GRRM: A RRetrospective

Riding on the first wave of success for his massive series A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin and Subterranean published this equally massive tome with an overview of his career up to that point in 2003. It has since been reprinted by Gollancz and Bantam under various tittles, sometimes in one volume, sometimes in two or three. I own the Gollancz edition from 2007. One of the one volume ones. It weighs in at 1185 pages and contains an introduction by Gardner Dozois, nine essays, thirty-four pieces of short fiction and a bibliography. It is, in other words, quite an exhaustive read. I've been going over it in the past few months for a Dutch language project over at Hebban. That project involves ten articles and will probably total something close to twenty-thousand words. It's a bit much to do the whole thing over again in English (it would have to be substantially rewritten for a different audience) so I figured I'd try for a more conventional review for Random Comments. With so much material to cover it turned out to be a bit on the long side so I am splitting it in three parts.

part 1, part 2, part 3

For the people who read Dutch, the first part of a Dutch language series of articles can be found here.