2021年1月23日发(作者：dfg)
The
Good:
George
R.R.
Martin
sets
the
standard
in
several
ways;
indeed,
his
skill
in
certain areas are frankly intimidating:
Character Development: This is perhaps Martin’s greatest strength. He is able to present
such a wide range of distinct personalities, from the Starks for whom honor is paramount,
to the Lannisters who are driven by greed and ambition, to the Targaryens who are driven
by
vengeance.
Martin’s
skills
shine
greatest
when
his
characters face
decisions
where
none of their choices easily fit their personal moralities. As time goes on these choices
become ever more difficult to make, the characters are often forced
to make decisions
between
the
unthinkable
and
the
too
terrible
to
contemplate.
What’s
more,
the
author
takes obvious delight in the interactions between the characters.
World
Detail:
The
author
takes
great
pains
in
his
descriptions
of
a
stunning
array
of
distinctly different environments and the people therein, from the wildlings of the far north
to the people of the Summer Isles. He takes just as much effort to allot cultural traditions
and characteristics to the extent that they are totally believable; the reader finds himself
saying, “Hey, I know some people just like that!”

Expectation of the Reader’s Comprehension: The story and dialogue in the series is never
‘dumbed
down’
for
the
reader,
who
must
either
keep
up
or
soon
become
lost
and
subsequently drowned in the sheer complexity of the plot. The twists of fate and human
caprice are brutal; the naive and soft-hearted reader need not turn the first page. This is a
series written for the adult who has a substantial level of understanding not only of the
vagaries of history and culture through the ages, but particularly of the evil that desperate
men and women do.
The Bad: But the author isn’t perfect. He has his faults as well:

Sheer Size of the Cast of Characters: It is one thing for a writer to present a vast, varied
world
with
a
grand
cast
of
characters,
but
it
is
another
thing
altogether
to
expect
the
reader to keep up with what’s happening with most or all of those characters. It doesn’t
help
that many of these characters were introduced with
little introduction. Martin must
have
the
classic
steel-trap
memory
to
juggle
and
keep
straight
all
the
many
different
storylines in the books, but he tosses so many personalities into the mix that the reader
loses track of some of the sub-plots therein.
Description of Battles: By the end of the third book, there have been two large battles:
King’s Landing and at the Wall. While the author’s description of the fear and violence of
individual melee actions was
superior, at no
point does
he
give
the
reader much more
than
a
cursory
overall
view
of
position,
strategy,
or
tactical
maneuver
of
the
armies
involved. Compare this to sweeping overviews that Tolkien gave of the battles of Helms
Deep and the Pelennor Fields. Martin’s omissions of this type lead one to suspect th
at
perhaps he does not feel comfortable with providing descriptions of war beyond what we
would today call the squad level.
The Ugly: Sex, Sex, and More Sex
—
and almost never for the right romantic reasons.
It seems that many authors today feel pressured to include scenes of gratuitous sex, and
not
just
romantic
missionary-position
sex,
either,
if
the
wild
success
of
Fifty
Shades
of
Gray is any indication. But Martin goes beyond the pale with descriptions that border on
outright pedophilia. To be fair, as
in much of the rest of the series, he’s drawing many of
the cultural and societal mores from our own medieval history, and it was not unusual for