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Urbane Guerrilla · 01-09-2007, 03:44 AM

Game of Thrones is unrelentingly grim, and I'm not sure I see the point of the unrelenting grimness going on for a couple thousand pages. I'm having great trouble finding any character in those multitudinous pages that I actually like, except perhaps the two or three very young characters not corrupted yet by this praetorian power struggle.

I've been reading from this quadrilogy (or is it longer?) every now and again as a way of sampling current F&SF work and taking a break from reading nonfiction.

I am presently engrossed in Whittaker Chambers' Cold Friday. It's dated nowadays, but he was a vivid writer. He seems to have concluded big-C Communism happens in societies in which religion has faded. I haven't found any explicit statement of this in Cold Friday, but the implication behind a lot of his writing about Communism is that it was a kind of religion. Other writers have stated that -- perhaps they'd read Chambers and drew this same conclusion from his work.

01-09-2007, 03:44 AM	#628
Urbane Guerrilla Person who doesn't update the user title Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Southern California Posts: 6,674	Game of Thrones is unrelentingly grim, and I'm not sure I see the point of the unrelenting grimness going on for a couple thousand pages. I'm having great trouble finding any character in those multitudinous pages that I actually like, except perhaps the two or three very young characters not corrupted yet by this praetorian power struggle. I've been reading from this quadrilogy (or is it longer?) every now and again as a way of sampling current F&SF work and taking a break from reading nonfiction. I am presently engrossed in Whittaker Chambers' Cold Friday. It's dated nowadays, but he was a vivid writer. He seems to have concluded big-C Communism happens in societies in which religion has faded. I haven't found any explicit statement of this in Cold Friday, but the implication behind a lot of his writing about Communism is that it was a kind of religion. Other writers have stated that -- perhaps they'd read Chambers and drew this same conclusion from his work. __________________ Wanna stop school shootings? End Gun-Free Zones, of course. Last edited by Urbane Guerrilla; 01-09-2007 at 03:53 AM.