GRRM: A Retrospective

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Title: The Complete Dreamsongs
Author: George Martin
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SFF
Pages: 1146
Words: 494K

Synopsis:

Combining Dreamsongs I and Dreamsongs II into one omnibus, this collects the majority of Martin's short stories from the beginning of his career to its publication date in either 2003 or 2006.

My Thoughts:

I really liked how Martin talked about the stage of his life when he wrote each story. It gave some background and made him a person. show more Even in his own words he comes across as an arrogant jackass and anyone who thinks he's going to finish Game of Thrones had better look at his own self-proclaimed track record. With that out of the way....

This was some of the best writing I have read in a while. Martin has talent and he's spent the time honing his skill and it shows. Based on the writing alone, this deserves 5 stars. If you like good story TELLING, then you need to read this.

However, WHAT he writes about is what took this right down to its current rating. Almost every story is sad, melancholic, depressing, horrific or down right twisted. While Sandkings is a fantastic horrorific short story, 1100 pages of that kind of things wears you down. These stories also gave me vivid bad dreams, to the point where I stopped reading this in the evenings.

I read this in small doses (I started in mid-April) and I cannot imagine the affect of trying to read this straight through. I would not recommend that to anyone, no matter how much they might enjoy Martin's writing. While I plan on re-reading Sandkings every decade or so, I think that will be the limit of my Martin reading. I will assiduously avoid all his others writings.

★★☆☆½ show less

Riding on the first wave of success for his massive series A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin and Subterranean published this equally massive tome with an overview of his career up to that point in 2003. It has since been reprinted by Gollancz and Bantam under various tittles, sometimes in one volume, sometimes in two or three. I own the Gollancz edition from 2007. One of the one volume ones. It weighs in at 1185 pages and contains an introduction by Gardner Dozois, nine essays, thirty-four pieces of short fiction and a bibliography. It is, in other words, quite an exhaustive read. I've been going over it in the past few months for a Dutch language project over at Hebban. That project involves ten articles and will probably total something show more close to twenty-thousand words. It's a bit much to do the whole thing over again in English (it would have to be substantially rewritten for a different audience) so I figured I'd try for a more conventional review for Random Comments. With so much material to cover it turned out to be a bit on the long side so I am splitting it in three parts.

part 1, part 2, part 3

For the people who read Dutch, the first part of a Dutch language series of articles can be found here. show less

A mixed bag - some good, most average, none that were really bad. I found myself skipping a lot. Disappointing.

Het is een bundel korte verhalen met lange beschrijvingen van de auteur over wanneer en waarom hij ze geschreven heeft en in welk verband we alles moeten zien. Ik hou niet zo van korte verhalen dus het duurde wat lang voordat ik er ‘in’ zat, maar de verhalen leken wel steeds beter te worden en op het eind was mijn enige kritiekpuntje het kolossale formaat wat lezen bemoeilijkte. Voor liefhebbers van alle sf, fantasy en horror.