George RR Martin's on-going effort to catch up the Robert Jordan as the King of Bloated Fantasy takes a giant leap forward with the quasi- completion of A Feast for Crows. From Martin's announcement:
... my publishers and I, after much discussion and weighing of alternatives, have decided to split the narrative into two books .... The first plan was simply to lop the text in half. In that scenario, I would finish the last few chapters in as short a length (and time) as possible. That would have produced a story of maybe 1650 to 1700 pages in manuscript, which we would simply have broken into two chunks of roughly equal length and published as A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part One and A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part Two.
We decided not to do that. It was my feeling -- and I pushed hard for this, so if you don't like the solution, blame me, not my publishers -- that we were better off telling all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. Cutting the novel in half would have produced two half-novels; our approach will produce two novels taking place simultaneously, but set hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and involving different casts of characters (with some overlap).
The division has been done, and I think it works quite well. The upshot is, A FEAST FOR CROWS is now moving into production. It is still a long book, but not too long; about the same size as A GAME OF THRONES. The focus in FEAST will be on Westeros, King's Landing, the riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. More than that I won't say.
Martin's saga is already more than 4 times longer than The Lord of the Rings. His story isn't four times more complex, let alone four times better, than LotR. My advice to GRRM: Wrap it up before you jump the shark.
Update: Steven Taylor headlines his comment on the announcement: And there was much rejoicing. Hmph. My views are more along the lines of a Crooked Timber commenter:
I started A Song of Ice and Fire just after volume two was published, and I figured on a nice trilogy without too long a wait for the third volume.
Then a) the series was extened to a sexology b) Martin decided to change his production schedule to a book every five years.
Yep. It's most annoying.
