jonjhargreaves wrote:I also discovered Kane thanks to this thread, my only problem is that I started Darkness Weaves and finished it the same day, never read a book in one sitting before.

Now, I'm waiting for a full day to see if I can do the same with Bloodstone.

Thanks all for pointing me to Wagner's Kane

Zenopus wrote:Let me know if you like the later novels/stories; I was thinking of ordering the comp but I've read the later stories are not easy reading (though some really like them).

Oh, and the other setting it reminded me of was the future Europe of Moorcock's Hawkmoon series (I'd recommend The Pastel City to anyone who liked that series). The paperback copy I have (from 1974) even has a quote from Moorcock on the back cover.

FormCritic wrote:Night Winds is possibly the best fantasy short story compilation written.

FormCritic wrote:I've been reading the Game of Thrones novels.  Watching the HBO series got me interested.

What I'm finding is an author with good ideas...possibly an excellent dungeon master with an interesting campaign based on medieval England...but also an author who is incapable of writing an action scene or of moving his plot along.

I had thought that the poor plot sequencing was due to budget restrictions for the HBO production.  Essentially, the characters on HBO strut about in filthy furs and hold the same conversation over and over in various poorly disguised sets in Malta and blue screen backgrounds.  I kept expecting one of them to point to a castle and say, "It's only a model!" HBO made up for the lack of any real action by inserting tons of nudity and various sexual perversions and scenes not actually found in the novel.  It turns out...NO.  The novels are just like that...but with less sex.

Mid-way through book three, reading the series has become a chore I must complete....even more tedious than the Wheel of Time books.  

In terms of writing, the Game of Thrones novels (called the "Song of Ice and Fire" series for no particular reason I can see) are superior to the Wheel of Time novels because there a fewer irritating female characters and the main characters sometimes do logical things....sometimes.  

But, the task of reading them has become tedious because the characters keep wandering about, never seeming to reach anywhere and always missing the great events happening off-stage.

The dwarf character, Tyrion Lannister, is one of the better fantasy characters I have encountered...a character as strong as Elric back when Elric was cool rather than pathetic.  Tyrion is not a dwarven dwarf.  Rather, he is a human dwarf, considered a freak and an imp by his family members.  Unfortunately, in book three he has been horribly scarred and he is currently wallowing about in the strands of sub-plots left over from the second novel.

In fact, all the third novel seems to consist of is ragged strands of plots left over from the second novel.  The title of the third book might as well be A Game of Let's Linger About and Act Illogically.

I noticed that the TV series changed the novel's timeline and added three to five years to the ages of all the characters.  That was a good thing because the writer of the Game of Thrones novels wrote half his characters far too young.  It would be OK, but we have to follow those elementary and pre-school age characters through a series of uninteresting situations.

The author's timeline is goofed in a number of places and his command of geography is pathetic.  The landscape stretches like taffy or snaps back like a rubber band as the so-called plot demands.

Every distance in A Game of Thrones is "a thousand leagues."  I was beginning to wonder if the author knows that a league is three miles...but now I have concluded that the characters describe any long distance as a thousand leagues...which makes sense because it takes some of them three novels to go about forty miles.

Every historical event in A Game of Thrones happened thousands of years ago...when the world was apparently exactly the same as it is now.  No changes in sea level.  No changes in technology.  No actual, historical events in between.  No dark ages.  No geological events. No changes in language or culture.   No logical explanation for anything, and the characters don't seem to notice.  The author seems unaware that 8,000 years ago is so far into earth's own past that we have little to no knowledge of those days.  We call it "pre-history."  Instead, his characters talk about things that happened 3,000 years ago as if they were recent events.

I will give the Game of Thrones author some credit over the Wheel of Time setting:  His world map isn't completely square with only one river.  Also, the religious setting is an excellent foundation for a fantasy game campaign...except that the author has started to jam in new religions willy nilly wherever he needs a plot device.

And so, it has become a slog and I am starting to cheer against the main characters and in favor of the villains.

Now, I open the book again to yet another character making an endless and repetitive journey.  And...oh god! It's another dream sequence!  Noooo!