(urth) The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and Fire

[Marc Aramini]

> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:36 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>> wrote:
> 
>     
> 
>     As for Martin's books---does anyone more familiar with them than I
>     think there is anything /but /a surface level to them?
>     _______________________________________________
Well, there are no profound truths/mysteries about the nature of reality, but Martin does several things subtly, including the family tree of some characters.  The "out of character" bastard son of the most upright guy in the books, Ned Stark, is hinted at actually being his sister's son in some passages, who ran off with a guy from the old dynasty who was killed by a usurper years before the action of the book starts.  So that bastard is probably a legit heir but nobody suspects it and he is just shunted around to the northern wall, and the noble Stark fellow lets his wife kind of hate his "bastard son".
 
Also, some of the sexuality is just kind of hinted at in the books, like Renly and his wife never consummating and a close hero-worship kind of relationship with his head knight, but in the tv show that turns into a straight up gay sex scene with hs knight.
 
He's not Wolfe but the first three books are good reads for something that is popular (how condescending does that sound? Shakespeare is and was popular, but public taste has gotten a bit more susceptible to criticism the last few centuries).
 
So ... hidden family trees, hiints about relatioships - that is a bit like Wolfe.  Deep thoughts, theosophical musings, arcane vocabulary, multiple meanings to names - nah, not quite on Wolfe's level.
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