The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and Fire

David Stockhoff · 02 Aug 2012, 01:52 · from 2012-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:52:41 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and Fire
In-Reply-To: <20120802003215.WSBU18532.eastrmfepo203.cox.net at eastrmimpo305.cox.net>
References: <50192826.7020800 at verizon.net>
	<1343831425.70197.YahooMailClassic at web160701.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
	<CAOVrOBcJEkBv9viamwnJah_K5NDB5gT-0mpyzt-e_bRoUM0G6Q at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAJ8=rtg_ejXjRkp17HK3eTgPjZQs4G1G_TikTiTKqifZuoo6Ew at mail.gmail.com>
	<1343855098.55956.YahooMailNeo at web84514.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<20120802003215.WSBU18532.eastrmfepo203.cox.net at eastrmimpo305.cox.net>
Message-ID: <5019DD69.1060607 at verizon.net>


On 8/1/2012 8:32 PM, James B. Jordan wrote:
>>
>>
>>     From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>>     To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>>     Sent: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 2:19 PM
>>     Subject: Re: (urth) The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and
>>     Fire
>>
>>     I'll also speak out in favor of Martin -- he wrote what I consider to
>>     be THE best rock'n'roll novel of all time, THE ARMAGEDDON RAG. The
>>     ASOIAF books, to my mind, are brutally honest depictions of the kind
>>     of society that generic fantasy readers & writers like to, well,
>>     fantasize about.
>>
>>     The Society for Creative Anachronism likes to say that it recreates
>>     "the middle ages as they should have been." Martin describes a
>>     medieval fantasy world as it really would have been.
>>
>
> Well, but without the Church and Christianity. So it's not actually 
> medieval at all.
>
> JBJordan

That's a good point---Westeros is plainly far more pagan that our world. 
I'd guess that there are reflections of elements of myths that went into 
Christianity (Osiris' rebirth and so on), but no Christ. He seems to try 
to keep it vague, and yet offers a remarkable amount of detail.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net