FIRE AND BLOOD
A feast for fans
World-builder extraordinaire George RR Martin explores Targaryen family history.
released OUT NOW! 736 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author George rr Martin Publisher HarperVoyager
There’s no getting away from it: Fire And Blood was a disappointment to fans the day it was announced.
With George RR Martin’s entitled audience furious that the author wasn’t hard at work on The Winds Of Winter (the penultimate volume in the A Song Of Ice And Fire series on which Game Of Thrones is based), Fire And Blood was written off as a waste of time by almost everyone it was aimed at. Forums exploded, and a thousand Joffreys sent ravens to George, swearing their loyalty to the main series.
Their loss. The first part of a two-volume history, Fire And Blood may break format, but is just as essential as the novels proper. In many ways it’s the ultimate ASOIAF book, despite the fact that it focuses on one family (the Targaryens), is set 300 years before Thrones, and is told from one perspective (Archmaester Gyldayn’s).
You want dragons? Have Balerion the Black Dread, Meraxes, Silverwing, Seasmoke, Dreamfyre and many more. You want incest? Have an MFF sibling threesome in the first 10 pages. You want violence? Fire And Blood contains the nastiest death of the entire series.
Most of all, did you enjoy George’s propensity for giving people similar names (a habit that caused HBO to rename characters on the TV show), forcing you to re-read passages to double-check who he’s talking about? Aegon, Aenar and Aerys are all described in one section; good luck telling them apart.
Just don’t ask us to give you a plot summary. George squeezes as many narrative threads into two paragraphs as most authors put into entire novels. Seriously, Martin’s said there’s enough here for 20 books, and he’s actually underestimating it.
It’s an incredibly dense piece of writing, not a traditional fantasy story by any means (unless your favourite Tolkien is The Silmarillion), reading more like a popular history book than a traditional novel.
Because it’s a prequel, we get all the usual prequel stuff. We hear of the first Hand of the King, Orys Baratheon, and how the stag became his sigil. We find out how the Iron Throne was forged, and about the creation of King’s Landing. But the prequel tropes are dispensed with early on, leaving the kingdom clear for new tales. And what new tales. We get enough fresh heroes and villains to fill a castle, with Jaehaerys and Alysanne soaring to the top of our list of favourite Thrones characters.
In a single sentence, Martin introduces one character so compelling she could front her own spin-off series, before he dismisses her as irrelevant to the main story and we never hear from her again. It’s no wonder Thrones never featured trolls... the king of that species writes the thing.
Another fascinating section discusses a forbidden book that is changed so much by everyone who comes into contact with it (especially actors) that it’s hard to tell what original truths it contained – a subtle criticism of the adaptation process?
Whatever. Martin should swap his signature hat for a Make Westeros Fun Again cap. If the main series has tied itself into a Gordian knot of protracted plotting, Fire And Blood cuts through the nonsense with a Valyrian steel sword.
The Winds Of Winter can wait. Until then, we’ll devour Fire And Blood, a feast of pure imagination as impressive as any course that came before it. Sam Ashurst
Fire And Blood was inspired by a fourvolume history of the Plantagenets, written by Thomas B Costain in the ’50s.
An incredibly dense piece of writing