My year has been made, and it's only January the eighteenth. Unfortunately, I have now been set up for either a very long wait or a huge disappointment. I am talking about, of course, the recent announcement that HBO has acquired the rights to make a series of George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, or ASOIAF, as us fanboys like to call it. For those of you that don't know, ASOIAF is a masterfully written series of fantasy books that is leaps and bounds better than anything else out there, past or present. I won't go into too much detail here, but if you want to learn more, click on a few of my favorite links and you're likely to get enough information to satisfy your curiosity for some time. And no, George R R Martin is not that objectivist asshole prick. That's Terry Goodkind.
Why is this so important to me? ASOIAF represents a watershed moment in my life. I've been reading books for a long, long time, and have had a few favorites come and go. I've had favorite authors, and I've had favorite books. Occasionally, the planets would align and one of my favorite authors would write a book that ranked among my favorites. Over time, some of them fell out of favor, some I got tired of, some got replaced by others, then forgotten, and some shot themselves in the head. But I've never been able to proclaim a book or an author to be my absolute, undeniable favorite. Until ASOIAF.
When I first read A Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, back in 2002, I had no clue what I was getting in to. Two years prior, I had just gotten back into reading fantasy after picking up a couple of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I read them and enjoyed them. They were an improvement over what I used to read back in the 1980's, but they still weren't exactly what I was looking for. But my interest was piqued and I started buying books at random from the fantasy shelves, with hopes of finding the "perfect fantasy story" to suit my tastes. The problem, with hindsight, was that I really didn't know what I wanted. If, in early 2002, someone would have asked me, "what, exactly, are you looking for in your fantasy stories?" My likely response would have been either "I don't know," or "I'll know it when I read it." The latter happened to be true - once I read A Game of Thrones, I knew. It was well written by a very experienced and polished author. The world was full of grim and gritty realism. The use of magic was subtle and didn't interfere with the plot. And then there were the characters - the clincher, as it were. The characters came alive, were flawed, and were believable because they were flawed. There were no absolute good guys out to save the world. There were no absolute evil overlords bent on destroying it. In fact, that was one thing that always bothered me about high fantasy - why were the evil overlords so hell-bent on destroying the world when they actually lived in it as well? It all seemed kind of counterintuitive to me. I loved ASOIAF because the good guys did bad things and the bad guys did good things. Heroes made dumb, sometimes self-serving decisions and got people killed. Bad guys, when given opportunities to reflect, actually felt remorse.
There are four books in his series now, with three more due over the next several years. Mind you, these are not small books, but there are flocks of loyal fans that devour each one the day they are released, myself included. And so far, every one of these have ranked over any other book I have ever read. Undoubtedly. And those are strong words from me - I'm very reluctant to call anything my favorite. I'm one of those types that will give you a list of twenty things when you ask things like, "hey, what is your favorite such-and-such?" Because I rarely, if ever, believe in absolute favorites.
I'm a little to young to actually remember the moon launches of the late sixties and early seventies. I was alive, but still in diapers, so I can only imagine the actual excitement and fervor the general populace felt when the first Saturn V rocket was launched with three astronauts on board - two of which were going to be walking on the surface of another planet in a few days time. I'm such a sucker for moments like these that I really wish that I could have been more aware of what was happening. I wish I could remember what it felt like to be there that day and understand that I was witnessing the one of the most important events in the history of mankind. If and when HBO decides to take their rights and actually greenlight this thing, the day the ASOIAF series premiers will be my own, personal moon launch. Like I said, books are important to me, and to see my most important books ever be made into a TV series will be exciting, eagerly anticipated, and hopefully not disappointing. Why am I so excited? I don't really know. Perhaps it validates my tastes to know there are others out there that feel as strongly as I do. So strongly, in fact, that they are willing to spend millions of dollars and years of time to bring the greatest story I have ever read to the most popular entertainment medium ever - the television set. And in the process, maybe, just maybe, it will hook an entirely new audience into the world of ASOIAF.
