Excellent Quotes: Game of Thrones

When he is not obsessing over medieval culinary delicacies and the finer points of battle dress, media sensation George RR Martin is busy crushing it story-telling-wise.

Hearing about the popularity of his Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, I got a copy of the first book for my girlfriend. She promptly inhaled the five-part-to-date series and is impatiently awaiting the next installment. I decided to give it a shot since she liked it so much and have been amazed at the way Martin invents and fully inhabits his fictional land of Westeros, home to seven squabbling kingdoms. Nearly every one of the inter-bred ruling family members and their minions is interesting (chapters are serially told from the perspective of one character at a time), there is enough hot and cold running backstory to pay homage to Frank Herbert, and the author has conjured up a killer app for his series: The Wall.

The Wall is made of solid ice 700 feet high, 100 leagues long--that's 300 miles to those of us not living in the British Isles--and so thick that it houses tunnels and prisons and The Seven know what else inside it. The Wall is all that stands between the "civilized" residents of the South and a northern territory known as Beyond the Wall or, more chillingly, as "The Land of Always Winter."

Somewhat disappointingly, The Wall is not really an allegory about the small-mindedness of Rep. Duncan Hunter or the bizarreness of modern US/Mexico relations. It more than makes up for it, however, by being awesomely about keeping The Others out of the South. The Others are a terrifying race of gaunt ice beings whose eyes shine blue and who silently slaughter you and your pals as they remorselessly converge on you regardless of your defenses. Oh, and, after they kill you, your undead corpse--complete with colorless skin offset by black, blood-engorged hands--rises to kill anyone you knew before. Brr.

Take a gander; here, Sam, one of The Wall's guardians, summarizes what the history books in Westeros say about the shivvery beings beyond The Wall:

 "The Others come when it is cold, most of the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear. They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night ... or else night falls when they emerge. Some stories speak of them riding the corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it makes no matter, so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed Small Paul was riding a dead horse, so that part's plainly true. Some accounts speak of giant ice spiders too. I don't know what those are. Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else the dead will rise again as their thralls."

-- A Dance with Dragons. Martin, George R.R. New York (NY): Bantam Books, 2011. Pp. 179-180 (of 1705 in the e-version).

Martin seamlessly weaves together something the reader has seen--Small Paul's nightmarish death at the hands of a corpse-riding ice horror--with a totally believable "history" from the past of his fabricated world. Combined with an unerring ear for an authentic-sounding kind of Middle Ages lingo--"it makes no matter" and "plainly true"--the plot sucks you into a fully-conceived universe that you are happy to inhabit for thousands of pages.

PS -- I must admit that I skipped the fourth book, which has nearly universally been reviewed as a slog whose only real purpose it to set up book five. I am quite a slow reader so I WikiCheated instead and read the plot online, skipping from book three to the present. Oh, but "Northern White Clouds" by Supermule is no slog; now playing on iTunes.