I’m fine with “entertaining”, but when a series starts to avalanche into purple prose describing the mithril veins running through a green marble colonnade, it’s time to cut bait.

GRRM is just another penny dreadful fantasy author, coming from the same school as Robert Jordan, David Eddings, and Terry Goodkind. They’re entertaining to read on the can when you’re a teenager, but they’re not literature. And they all suffer from the same “a trilogy of thirteen books” hubris, where the author twigs…

He is a hack, writing a hack serial. Don’t pretend that he’s the Shakespeare of our time.

He has better than no pages. He has a MS Word template. All he has to do is let Clippy loose with character names and a few purple phrases, and the story literally writes/mail merges itself to completion.

Remember the Wheel of Time series? Same deal. Page counts that made the Yellow Pages look anorexic, and enough story to nearly fill three sentences.

GRRM: The L. Ron Hubbard of fantasy.

The historic bridge was an inside job.