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

Jeff Wilson · 02 Aug 2012, 04:05 · from 2012-August.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:05:36 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and Fire
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On 8/1/2012 8:43 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
>
>> Apparently, the history and other fantastic parts are implausibly grandeurous
>> intentionally because they exist only to serve the realistic characters and
>> plot.
>
>
> I don't see in that quotation that he says why the series has fantastic parts, much less what their "only" purpose is.  I also don't think "a truth at the core of it" is necessarily the same as "realistic characters and plot."

There's more at the link and in other publicity he's done about the 
books and show.

The characters need realistic personalities to reflect the concerns of 
those human hearts rather than be caricatures with no internal 
motivations: the antagonists aren't that way because they are EEEEVIL, 
they antagonize becasue of differing loyalties, resentment, greed, etc.

But the other stuff, the lie parts like the fictional fantasy setting, 
*are* there for the human story's purposes, and you can say The Wall's 
been there for 8000 years for the same reason the story of the Burning 
Buddha has him being on fire for 72,000 years.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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