A Song of Ice and Fire Review: A Gimmick That Worked, a Corner He Wrote Himself Into, and Counting

A note on why this is here

A Song of Ice and Fire is not LitRPG or progression fantasy. There are no stats, no systems, no cultivation. This review exists because the reviewer read all five books more than twenty years ago and has wanted to write this review ever since. This is his site. That is sufficient justification.

What worked

A Game of Thrones did something interesting in 1996. Fantasy at the time was comparatively thin — Robert Jordan, some early Abercrombie, Tolkien's long shadow over everything. Martin combined medieval epic fantasy with the political drama of a soap opera and added something no one was doing: real stakes, real deaths, characters who seemed central to the narrative killed off before the story was finished with them.

Eddard Stark's death in book one was legitimately shocking at the time. He was positioned as the protagonist. The genre convention said he'd be fine. He wasn't. That's a real creative choice, and when it landed, it landed hard. The early books work because that principle — nobody is safe — creates real tension. You couldn't assume anything. The White Walkers as an undead threat were handled well. The political maneuvering had real intrigue. The world had weight.

Martin found a formula. This review is about what he did with it.

The stallion that mounts the world

If you've only watched the HBO show, you don't know about the Dothraki prophecy that saturates the early books. The stallion that mounts the world — the great conqueror prophesied to rule all the known earth — is mentioned relentlessly when Daenerys is among Khal Drogo's people. It's woven into their religion, their culture, their daily conversation. It's presented as cosmically significant to understanding the Dothraki and their place in the story.

It doesn't amount to anything.

Once Daenerys takes control of the Dothraki, the prophecy is quietly abandoned. It had no bearing on where the story went. It was apparently included because Martin was writing and thought it was interesting, and then the story moved in a different direction, and it just got left behind.

This is not an isolated example. It's the operating method. Martin writes, things seem significant, the story moves elsewhere, those things are forgotten. The books function less like a planned narrative and more like improvisational worldbuilding that occasionally produces something compelling and often produces things that go nowhere. It works in a first draft. In a series that's supposed to be building toward a conclusion, it's a problem.

The cast problem

For every character in the HBO series, assume five to six characters from the books were combined into one. The show didn't make this choice because it was artistically superior — it made this choice because the source material had an unmanageable number of characters and the show needed to be watchable.

Martin created this cast because he needed a constant supply of people to kill. Each book executes characters to generate shock and momentum. The problem with using death as your primary narrative tool across a multi-volume series is that death is a depletable resource. You can only kill characters your audience cares about, and once you've killed enough of them, you've eliminated the thing that made the deaths matter.

By book five, Martin had burned through approximately eighty percent of the characters readers had spent four books caring about. The solution he landed on was introducing an entirely new cast in book five. Your audience is now five volumes and thousands of pages into a series, the characters they cared about are mostly dead, and you're asking them to start over with people they've never met. Nothing significant advances in book five. Martin was essentially restarting from book one's position while everyone was waiting for the conclusion.

This is not a stylistic choice that can be defended as bold. It's the structural consequence of writing without planning, discovering mid-series that you've consumed all your material, and having no clear path forward.

Why the series will not be finished

A Dance with Dragons was published in 2011. In the thirteen-plus years since, Martin has published prequels, companion volumes, and material set in the same world. He has not advanced the main story by a single page.

He has given interviews suggesting he knows how the series ends and is working toward it. This has been the position for over a decade. It is not a credible position. Authors who know how their stories end and have the ability to write them eventually produce books. The record here is the record.

The structural reason for the impasse is the one described above: Martin killed his characters past the point where the story could be carried forward by anyone the audience knows, introduced replacements no one cares about, and now faces the challenge of delivering a satisfying conclusion with a cast he assembled in book five without the benefit of five books of earned investment.

The more honest reading of the situation — and this reviewer has held this position for twenty-five years — is that he doesn't know how to get out of the corner he wrote himself into. The prequels and side stories exist because he can operate in that world without confronting the structural problem in the main series. That is a reasonable thing for a writer to do when stuck. The part that deserves criticism is the ongoing suggestion to fans that the finish line is in sight.

What this costs

Readers who loved the early books and expected a conclusion have been waiting since 2011. Some have been waiting since the 1990s. At Martin's current age and pace, there is no realistic scenario in which the series is completed. The HBO show provided its own ending — a final season that was widely, correctly, regarded as a disaster — but at least it was an ending.

Martin has said the HBO ending is not his ending and that his version will be different and better. He may be correct that his version would be different. "Different" and "better" require a book to evaluate, and no book has been forthcoming.

The verdict

F tier. The early books worked. The formula was novel for its moment, and the craft in the first three volumes is real. None of that changes what the series looks like now: five published books, no conclusion in sight, the story structurally incapable of progressing with the characters it has, and an author who shows no signs of having solved the problem.

Not Worth the Credit — or the time, or the emotional investment. If you haven't started: watch the HBO show through season six and stop. You'll get the best version of the story, properly paced, with a manageable cast, delivered by people who understood that a story needs to move forward.

The reviewer would note that if this site ever creates a tier below F, a strong case exists for placing this series in it — not primarily for the quality of the books themselves, but for what the series represents to readers who gave it years of investment and received nothing but an ongoing performance of progress in return.

That's a significant thing to do to your audience. It deserves to be said.

Reviewed through A Dance with Dragons (all five published books). Series abandoned as of this writing.