Fixed.

Well, of course he did! What, don’t you see it? ;)

After all, we know how WW2 ended, but people still keep using it as the setting for stories.

I don’t think the point is to write stories about characters in the context of a civil war. The point is to write a kind of deconstructed history of a civil war through the voices of a large number of marginal actors. None of them is capable of becoming a Churchill or a Hitler, but collectively their actions, even just their presence, doesn’t just influence, but virtually makes up the course of events (and it’s a civil war, not WWII, so it’s the chaos that’s the story). In other words, narrative history focuses on a few events the historian deems pivotal and compresses the rest into demographic trends, economic circumstances, &c. Individual motives, feelings, &c., are erased by that kind of narrative. What Martin is giving us is a history built from all the stuff that is left out of history. Maybe he’s only doing this to set us up for when the real heroes swoop in and save the day, but I doubt that.

I think of it as something like a medieval fantasy response to subaltern studies. Since it’s medieval history he’s referring to, we have virtually no data about the lower classes that isn’t demographic—few if any narrative sources that would tell us their thoughts, feelings, motives, &c., as we have for elites. So, as with medieval history, the story is limited to the elites, but he picks out the most marginal of elites—children, women, cripples: people who are mostly just affected by events, and who can do something, but very little, to change their course—while teasing us with hints of what things are like for the commoners. And then he drops in moments like Tyrion the dwarf (an actual midget, not a dwarf like in LOTR) riding a horse into battle, wielding an axe (he ends up falling and hitting his head and barely surviving), and the fat kid (forget his name) running down the stairs and dropping an old manuscript in a puddle (a manuscript which is being used for research that could end up saving the day), and a lot of attention to food, festivals, and clothing—intertextual shout-outs to historians and fans of medieval fantasy.

You could say that it’s epic fantasy without heroes.

After all, we know how WW2 ended, but people still keep using it as the setting for stories. If Tolkien were immortal, for instance, he could very easily keep writing essentially standalone novels or trilogies about people living during the events of Lord of the Rings, describing locations that were only mentioned in passing in LOTR.

I’m glad Pratchett didn’t munge all his novels together into one massive, slow-moving, never-resolving tube of plot.

I predict this is going to end like Robert Jordan’s books. Great beginning, tedious middle, awful home stretch, no ending.

Maybe we just need to learn to be satisfied with the beginning for some things?

Ice and Fire has a kind of post-modern approach plot, like DeLillo’s White Noise (‘all plots are ultimately futile,’ or in Ice and Fire’s case, that narrative history is futile), and that the central theme and central current of events, which doesn’t particularly depend on any of the characters, is the failure of “heroism” or “nobility” to maintain a just political order. And what Martin has done is create a setup where you can infer such an over-arching plot (which in any case is more about large-scale social configurations than about characters), but he scrupulously avoids signaling that any particular event is bound to be especially consequential in “history”. The dragon girl is a foil, she looks like she will be completely unstoppable, the one character that might matter to history, and ultimately a kind of deus ex machina foretold; and she is very marginal to the narrative.

On the other hand, would a fantasy series have the same chance for success if it weren’t set in warmed-over England?

The Empire Trilogy by Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts is based on medieval Korea, but yeah…

Even Earthsea, which is meant to be “racially” progressive, is in warmed-over ancient Greece, and pivots on Orientalist tropes. And Martin’s Asia-equivalent is a hideous mess of Orientalist tropes (perfectly disciplined eunuch soldiers, ignorant violent nomads, slave-holding aristocrats…). But I always thought this was more a matter of self-selection by writers than anything to do with the market for fantasy novels.

The initial setup is the (Sta/Yo)rks versus the Lan(ca/nni)sters, but that’s not driving the plot in any detailed sense. I mean, possibly we’re going to end up with the disabled Stark kid on the throne murdering the Lannister princes, but I don’t really see the series gathering momentum toward that point. Mostly, the ‘plot’ has turned into just one damn thing after another, which is a surprisingly realistic (allowing for the whole fantasy novel level of realism) way of presenting events, as set forth in 7, but also annoying and dull.

But I should stop griping—I got sucked in by the first book, and have been growing crankier and crankier with each subsequent book.

It’s mostly the Wars of the Roses, with a bit of a side order of Mongols. Henry VIII dies to kick off the conflict, rather than consolidating the successor dynasty, but that’s not exactly a huge innovation.

On the other hand, would a fantasy series have the same chance for success if it weren’t set in warmed-over England?

Is there a “the plot,” though?

Hmm… don’t we have the internet for that?

Same problem with reading Stephen Eriksen’s Malazan books. There’s so many plot threads, I think I’d need to fire up Microsoft Project to keep track of who’s doing what when.

“What is interesting about them to me is that they tell the story of events that we would normally think of as major historical events involving virtually an infinite number of actors which we boil down to a narrative involving only a few key actors”

Or, in another way, that when historical events are happening its actually hard to figure out What the Fuck Was Going On.
I was in the Soviet Union when it collapsed, and except for the times I could beg a shortwave radio, it was really hard to find out what was happening; you could feel history turning, but figuring out what direction was very difficult without someone authoratitive with better sources taking the information and constructing a narrative.

defending their bloatedness as some sort of subtle intertextuality is ludicrous

Alright, tell me if this is ludicrous.

What is interesting about them to me is that they tell the story of events that we would normally think of as major historical events involving virtually an infinite number of actors which we boil down to a narrative involving only a few key actors (“Caesar crossed the Rubicon”), and instead of this kind of narrative, we have many personal/psychological narratives involving a lot of marginal actors, eschewing categories like “just governance,” “the people,” “popular will,” that would condense a lot of events or judgments, and without characters that we can rely on as stand-ins for an entire class of people we are sympathetic to—for example, no commoners that can be taken as representative of commoners in general. The meaning of the really important events in the story completely depends on our memories of previous interactions between the same characters (or related characters). Avoiding straightforward categories (such as saying “this story is about a civil war”) that, once you name them, beg beginning and ending dates, a list of factions, &c., means there are no anchor points that could be used to situate characters in a historical narrative. The point is to get lost in the maze, and it takes a lot more than a novel’s worth of writing to get the reader lost that way. I can imagine a much shorter work doing this by focusing on a smaller range of events and only going so far as to prove the concept, but that would probably be less entertaining, and if it weren’t entertaining, would it even work?