well, it is, but only book 1 is out so far. i really can't wait for her next one. mind you, i'd have liked her to have been able to continue the bel dame series. that was awesome. given the mad max frenzy right now, this book should be pushed hard. it's essentially mad max in a kind of fantasy setting with scifi. dune mixed with mad max and pulp sword and sorcery. brilliant stuff.
How has ASoIaF defined fantasy? It is a grand and complex story with many twists, but to me it only made a change in the way it treats its central characters; as in that they can be killed off or that their lives turned into a terrible mess at any moment so that any attachment is held in fear by the reader.
I started to debate this with respect to Martin, but then I thought about what it means to "define" fantasy. I guess one valid definition would be that when people define the fantasy genre, they use a certain book series as an example. For many people, Martin probably fulfills that, especially for younger readers who didn't grow up on Belgariad, Shannara, Thomas Covenant, Elric, Amber, etc. I don't know if I would say nothing else comes close (for anyone over 35, any of the series I list probably come close or surpass it) but I'd guess its the most popular fantasy series of the last 20 years.
That is a valid definition, although the thing is: These statements have been made every handful of years about a series. For years I read that the Wheel of Time would define fantasy for decades to come as well, but seeing the recent responses on this forum the WoT's impact is growing less and less. Before ASoIaF became a TV series the books were popular enough but nothing out of the ordinary (if I compare it to WoT and Sword of Truth). Similar things happened with Twilight and True Blood when they were adapted into movie and TV series. For some time I even feared vampire novels would swamp the other kinds of fantasy.
Absolutely! I was eleven or twelve when the first one came out. I read all of them, but I have a love/hate relationship with the series. My mom read the Dark is Rising Sequence to me even before I read Harry Potter. I think that it is more sophisticated, more interesting, and a heck of a lot more consistent than Harry Potter.
