness his relations lack. (The role is played with great verve by Peter Dinklage, one of many strong actors on the show.)

Staunchly loyal to Robert and just as staunchly wary of the evil Lannisters is Eddard “Ned” Stark of Winterfell, the king’s “Hand” or chief minister, a gruffly ethical northern lord who, along with his family—his wife Catelyn, their five children, and a bastard whom he has lovingly raised as his own—provides the violent goings-on with a strong emotional focus. After Robert dies during a hunting accident engineered by his wife’s relatives, Ned finds himself locked in a struggle for the regency with the Lannisters, who have placed Cersei’s eldest son, Joffrey, a Caligula-like teenaged sadist, on the throne. But because the high-minded Ned is insufficiently ruthless, his plan backfires, with fatal results for himself and the Stark family. One of the pleasures of Martin’s series is the grimly unsentimental, rather Tacitean view it takes of the nature and uses of power at court. Often, the good guys here do not win.

Indeed, the shocking climax of the first book—Joffrey’s surprise execution of Ned, who up to this point you’d figured was the protagonist—is a strong sign that Martin’s narrative arc is going to be far more surprising than you could have guessed. “When my characters are in danger,” the author said in an interview, “I want you to be afraid to turn the page…you need to show right from the beginning that you’re playing for keeps.” A sense that brutal, irreversible real-life consequences will follow from the characters’ actions—rare in serial novels and almost unheard of in television series, which of course often depend on the ongoing presence of popular characters (and actors) for their continued appeal—is part of the distinctive tone of Martin’s epic. I suspect that one reason Game of Thrones has seduced so many of my writer friends, people who have either no taste for fantasy or no interest in television, is precisely that its willingness to mete out harsh consequences, rather than dreaming up ways to keep its main characters alive for another season, feels more authentic, more “literary” than anything even the best series in this new golden age of television can provide.

After Ned’s death, the multiplying plotlines adhere, for the most part, to the various Starks. The widow Catelyn (splendidly played by Michelle Fairley), a complex character who oscillates between admirable strength and dangerous weakness, and her eldest son, Robb, lead a new civil war against the triumphant Lannisters. Her son Bran, crippled after being unceremoniously defenestrated by the corrupt Jaime Lannister, finds that he is gifted with second sight and has the ability to inhabit the body of a giant wolf; the beautiful young Sansa, once betrothed to Cersei’s son Joffrey, now finds herself a terrified political hostage in King’s Landing; and the plain but spirited Arya, a girl of nine when the story begins, is separated from the rest and starts on an unusual spiritual and emotional journey of her own.

And then there is Jon Snow, ostensibly Ned Stark’s bastard. (“Ostensibly,” because there are proliferating hints that he is the love child of two other significant characters, long dead.) The most sympathetic of the younger generation of male Starks, Jon is a spirited but troubled youth who, in the first novel, goes off to join something called the Night’s Watch. Informally known as “Crows,” this black-clad cohort, part monk and part warrior, vowed to celibacy and trained to arms, culled from the realm’s rich stores of bastards, criminals, and political exiles, man “the Wall,” a fabulous seven-hundred-foot-high edifice that runs across the entire northern border of Westeros. Clearly modeled on Hadrian’s Wall (much of Westeros’s topography reminds you of Great Britain’s), the Wall, one of Martin’s most striking creations, is meant to protect the realm against the giants, monsters, undead, and the unruly clan of “Wildlings” who inhabit the frozen region to the north—and who, when the action of A Song of Ice and Fire begins, have begun, terrifyingly, to move southward for the first time in thousands of years. The novels are strewn with ominous portents—not least, a red comet that illuminates the sky for much of the second novel—of an imminent, cataclysmic confrontation between the supernatural and natural worlds.

Peter Dinklage (center) as Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones

The Wall is one of the three geographical centers of the sprawling action, the other two being King’s Landing in the Italianate south, where the Lannisters endlessly machinate, and the exotic Eastern lands beyond the Narrow Sea, where Daenerys plots her comeback. (In the HBO series, shot mostly in Ireland and on Malta, each locale has its own color palette: cool blues and hard whites for the Wall, tawny soft-focus gold for King’s Landing, and saturated tropical hues for the East.)

Martin renders the Eastern cultures in particular with Herodotean gusto: the nomadic, Scythian-like, horse-worshiping Dothraki, to one of whose great warlords Daenerys is bartered when the saga begins (their unborn child is referred to as “the Stallion Who Mounts the World”); the quasi-Assyrian city-states of Qarth, Astapur, and Meereen, with their chattering merchants and unctuous slavers (and warlocks); the decadent port of Braavos, a cross between Switzerland and Venice, whose moneylenders finance the Westerosi wars, and where young Arya finds herself, at the end of Book 5, an acolyte in a temple of death.

But what keeps you riveted, in the end, are the characters and their all-too-familiar human dilemmas. Jon Snow on the frozen Wall, torn between family loyalty and duty to his vows; Dany, both his counterpart and his opposite, far away in the burning Eastern deserts, learning the art of statecraft even as she dreams of love; the vindictive Lannisters and fugitive Starks, conniving and being betrayed by their various “bannermen”: these people and many more suggest why Martin likes to paraphrase William Faulkner’s remark, in his Nobel speech, that the only great subject is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” (A question worth raising about Martin’s novels is how different they’d feel if you subtracted the dragons and witches and undead; my feeling is, not much.)

One of the few serious missteps that Martin has made in his grand project was, indeed, to abandon most of these characters and locales in the fourth novel, A Feast for Crows , introducing instead a group of new characters, cultures, and dynastic schemers. I read each of the first three novels in a few days, happily addicted; it took me a month to get through the fourth, because I simply didn’t care about these strangers. It will be interesting to see how the writers of HBO ’s Game of Thrones , which cannot afford to try the patience of its audience, handle this lapse.

It’s a point worth wondering about precisely because the TV series has followed the outlines of Martin’s action, and his various tangled subplots, with such fidelity. The very few deviations I noticed have no significant repercussions. Sometimes, the writers on the show have invented material that brings home Martin’s important themes in a pungently dramatic way. There’s an amusing scene in Season 2 when, in response to an unctuous minister’s smirking suggestion that “knowledge is power,” Cersei, now riding high as queen regent, suddenly orders her bodyguards to seize the courtier and cut his throat—and then, at the last moment, to release him unharmed. As the terrified man sags with relief, the queen looks at him and says, “ Power is power.” (The one-note, smirky performance of Lena Headey in this crucial role is a major weakness of the TV show; far worse is the tinny portrayal of Daenerys by Emilia Clarke, an untalented lightweight who accidentally succeeds in conveying the early Dany—the cowering virgin—but can’t come close to bringing across the character’s touching complexity, the girlishness and the ferocity combined.)

Inevitably, the TV series can’t reproduce, or must violently compress, much of the novels’ most interesting techniques and most entertaining material. A striking feature of the novels is that each chapter is narrated by a different character. This device—which the directors of the HBO adaptation do not attempt to reproduce cinematically—gives the sprawling goings-on a lively texture, and can have a Rashomon-like effect, since it often turns out that the perspective we have on a character or event is partial, or biased, or simply wrong. (One pleasure of reading the series is that you constantly have to revise your opinions and theories about the characters as the multiplex tale evolves.) This fragmentation in the storytelling nicely mirrors Martin’s larger theme: the way in which the appetite for, and the use and abuse of power, fragments societies and individuals; in a world ruled by might, who is “right”? People often talk about Tolkien as Martin’s model, but the deep, Christianizing sentimentality of the world-view expressed in Lord of the Rings is foreign to the Martin, who has, if anything, a tart Thucydidean appreciation for the way in which political corruption can breed narrative corruption, too.

So the suggestive textures of the way the novels tell their story is sandpapered away by the wholly conventional storytelling you get in the television adaptation. Also elided, of necessity, are the elaborate back-stories that give helpful context to certain plotlines, the biographies of complicated and interesting secondary characters who, in the screen adaptation, are reduced to little more than walk-ons. (The most regrettable instance of this is the treatment of the admirable “Onion Knight,” Davos Seaworth, the loyal Hand to one of the pretenders to the throne—a man whose rise to power came at the cost of four fingers, the bones of which he good-naturedly wears around his neck as a reminder of how dangerous it is to deal with the great and powerful.) Nor is there really a way to render, in a dramatization, Martin’s imaginative linguistic evocations of his invented cultures: the compound coinages that replace standard English (“sellsword” for “mercenary,” “holdfast” for “fort”), the ingeniously quasi-medieval diction and spellings of names, the perfumed language—the horses called destriers and palfreys, the gowns of vair and samite—that give you a strong sense of the concrete reality of this imagined world.

An omission on the part of the Game of Thrones writers that is less venial is the elision of a major theme: religion. From his earliest published work, Martin has shown an unusually strong interest in serious religious questions. His first Hugo Award–winning science fiction story, “A Song for Lya” (1974), is about two telepaths sent to a planet whose ostensibly primitive inhabitants have achieved a kind of religious transcendence unavailable to humans; in what may be his most famous single short story, the creepy “Sandkings” (1980, also a Hugo winner), a man plays god to a colony of insectoid worshipers who are more sapient than he credits, with gruesome results. (Both stories have now been collected in the two-volume set Dreamsongs .)

No wonder, then, that the action of A Song of Ice and Fire seems to be leading not only to a resolution of the dynastic question, but to a grand showdown among three major religions whose histories, theologies, and ritual practices Martin evokes in impressive detail. There is the easygoing polytheist pantheon of “the Seven,” the religion of the indolent South (complete with priests and priestesses called septons and septas , who worship at temples called septs ); the Druidic, tree-based animistic worship of the Northern clans, which we learn was the older religion superseded by the “southron” gods (“The trees will teach you. The trees remember.”); and the unforgiving, vaguely Semitic Eastern cult, now infiltrating Westeros, of “the one true god”—a fiery “lord of light” with the nicely Semitic name “R’hllor,” who insists on a furious moral absolutism, and who enjoys the occasional auto-da-fé. “If half of an onion is black with rot,” R’hllor’s terrifying priestess, Melisandre, tells Davos Seaworth, who has good-naturedly observed that most men are a mixture of good and evil, “it is a rotten onion. A man is good, or he is evil.”

These religious motifs are more than window dressing: there is a strong suggestion that the “fire” of Martin’s title for the entire series refers not only to Dany, with her fire-breathing pets, but to the fire-god R’hllor, and that the “ice” refers not only to Jon Snow but to the old northern gods who animate dead men; and hence that the climax to which the entire epic is moving is not only political but metaphysical.

It’s too bad then that, of all this, the writers on the series have focused only on Melisandre and her fiery deity—likely because she triggers so many plot points. I don’t think that the theological preoccupations of Martin’s novels—grittily realistic, for all the fantasy—raise them, in the end, to the level of, say, Lord of the Rings , whose grandly schematic clash of good and evil, nature and culture, homely tradition and industrialized progress gives it the high Aeschylean sheen of political parable, the enduring literary resonance of cultural myth. But the not inconsiderable appeal of A Song of Ice and Fire lies as much in its thematic ambitions as in its richly satisfying details, and the former ought to be a salient feature of any serious adaptation.

Martin’s medieval narrative, the distinctly Anglo-Saxon milieus alternating with exotic “oriental” locales, everywhere bears traces of the author’s deep affection for the rather old-fashioned boys’ adventure stories that, he has said, formed him as a writer—not least Walter Scott’s crusader romance Ivanhoe , but also Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company and Thomas B. Costain’s The Black Rose , stories in which European men have grand adventures when they wander into exotic, often Eastern cultures and climates. On his blog, Martin recommends these texts, along with a number of classic sci-fi and fantasy titles, to readers who ask what they should be reading while waiting for the next George R.R. Martin book.

Given those literary antecedents, it’s striking that a strong leitmotif of the series is pointed criticism by various characters of “chivalry,” of romantic stories about knights and fair maidens—of, you might say, “fantasy” itself. In the third and, perhaps, most violent novel, A Storm of Swords , Dany, whose ongoing political education leaves her with fewer and fewer illusions, ruefully acknowledges a childish yearning for stories “too simple and fanciful to be true history,” in which “all the heroes were tall and handsome, and you could tell the traitors by their shifty eyes.” It’s as if Martin is drawing a line between his work and an earlier, more naive phase of fantasy literature.

The purest expression of this disdain for naive “romance” is put in the mouth of the dwarf, Tyrion, who understands better than any other male character what it means to be on the outside—on the other side of the myth. After a battle, he declares that he is

done with fields of battle, thank you…. All that about the thunder of the drums, sunlight flashing on armor, magnificent destriers snorting and prancing? Well, the drums gave me headaches, the sunlight flashing on my armor cooked me up like a harvest day goose, and those magnificent destriers shit everywhere .

The juxtaposition of “magnificent” and “shit” is pointed: this is a mock-medieval epic that constantly asks us not to be fooled by romance, to see beyond the glitter to the gore, to the harsh reality that power leaves in its wake, whatever the bards may sing. There’s a marvelous moment in the second novel when a knight notices the sigil, or arms, of some legendary warriors above the door of a tavern. “They were the glory of their House,” the knight mournfully observes. “And now they are a sign above an inn.” Martin’s willingness to question the traditional allure of his own genre gives his epic an unusually complex and satisfying texture.

As it happens, the knight at the inn is a woman—a most unusual character. In fact, nowhere is the unexpected subversive energy of A Song of Ice and Fire more in evidence than in its treatment of its female characters—the element that has provoked the strongest controversy in discussions of the HBO adaptation. 2

Almost from the start, Martin weaves a bright feminist thread into his grand tapestry. It begins early on in the first book, when he introduces the two Stark daughters. The eldest, Sansa, is an auburn-haired beauty who loves reading courtly romances, does perfect needlework, and always dresses beautifully; in striking contrast to this conventional young woman is the “horsefaced” younger daughter, Arya, who hates petit point and would rather learn how to wield a sword. (Later on, she gets a sword that she sardonically names “Needle”: she too, as we will see, plays for keeps.) At one point early in the first novel Arya asks her father whether she can grow up to “be a king’s councilor and build castles”; he replies that she will “marry a king and rule his castle.” The canny girl viciously retorts, “No, that’s Sansa .”

The two girls represent two paths—one traditional, one revolutionary—that are available to Martin’s female characters, all of whom, at one point or another, are starkly confronted by proof of their inferior status in this culture. (In a moment from the second novel that the HBO adaptation is careful to replicate, Ned Stark’s widow Catelyn realizes that Robb doesn’t think his hostage sisters are worth negotiating for, although his murdered father would have been: they’re simply not worth what a man is.) Those who complained about the TV series’ graphic and “exploitive” use of women’s bodies are missing the godswood for the weirwood trees: whatever the prurient thrills they provide the audience, these demeaning scenes, like their counterparts in the novels, also function as a constant reminder of what the main female characters are escaping from . “I don’t want to have a dozen sons,” one assertive young princess tells a suitor, “I want to have adventures .”

All the female figures in Martin’s world can be plotted at various points on the spectrum between Sansa and Arya Stark. It’s significant that the older generation tend to be less successful (and more destructive) in their attempts at self-realization, while the younger women, like Arya and Daenerys, are able to embrace more fully the independence and power they grasp at. Cersei Lannister is a figure whose propensity to evil, we are meant to understand, results from her perpetually thwarted desire for independence, as is made clear in a remarkable speech she is given at the end of A Clash of Kings (reproduced faithfully in the TV series):

When we were little, Jaime and I were so much alike that even our lord father could not tell us apart. Sometimes as a lark we would dress in each other’s clothes and spend a whole day each as the other. Yet even so, when Jaime was given his first sword, there was none for me. “What do I get?” I remember asking. We were so much alike, I could never understand why they treated us so differently . Jaime learned to fight with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly Rock, while I was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly. Jaime’s lot was to be glory and power, while mine was birth and moonblood.

This is an arresting echo of the Greek notion that childbirth is for women what warfare is for men.

Cersei is a portrait of a tragic pre-feminist queen—someone out of Greek drama, a Clytemnestra-like figure who perpetrates evil because her idea of empowerment rises no higher than mimicking the worst in the men around her. (She ruefully remarks at one point that she “lacked the cock.”) By contrast, Dany Targaryen can be seen as a model of a new feminist heroine. Apart from the Starks, it is she who commands our attention from book to book, learning, growing, evolving into a real leader. We first see her as a timid bride, sold by her whiny brother Viserys, the Targaryen pretender, to a savage nomadic warlord whose men and horses the brother wants to secure for his own claim. But eventually Dany edges her brother aside, wins the respect of both the warlord and his macho captains, and grows into an impressive political canniness herself.

This evolution is pointed: whereas Viserys feels entitled to the throne, what wins Dany her power is her empathy, her fellow feeling for the oppressed: she, too, has been a refugee, an exile. As she makes her way across the Eastern lands at the head of an increasingly powerful army, she goes out of her way to free slaves and succor the sick, who acclaim her as their “mother.” She doesn’t seize power, she earns it. What’s interesting is that we’re told she can’t bear children: like Elizabeth I, she has substituted political for biological motherhood. Unlike the frustrated Cersei, Daenerys sees her femininity as a means, rather than an impediment, to power.

And so Martin’s saga goes to considerable lengths to create alternatives to the narratives of male growth, the boys’ Bildungsromane , that have, until relatively recently, been the mainstay of so many myths and so much fantasy literature. “Boy’s fiction”? If anything, it’s possible to see in characters like the feisty Arya an antecedent of the protagonists of such popular contemporary Young Adult series as The Hunger Games , in which the “heroes” are girls. Whatever climax it may be leading to, however successfully it realizes its literary ambitions, George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus is a remarkable feminist epic.

November 7, 2013

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Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

April 29, 2021 issue

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large at The New York Review and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard, is the author, most recently, of Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate . His translation of Homer’s Odyssey will be published next year. (July 2023)

See Ginia Bellafante, “A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms,” The New York Times , April 14, 2011, and Emily Nussbaum, “The Aristocrats,” The New Yorker , May 7, 2012.  ↩

Online comment has taken the form of articles and blogs with titles such as “Why Girls Hate Games of Thrones”; “Misogyny and Game of Thrones”; “7 Reasons Why Game of Thrones Is Not for Women”; “Stop Saying Women Don’t Like Game of Thrones Already”; “Why More Feminists Should Watch Game of Thrones”; etc.  ↩

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A GAME OF THRONES

From the a song of ice and fire series , vol. 1.

by George R.R. Martin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 1996

After a long silence ( Portraits of his Children , stories, 1987), the author of the cult novel  The Armageddon Rag (1983) returns with the first of a fantasy series entitled, insipidly enough, A Song of Ice and Fire. In the Seven Kingdoms, where the unpredictable seasons may last decades, three powerful families allied themselves in order to smash the ruling Targaryens and depose their Mad King, Aerys II. Robert Baratheon claimed the throne and took to wife Tywin Lannister's daughter, Cersei; Ned Stark returned north to gloomy Winterfell with its massive, ancient Wall farther to the north that keeps wildings and unspeakable creatures from invading. Some years later, Robert, now drunk and grossly fat, asks Ned to come south and help him govern; reluctantly, since he mistrusts the treacherous Lannisters, Ned complies. Honorable Ned soon finds himself caught up in a whirl of plots, espionage, whispers, and double-dealing and learns to his horror that the royal heir, Joffrey, isn't Robert's son at all but, rather, the product of an incestuous union between the Queen and her brother Jaime—who murdered the Mad King and earned the infamous nickname Kingslayer. Ned attempts to bargain with Cersei and steels himself to tell Robert—but too late. Swiftly the Lannisters murder the King, consign Ned to a dungeon, and prepare to seize the throne, opposed only by the remaining Starks and Baratheons. On the mainland, meanwhile, the brutal and stupid Viserys Targaryen sells his sister Dany to a barbarian horse-warrior in return for a promise of armies to help him reconquer the Seven Kingdoms. A vast, rich saga, with splendid characters and an intricate plot flawlessly articulated against a backdrop of real depth and texture. Still, after 672 dense pages, were you expecting a satisfying resolution? You won't get it: Be prepared for a lengthy series with an indefinitely deferred conclusion.

Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1996

ISBN: 0-553-10354-7

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Spectra/Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996

FANTASY | EPIC FANTASY

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THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE

by Samantha Shannon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 2019

A celebration of fantasy that melds modern ideology with classic tropes. More of these dragons, please.

After 1,000 years of peace, whispers that “the Nameless One will return” ignite the spark that sets the world order aflame.

No, the Nameless One is not a new nickname for Voldemort. Here, evil takes the shape of fire-breathing dragons—beasts that feed off chaos and imbalance—set on destroying humankind. The leader of these creatures, the Nameless One, has been trapped in the Abyss for ages after having been severely wounded by the sword Ascalon wielded by Galian Berethnet. These events brought about the current order: Virtudom, the kingdom set up by Berethnet, is a pious society that considers all dragons evil. In the East, dragons are worshiped as gods—but not the fire-breathing type. These dragons channel the power of water and are said to be born of stars. They forge a connection with humans by taking riders. In the South, an entirely different way of thinking exists. There, a society of female mages called the Priory worships the Mother. They don’t believe that the Berethnet line, continued by generations of queens, is the sacred key to keeping the Nameless One at bay. This means he could return—and soon. “Do you not see? It is a cycle.” The one thing uniting all corners of the world is fear. Representatives of each belief system—Queen Sabran the Ninth of Virtudom, hopeful dragon rider Tané of the East, and Ead Duryan, mage of the Priory from the South—are linked by the common goal of keeping the Nameless One trapped at any cost. This world of female warriors and leaders feels natural, and while there is a “chosen one” aspect to the tale, it’s far from the main point. Shannon’s depth of imagination and worldbuilding are impressive, as this 800-pager is filled not only with legend, but also with satisfying twists that turn legend on its head. Shannon isn’t new to this game of complex storytelling. Her Bone Season novels ( The Song Rising , 2017, etc.) navigate a multilayered society of clairvoyants. Here, Shannon chooses a more traditional view of magic, where light fights against dark, earth against sky, and fire against water. Through these classic pairings, an entirely fresh and addicting tale is born. Shannon may favor detailed explication over keeping a steady pace, but the epic converging of plotlines at the end is enough to forgive.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-63557-029-8

Page Count: 848

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY | EPIC FANTASY

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THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA

by TJ Klune ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.

Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune ( The Art of Breathing , 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY

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REVIEW: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

• Book Reviews
• July 6, 2022
• 1,837 views
• By John Mauro

Last Updated on February 12, 2024

Life is full of insignificant events, small perturbations that are rarely of any consequence. But occasionally the conditions are right for a small perturbation to escalate into something that alters the entire world, leaving a permanent mark on history. Whether it’s the start of a World War or the beginning of a global pandemic, the impact of a single, seemingly insignificant event can grow to outsize proportions, pushing the world out of its delicate balance.

The impact of A Game of Thrones on the world of fantasy cannot be overstated. Its publication in 1996 brought about an irreversible step change in fantasy literature, which for decades had been following the blueprint laid out by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings .

Since its release in the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings had become the single most influential work of fantasy ever written, spawning countless imitations, none of which could reach the same level of impact achieved by Tolkien. Tolkien’s cultural influence stretched far beyond the world of literature, encompassing cinema (Peter Jackson), music (Led Zeppelin), and any number of role-playing games, including both tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons and video games such as the Final Fantasy series.

Tolkien combined expansive, detailed worldbuilding with an epic good-vs-evil struggle of biblical proportions. Although Frodo struggles mightily against the corrupting power of the One Ring, there is never any doubt that he is on the side of good, a Christ figure who is willing to sacrifice himself to save others. Only two notable characters in The Lord of the Rings exhibit discernable gray morality. The most obvious of these is Gollum/Sméagol, but his gray morality is just a superposition of two dichotomous personas, one of which is good (Sméagol) and the other evil (Gollum). The other character, of course, is Boromir, who is fundamentally good but ultimately seduced by the Ring, becoming the Judas Iscariot figure of the Fellowship.

In A Game of Thrones , George R.R. Martin embraced Tolkienesque worldbuilding while taking an antithetical approach to character morality. Both Middle-earth and Westeros feel authentic because they are so fully realized, complete with their own history and culture, giving the reader a fully immersive experience where they can suspend their own reality while diving into a richly detailed new world.

The main difference comes in the gritty approach that Martin has taken toward character morality, making A Game of Thrones one of the first true grimdark fantasies. Whereas Middle-earth is a world of black and white, Martin uses a full palette of gray to paint his cast of characters. If Tolkien has written an allegory for the epic battle of Christ vs Satan, then George R.R. Martin is more interested in the sneering Pontius Pilate, questioning the meaning of truth itself.

In presenting a grittier, more realistic approach to fantasy, A Game of Thrones became part of a larger cultural movement that emerged in the 1990s. For example, at around the same time, grunge bands such as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains came to prominence, bringing an unapologetic rawness and honesty to a music scene that, in the preceding decade, had been hiding behind a façade of synthetic sounds, big hair, and heavy makeup.

More than a quarter century later, A Game of Thrones has rightfully become one of the most respected and influential works of fantasy. A Song of Ice and Fire has sold close to 100 million books worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling series of all time.

Rereading A Game of Thrones , it’s easy to see why. George R.R. Martin is an outstanding writer. Given the complexity of the world and the plot, this book could have easily become unreadable in less capable hands. But Martin does a wonderful job introducing us to the characters and worldbuilding in a natural and accessible fashion. A Game of Thrones is never a chore, and the pacing is remarkably consistent throughout the book.

Although A Game of Thrones is fantasy, the magical elements are of secondary importance, at least in this first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire. Instead, A Game of Thrones is driven by its wonderful cast of characters. George R.R. Martin has crafted some of the finest characters in all of fantasy, including the inimitable Tyrion Lannister, whose astute political skills are coupled with a keen wit and a genuine kindness toward the less fortunate.

One of the interesting choices made by George R.R. Martin is that, out of the eight point-of-view characters in A Game of Thrones , five are children. Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen are both 14 years old at the beginning of A Song of Ice and Fire. Among the Stark children, Sansa is 11, Arya is 9, and Bran is 7. Beyond these point-of-view characters, Robb Stark is 14 and Joffrey Baratheon is 12. This may be surprising for fans of the HBO series , since all the actors portraying these characters were significantly older than the characters themselves. Considering their young age, the terrible situations experienced by these children in A Game of Thrones become all the more harrowing. I particularly admire the way Daenerys overcomes unspeakably terrible abuse to grow into the strong, self-assured leader that she becomes.

We are living the legacy of A Game of Thrones now, with its indelible impact on both grimdark fantasy and epic fantasy in general. One prominent example is The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, which is clearly influenced by the narrative structure, expansive worldbuilding, and character-driven plot of A Game of Thrones . Both are full of political intrigue and focus on sparring factions of a fractured society who are fighting each other when they should be focused on a more sinister enemy posing an existential threat to their civilization.

Does this remind you of anyplace else? Although A Game of Thrones emerged in the 1990s, I would argue that it is even more relevant today in our own time wracked by political extremism and a breakdown of global order, where irrational nationalism trumps our ability to confront the serious existential threats facing our society.

A Game of Thrones is one of the finest and most influential books ever published, and its impact only continues to grow. If you have somehow put off reading A Game of Thrones , please put aside whatever reservations you may have and just dive in. You won’t be disappointed.

Read A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

John Mauro lives in a world of glass amongst the hills of central Pennsylvania. When not indulging in his passion for literature or enjoying time with family, John is training the next generation of materials scientists at Penn State University, where he teaches glass science and materials kinetics. John also loves cooking international cuisine and kayaking the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

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3 Body Problem review – the creators of Game of Thrones have done it again

Not content with turning one borderline unfilmable set of novels into highly watchable TV, they’ve repeated the trick with this deeply complex sci-fi series

W ell, hello again to Game of Thrones’ David “Unfilmable books a speciality!” Benioff and DB “Likewise!” Weiss! This time they are on Netflix, with an adaptation of the hardest of hard sci-fi tomes, Liu Cixin ’s The Three-Body Problem (the first in a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past). The eight-part series is near-named after the book as 3 Body Problem and opens with a truly harrowing scene of a Maoist struggle in which an eminent professor of physics, who has fallen foul of the Chinese Cultural revolutionaries for teaching the principles of western science, is beaten to death on stage in front of his wife – who denounces him as he is killed – while his appalled daughter and protege, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), watches in the audience. One of the timelines follows her as she is sent first to a forced labour camp in Inner Mongolia and then, when her astrophysicist skills are needed, to a mysterious scientific project (lots of buttons, big satellite dish) on its outskirts.

In the present day, particle accelerators around the world have started delivering results that make a mockery of all known physical laws and eminent scientists are killing themselves – or looking as if they’ve killed themselves – at what is mathematically known as a rate of knots. These “suicides” are being investigated by ex-cop Da Shi (Benedict Wong, the acceptance of whose transition to dramatic roles after 15 Storeys High I still find harder than understanding the three body problem itself, regardless of his excellence here). He reports to Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), a shadowy figure who is working for (or is possibly the head of) an even more shadowy secret authority bent on preserving humanity. Or not. I think.

Anyway. One of the mysterious deaths brings a group of five former students of the deceased teacher back together. It comprises underachieving borderline nihilist genius Saul (Jovan Adepo), engineering supremo Auggie (Eiza González) who is on the verge of a world-changing breakthrough in nanofibre technology, brilliant theoretical physicist Jin (Jess Hong), relative dropout Will (Alex Sharp), who now teaches science to high schoolers but is as in love with Jin as he was in their university days, and Jack (John Bradley), who sold out to make a fortune from snack foods and whose wealth is going to come in handy later. And who was their late teacher? Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), the daughter of the daughter in the audience who watched her father being killed in 1966 Beijing. The first of what promises to be many, many links looping together, back over themselves, and round about again is forged.

Soon, Auggie is visited by or starts hallucinating a countdown to what appears to be her own death – and only renouncing her nanofibre ambitions will halt it. An impossibly advanced virtual reality game comes into play and may or may not be connected with the death of Vera and the other scientists. Characters appear who don’t show up on CCTV and who seem to know more about other characters and the future than they should. More worryingly, an increasing number of whiteboards and blackboards start being wheeled out by people purporting to explain a growing number of higher dimensional geometric operations, orbital mechanics, the “Wow! signal” and all sorts of other reminders of something very important. No matter how much human interest an adaptation team brings to a book about abstruse and abstract physics there will still be knotty problems we are all going to have to do our best to understand.

Nevertheless, 3 Body Problem does well to pull us onward, as much through the relentless, but never overplayed, suffering and hardening of Ye Wenjie as she endures her effective imprisonment in the project grounds – and the stealing of her work by others – as by the present day mystery. It looks great, it soon has Jonathan Pryce joining proceedings as Mike Evans, an eco activist turned reclusive oil tycoon billionaire, and the answers to the mystery of who (and what) the extraordinary forces are, what they want and who summoned them are doled out at a fair pace.

But it can’t quite get rid of the cold abstraction that was at the heart of the books and which is revered by its fans. It’s impressive, it is – at its best – intriguing, but the threat is distant metaphorically and literally. There are puzzles to solve, if you are capable, but nothing and no one to root for. Even its design as a metaphor for the climate crisis and human inertia in the face of potential doom doesn’t give it enough heft – in fact, such is the way of these things, it may even serve to alienate us further from emotional engagement. It won’t be Netflix’s answer to Game of Thrones. But Benioff, Weiss, and their collaborator Alexander Woo have undoubtedly proved yet again that there is no such thing as an unfilmable novel.

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Book Review: A Game of Thrones

“A Game of Thrones” by George R.R. Martin tells the tale of various clashing households and their quest to conquer control over the seven kingdoms. Set in a distant, but vaguely familiar medieval-Europe, the story bears parallels to England’s “War of the Roses,” while also introducing its share of unique fantasy elements. As the reader progresses through the book, they follow the politics of the Iron Throne- a metaphor representing the complete and utter control a King possesses in a feudal government system. Furthermore, the reader tracks 8 character perspectives, which are alternated through passing chapters.

As the King rides north to Winterfell to meet with his trusted vassal, and friend, Eddard "Ned" Stark, he strikes up an agreement to anoint Eddard as the hand of the king. Reluctant, Ned follows the King back to the South, but as the plot continues to unfold, Eddard learns of a secret unbeknownst to the King and some of his most trusted advisers. With the death of the King and the ruin of Eddard’s house, war rages in Westeros- as several characters attempt to strike their claims on the Iron Throne.

I initially picked this book up after finishing J.R.R Tolkien’s, “Lord of the Rings” series and have been pleasantly surprised with it. Many fantasy readers have speculated that the literary masterpiece of Tolkien’s novels could not be out done, but I am now inclined to disagree. I thought the book was well-crafted and engaging as an intermediate to advanced reader. However, I would file the complaint that the book moves a bit slow for my taste. Some may lose interest in its plot, especially considering the sheer volume of the book series. The old-language also adds to this effect, as it may cause some readers to struggle following along.

Overall, I would say that this book is certainly worth a try for someone who enjoys medieval-fantasy novels. Admittedly, it will take a while to read and is certainly no small undertaking, but by sticking with it, I found myself enjoying every page more than the last!

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Review: ‘3 Body Problem’ Is a Galaxy-Brained Spectacle

The Netflix sci-fi adaptation has done its physics homework, even if it sometimes falls short on the humanities.

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By James Poniewozik

The aliens who menace humankind in Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” believe in doing a lot with a little. Specifically, they can unfold a single proton into multiple higher dimensions, enabling them to print computer circuits with the surface area of a planet onto a particle smaller than a pinprick.

“3 Body Problem,” the audacious adaptation of a hard-sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin, is a comparable feat of engineering and compression. Its first season, arriving Thursday, wrestles Liu’s inventions and physics explainers onto the screen with visual grandeur, thrills and wow moments. If one thing holds it back from greatness, it’s the characters, who could have used some alien technology to lend them an extra dimension or two. But the series’s scale and mind-bending turns may leave you too starry-eyed to notice.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, partnering here with Alexander Woo ( “The Terror: Infamy” ), are best known for translating George R.R. Martin’s incomplete “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy saga into “Game of Thrones.” Whatever your opinions of that series — and there are plenty — it laid out the duo’s strengths as adapters and their weaknesses as creators of original material.

Beginning with Martin’s finished novels, Benioff and Weiss converted the sprawling tomes into heady popcorn TV with epic battles and intimate conversations. Toward the end, working from outlines or less, they rushed to a finish and let visual spectacle overshadow the once-vivid characters.

In “3 Body,” however, they and Woo have a complete story to work with, and it’s a doozy. It announces its sweep up front, opening with a Chinese scientist’s public execution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then jumping to the present day, when a wave of notable physicists are inexplicably dying by suicide.

The deaths may be related to several strange phenomena. Experiments in particle accelerators around the world suddenly find that the last several decades’ worth of research is wrong. Brilliant scientific minds are being sent futuristic headsets of unknown provenance that invite them to join an uncannily realistic virtual-reality game. Oh, also, one night all the stars in the sky start blinking on and off.

It all suggests the working of an advanced power, not of the cuddly E.T. variety. What starts as a detective mystery, pursued by the rumpled intelligence investigator Clarence Da Shi (Benedict Wong), escalates to a looming war of the worlds. What the aliens want and what they might do to get it is unclear at first, but as Clarence intuits, “Usually when people with more advanced technology encounter people with more primitive technology, doesn’t work out well for the primitives.”

Most of the first season’s plot comes straight from Liu’s work. The biggest changes are in story structure and location. Liu’s trilogy, while wide-ranging, focused largely on Chinese characters and had specifically Chinese historical and political overtones. Benioff, Weiss and Woo have globalized the story, shifting much of the action to London, with a multiethnic cast. (Viewers interested in a more literal rendition of Liu’s story can watch last year’s stiff but thorough Chinese adaptation on Peacock.)

They’ve also given Liu’s heavy science a dose of the humanities. Liu is a brilliant novelist of speculative ideas, but his characters can read like figures from story problems. In the series, a little playful dialogue goes a long way toward leavening all the Physics 101.

So does casting. Wong puffs life into his generically hard-boiled gumshoe. Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth in “Thrones”) stands out as Thomas Wade, a sharp-tongued spymaster, as does Rosalind Chao as Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist whose brutal experience in the Cultural Revolution makes her question her allegiance to humanity. Zine Tseng is also excellent as the young Ye.

More curious, if understandable, is the decision to shuffle and reconfigure characters from throughout Liu’s trilogy into a clique of five attractive Oxford-grad prodigies who carry much of the narrative: Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a dogged physicist with personal ties to the dead-scientists case; Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), an idealistic nanofibers researcher; Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), a gifted but jaded research assistant; Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a sweet-natured teacher with a crush on Jin; and Jack Rooney (John Bradley of “Thrones”), a scientist turned snack-food entrepreneur and the principal source of comic relief.

The writers manage to bump up Liu’s one-dimensional characterizations to two-ish, but the “Oxford Five,” with the exception of Jin, don’t feel entirely rounded. This is no small thing; in a fantastical series like “Thrones” or “Lost,” it is the memorable individuals — your Arya Starks and your Ben Linuses — who hold you through the ups and downs of the story.

The plot, however, is dizzying and the world-building immersive, and the reportedly galactic budget looks well and creatively spent on the screen. Take the virtual-reality scenes, through which “3 Body” gradually reveals its stakes and the aliens’ motives. Each character who dons the headset finds themselves in an otherworldly version of an ancient kingdom — China for Jin, England for Jack — which they are challenged to save from repeating cataclysms caused by the presence of three suns (hence the series’s title).

“3 Body” has a streak of techno-optimism even at its bleakest moments, the belief that the physical universe is explicable even when cruel. The universe’s inhabitants are another matter. Alongside the race to save humanity is the question of whether humanity is worth saving — a group of alien sympathizers, led by a billionaire environmentalist (Jonathan Pryce), decides that Earth would benefit from a good cosmic intervention.

All this attaches the show’s brainiac spectacle to big humanistic ideas. The threat in “3 Body” is looming rather than imminent — these are not the kind of aliens who pull up quick and vaporize the White House — which makes for a parallel to the existential but gradual threat of climate change. Like “Thrones,” with its White Walkers lurking beyond the Wall, “3 Body” is in part a collective-action problem.

It is also morally provocative. Liu’s novels make an argument that in a cold, indifferent universe, survival can require a hard heart; basing decisions on personal conscience can be a kind of selfishness and folly. The series is a bit more sentimental, emphasizing relationships and individual agency over game theory and determinism. But it’s willing to go dark: In a striking midseason episode, the heroes make a morally gray decision in the name of planetary security, and the consequences are depicted in horrifying detail.

Viewers new to the story should find it exciting on its own. (You do not need to have read the books first; you should never need to read the books to watch a TV series.) But the book trilogy does go to some weird, grim — and presumably challenging to film — places, and it will be interesting to see if and how future seasons follow.

For now, there’s flair, ambition and galaxy-brain twists aplenty. Sure, this kind of story is tough to pull off beginning to end (see, again, “Game of Thrones”). But what’s the thrill in creating a headily expanding universe if there’s no risk of it collapsing?

James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. More about James Poniewozik

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The Original Reviews of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones

Long before its tv adaptation became a global phenomenon, here's what the critics thought of the first volume in martin's a song of ice and fire series.

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When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.

“George R.R. Martin’s new novel, A Game of Thrones , is the first in an epic series about a land in which the seasons shift between periods of seemingly endless summer and seemingly endless winter. The story begins with the kingdom of Winterfell facing both external and internal dangers. Beyond her borders, the cold is returning, a dragon prince is scheming to win back his lost kingdom, and the eggs of supposedly long extinct dragons are beginning to hatch. Within Winterfell itself, war soon erupts when the king is murdered by a family grasping for unlawful power.

Many fans of sword-and-sorcery will enjoy the epic scope of this book, something of a change of pace for Martin, who has spent the last decade working for television and who has long been honored for his award-winning stories (e.g., ‘Sandkings’). Still, to my mind, this opening installment suffers from one-dimensional characters and less than memorable imagery.”

–  John H. Riskind, The Washington Post , June 28, 1996

“George R.R. Martin’s  A Game of Thrones— a 694-page novel that begins a series — is in many ways a tale fit for a king. Its tapestry is satisfyingly rich and complex, weaving together dozens of characters, major and minor, in a wide spectrum of shades of hero and villain, all vivid and memorable. The settings are equally diverse and evocative. Martin writes as convincingly of tart juices oozing from an apple as of sleet on the side of a mountain, and his book is as much an adventure of the senses as it is of the mind. On the other hand, the thimble-full of living dead and the soupcon of dragons we’re served here add little to the story. Or, they may indeed be setting the groundwork for sequels—which seems clear at the end—but their presence in A Game of Thrones seems little more than frost and steam on the window.

“…this is an old story, but A Game of Thrones is so well played that, like a vibrant re-make of an old hit record, you can enjoy almost every beat of it. Indeed, Arthurian/Shakespearean clashes among great and lesser lineages, with all the opportunities they afford for exploration of such perennial themes as honor, loyalty, ambition, love in all its forms, are always welcome subjects for science fiction and fantasy. Such political and personal strìngs served as superb accompaniment to the science fiction in Dune, and they’re often heart-rending, always provocative and appealing, to behold here—though as a center-stage performance, not as background or foreground for fantasy which is barely there.

But the dragon thread has other problems. Published as a stand-alone novella in the July 2006 Asimov’s Magazine (‘Blood of the Dragon’), it follows the trials and exploits of the overthrown King’s two lineal descendants—a brother who is a claimant to the throne with no army, and his sister, whom the brother gives as a bride to a Ghenghis Khan-type character reigning with a vast army in this England’s version of Europe and Asia, in hopes of getting that army to cross the ‘narrow sea’ and reclaim the pretender`s throne. The descriptive passages are marvelous—you can smell the spice, and taste it in every cup of wine Martin renders—but the story as a whole is not special.

“These other threads show us two different daughters, a romantic and a tomboy, and how they fare in these less­-and-more than chivalrous times; a bastard and a ‘true-born’ hero and another son whose legs are paralyzed but whose mind soars; another family where one son is handsome and vicious and evil yet brave, and his brother—a dwarf, my favorite character in the novel—is conniving, yet so honorable that he pays his debt of gold to a cruel, stupid jailor whom the dwarf has talked into taking a message that will free him. Yes, I liked this dwarf so much that I truly felt glad when, after months of travail, he finally finds comfort in a prostitute’s arms. The book is so good at this, so real and effective in its complex characterizations, that I would vote it an award just for that, and the dragons be damned.”

– Paul Levinson, Tangent Magazine , Fall 1996

“In a world where the approaching winter will last four decades, kings and queens, knights and renegades struggle for control of a throne. Some fight with sword and mace, others with magic and poison. Beyond the Wall to the north, meanwhile, the Others are preparing their army of the dead to march south as the warmth of summer drains from the land. After more than a decade devoted primarily to TV and screen work, Martin makes a triumphant return to high fantasy with this extraordinarily rich new novel, the first of a trilogy. Although conventional in form, the book stands out from similar work by Eddings, Brooks and others by virtue of its superbly developed characters, accomplished prose and sheer bloody-mindedness. Although the romance of chivalry is central to the culture of the Seven Kingdoms, and tournaments, derring-do and handsome knights abound, these trappings merely give cover to dangerous men and women who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. When Lord Stark of Winterfell, an honest man, comes south to act as the King’s chief councilor, no amount of heroism or good intentions can keep the realm under control. It is fascinating to watch Martin’s characters mature and grow, particularly Stark’s children, who stand at the center of the book. Martin’s trophy case is already stuffed with major prizes, including Hugos, Nebulas, Locus Awards and a Bram Stoker. He’s probably going to have to add another shelf, at least.”

– Publishers Weekly , July 29, 1996

“After a long silence, the author of the cult  The Armageddon Rag  (1983) returns with the first of a fantasy series entitled, insipidly enough,  A Song of Ice and Fire . In the Seven Kingdoms, where the unpredictable seasons may last decades, three powerful families allied themselves in order to smash the ruling Targaryens and depose their Mad King, Aerys II. Robert Baratheon claimed the throne and took to wife Tywin Lannister’s daughter, Cersei; Ned Stark returned north to gloomy Winterfell with its massive, ancient Wall farther to the north that keeps wildings and unspeakable creatures from invading. Some years later, Robert, now drunk and grossly fat, asks Ned to come south and help him govern; reluctantly, since he mistrusts the treacherous Lannisters, Ned complies. Honorable Ned soon finds himself caught up in a whirl of plots, espionage, whispers, and double-dealing and learns to his horror that the royal heir, Joffrey, isn’t Robert’s son at all but, rather, the product of an incestuous union between the Queen and her brother Jaime—who murdered the Mad King and earned the infamous nickname Kingslayer. Ned attempts to bargain with Cersei and steels himself to tell Robert—but too late. Swiftly the Lannisters murder the King, consign Ned to a dungeon, and prepare to seize the throne, opposed only by the remaining Starks and Baratheons. On the mainland, meanwhile, the brutal and stupid Viserys Targaryen sells his sister Dany to a barbarian horse-warrior in return for a promise of armies to help him reconquer the Seven Kingdoms. A vast, rich saga, with splendid characters and an intricate plot flawlessly articulated against a backdrop of real depth and texture. Still, after 672 dense pages, were you expecting a satisfying resolution? You won’t get it: Be prepared for a lengthy series with an indefinitely deferred conclusion.”

– Kirkus , July 1, 1996

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Netflix’s 3 Body Problem adaptation channels the book’s spirit but not its brilliance

Though david benioff, d. b. weiss, and alexander woo’s 3 body problem is impressive, it really feels like just an introduction to cixin liu’s deeper ideas..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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In his 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem , Cixin Liu created a fascinating world where cutting-edge particle physics, VR gaming, and Chinese history played crucial roles in shaping humanity’s response to an imminent planet-wide threat. It also seemed unfilmable. The depth of the book’s ideas about cultural memory and the complexity of its central mystery made The Three-Body Problem feel like a story that could only work on the page.

That hasn’t stopped streamers from trying, and last year, Tencent debuted its own live-action, episodic take on Liu’s book . Netflix spent a fortune putting 3 Body Problem in the hands of executive producers David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. Their adaptation is leaner and more diverse than the book in a way that makes it a very different kind of story . Often, it’s a good one — and very occasionally a great one — that works as an introductory crash course to the basic ideas key to understanding the larger concepts that shape Liu’s later books. 

But rather than confronting the sophistication of the book, Netflix’s main priority with 3 Body Problem seems to be selling it as the next Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss’ last series). And while it’s easy to understand why the streamer might want that, it’s hard not to see the show as a flashy but stripped-down version of the source material.

• Dive into the world of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem

3 Body Problem involves a constellation of distinct narratives spanning multiple decades and generations. But at its core, the show is a compelling thriller about how the sins of humanity’s past come to shape its future. In a world where the scientific community has been rocked by an alarming wave of mysterious suicides, private intelligence officer Clarence Shi (Benedict Wong) and a group of researchers get swept up in a race to save the planet from destruction. 

As a former agent of both MI5 and Scotland Yard, Clarence is no stranger to shadowy plots. But he’s vastly out of his depth in the worlds of cutting-edge theoretical physics and materials engineering. Meanwhile, scientist Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is also navigating uncharted waters as she struggles to make sense of what’s happening to her peers and why many experiments involving particle accelerators are going wrong. The panic of the present day pushes Jin to reconnect with her four best college friends, and the dynamic of the reunited “Oxford Five” inches closer to revealing a world-ending threat.

Given the structural complexity of Liu’s books, it isn’t surprising that Netflix’s 3 Body is streamlined in a much more linear fashion that makes it feel like Lost -style mystery-within-a-mystery you’re figuring out alongside Clarence. But it’s actually in 3 Body Problem ’s core group of characters that you can most clearly see the steps Benioff, Weiss, and Woo took to rework Liu’s ideas for a more global audience.

Before the book’s story in present-day China really gets going, Liu spends quite a bit of time in the past in order to give you a better grasp of the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist movement to purge society of capitalists and intellectuals. It’s the Party’s reversal of these horrifying policies — instead embracing academia and scientific research — that sets China on a path to become a global superpower. And as the book moves into the present, that historical context helps you appreciate why a sudden and sustained spike in inexplicable scientist suicides would prompt the government to deploy counter-terrorism operatives to investigate.

In the novel, much of the early mystery is rooted in the fact that its characters — like offputting former detective Shi Qiang (often referred to as “Da Shi”) and nanomaterials specialist Wang Miao — are solving it in isolation. Netflix’s answer to Da Shi, Clarence, is now British and a softer, more contemplative presence than his curmudgeon literary counterpart. The show also splits Wang’s character into the Oxford Five, an ethnically diverse group of friends consisting of Jin, research assistant Saul (Jovan Adepo), nanotech expert Auggie (Eiza González), physics teacher Will (Alex Sharp), and snack magnate Jack (John Bradley).

Making characters fumble in the darkness on their way to solving the puzzle of Three-Body was one of the many ways Liu mirrored, on a microscopic level, the book’s larger ideas about the power of collaborative efforts versus the control that comes from individual decision-making. But because the show’s Oxford Five are all friends (and former lovers in some instances) who quickly begin working together, relationships drive the plot forward more than its existential puzzle. These changes bring a new level of interpersonal drama to Netflix’s show that isn’t present in the book, especially for Auggie, who’s haunted by visions of a glowing countdown that seems to be seared onto her retinas. Dividing Wang into five distinct characters emphasizes the idea that there’s power in looking at complicated problems from a diverse array of unique perspectives.

But because the Oxford Five are all based on a single character and spend so much time talking each other through theories about what’s going on, scenes focused on them often feel the show taking a moment to spell out plot points in ways that feel clumsy and inorganic. This is less the case when 3 Body Problem shifts its focus to the past and zeroes in on the life of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a promising young astrophysicist whose entire world is upended by the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like in the book, 3 Body Problem truly begins with Ye and how the personal choices she makes — all informed by her experiences as a survivor of the Revolution — have an incalculable impact on the future at a worldwide scale.

In both the book and Netflix’s adaptation, Ye’s story is a powerful one that contextualizes the present in important ways. But the show is less willing to dwell in it. Rather than consider the political and personal effects of the Revolution, the series commits to being a thinky but easily digestible chronicle of the world readying itself for war. An older version of Ye (Rosalind Chao) sticks around as 3 Body Problem to watch events unfold with a knowing solemnity. 

Meanwhile, the show invests in the messy lives of the Oxford Five and their flirtations with a futuristic piece of technology that plunges its wearer into an unimaginable world of riddles, mathematics, and roleplaying. The headset also gives the show a way of stepping outside the confines of the detective genre and into an otherworldly space that has the recognizable markers of science fiction, like planets with multiple suns. Smartly, 3 Body Problem balances out some of that predictability by placing many of its most imaginative, impossible set pieces in the game where the uncanny combo of Netflix’s signature visual look and an inordinate amount of shiny VFX. And it actually works as a plus rather than a minus here because of how unsettling playing the game is supposed to feel.

There are at least a few truly breathtaking action sequences unevenly sprinkled throughout 3 Body Problem ’s first season. But for all their terrifying beauty, they’re not quite enough to keep the show from feeling like Netflix’s adequate attempt at distilling a literary masterpiece into eight hours of television. 3 Body Problem ’s first season works as a solid introduction to this world, but by the finale, it becomes clear that these episodes are really just laying the groundwork for an even bigger, more deeply complicated narrative. With the right plan, tapping into the wildness of Liu’s later books could definitely take 3 Body Problem to its next level in future seasons. But that’s all going to depend on whether the show takes off.

3 Body Problem also stars Sea Shimooka, Marlo Kelly, Saamer Usmani, and Eve Ridley. The series is now streaming on Netflix.

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Can the Writers Behind Game of Thrones and True Blood Make the 3 Body Problem the Next Sci-Fi Sensation?

The showrunners talk to ign about adapting the chinese literary phenomenon for netflix and western audiences..

If you’re well-versed in contemporary world science fiction, then Chinese author Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem — the first in his Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy — is likely already on your favorites list. In 2015, the English translation won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and helped sweep Chinese science fiction onto the modern global literary radar, with eight million copies of the trilogy sold worldwide.

Yet for mainstream Western audiences, the Remembrance of Earth's Past novels haven’t crossed over into the general pop culture zeitgeist. So when Netflix bought the rights for an English language streaming adaptation in 2019, finding writers who could distill the heady subject matter about astrophysics, extraterrestrials, and human extinction into an exciting series narrative, and make it alluring for global audiences was imperative.

In 2020, Netflix put together a trio of seasoned television writers who had already succeeded in turning sci-fi books into hugely popular series. Writing partners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (nicknamed D&D) were the sole showrunners of HBO’s Game of Thrones series based on author George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and Alexander Woo who was an executive producer on HBO’s True Blood based on Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels and creator of The Terror: Infamy. After reading Liu Cixin’s work, they were hooked and ready to go.

Watch this exclusive clip from 3 Body Problem featuring Benedict Wong:

Why the Books Work As a Series

“When you start reading it, there's some absolutely amazing things going on,” Weiss said of the narrative. “With a book that has that cover , you don't expect it to start that way. You expect it to start with Space Captain Brock Sampson, or whatever, and it doesn't. It starts in the world, as it was, in a terrible, real event. So, it automatically raises the question, how does this turn into a book that has that cover? Out of the gate, it pushed me through the book because there's a question that it planted in me and I needed to know the answer to that question.”

Woo said he was also deeply impressed with the “gear shifts” the author pulls on the reader. “It starts as historical fiction and then it's a murder mystery, then science fiction. It was really exhilarating. You're wrong-footed constantly, which is something that we wanted to certainly adapt the spirit of.”

The book opens following the tumultuous existence of Ye Wenjie, a Chinese astrophysicist. A survivor of the Cultural Revolution, she eventually becomes a trusted member of a secret Chinese program searching for extraterrestrial life, where she decodes a message from the Trisolarans. Their alien world is doomed and she invites them to Earth. Whom she tells, and what comes from their response, spans decades involving a broad ensemble of Chinese characters.

3 Body Problem Gallery

“I'm not really a science fiction guy. For the most part, I just don't care enough about the stories because I don't care about the characters,” Benioff admitted about his ennui about the genre. “So when I finished these books, the one thing that was incredible to me was where it starts.

“Right away, I was on that woman's side,” he said of Wenjie. “I don't know where she's gonna go, but I am rooting for her. And then there’s the ending, which is incredible and powerful and also very much about characters, and quite small. There's all the stuff in the middle that's science and really heavy stuff. But it starts and ends with characters and our connection to these characters. So that was everything for me, and I think for all of us.”

What to Keep and What to Change?

The trio started work in February 2020, and then due to the pandemic spent the next two years separate, virtually writing their adaptation, 3 Body Problem. Their mandate was to reconfigure the books as needed to make the story work in a visual medium but to stay character-focused.

To do that, they would diversify the book’s ensemble of characters to include more ethnicities and countries of origin for its five contemporary scientists—played by Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza González, John Bradley, and Alex Sharp—whom they dubbed “The Oxford Five”. But Ye Wenjie’s (Zine Tseng) story would remain very close to the book’s arc, and carry through as a central throughline in the series adaptation.

“It was important for us to start with the Cultural Revolution and then go into the mystery aspects of the story,” Woo explained. “That was something that we just loved from the novels.”

“For us, that had to be faithful,” Benioff confirmed. “But then we wanted to internationalize it and have people really representing humanity. And the other part of that is just like, how do we get these characters who might not intersect in the novel, get them to know each other? So we came up with this notion that most of [the Five] went to school together … and we bring them together in the first episode and you get to know these relationships.”

“And so even if the specific details are different, the one thing I think that's most important to adapt from the source material is just the spirit of it,” Woo continued. “It's [about], ‘What is that feeling that you get when you first read that book?’ And hopefully, it's the same feeling you get when you watch this show.”

“In general, our primary goal was to make as good a show as we could make,” Weiss concurred. “And sometimes with any adaptation, whether it's for television or for film, from any source material, that will inevitably involve diverging from the source material. We knew from the beginning that we needed to make this not just palatable, but exciting and thrilling and compelling to people who had never read these books. Hopefully, watching the show will draw people to the books…It's kind of a win-win scenario in that way, but the show needs to walk and talk on its own. It can't lean on the source material as a crutch, because it won't work for the vast majority of the people out there if it does.”

Benioff concluded, “The author has bequeathed us with this insanely ambitious, genius narrative, but we have to do work on the characters to make people care. Obviously, we want a big audience. It's an expensive show. We need a big audience to justify that to get further seasons. But a lot of it's just like, how can we make a show that we're going to love? Because I don't think I'm a unique person. I think if I love something, other people are going to feel the same.”

3 Body Problem premieres on Netflix on March 21. Read IGN’s review here .

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