I’m probably in a minority amongst science-fiction and fantasy fans in that I never got past the first book of George R.R.Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice”. the long-awaited final volume of which will be published this summer, and which has now been adapted for the telly.

I remember reading the first volume as part of the Book Club on the CompuServe SFLIT forum (who’s old enough to remember CompuServe?). Everyone else was gushing praise about it, but it left be a little underwhelmed. Yes, it was a page-turner, but I found it read too much like a daytime soap-opera in medieval clothes. One reviewer described it as “Dallas in furs”, which for me was precisely what was wrong with it. Far too many characters, and not nearly enough emphasis on the worldbuilding. It may be there was a lot more creative worldbuilding that’s revealed in later volumes, but in the first volume at least, GRRM didn’t show me enough to keep me interested enough in the series to want to read any of the following books.

For me. it was a stark contrast to Frank Herbert’s classic Dune which we’d read previously, which is a book where the worldbuilding is very much centre-stage. I remember the sysop saying how much better Game of Thrones was than Dune, and the patronising way she kept dismissing my attempts to defend Dune still rankle a decade later. The line she kept parroting, which she claimed came from the TV industry, was “If you care about the characters, nothing else matters. If you don’t care about the characters, nothing else matters”. I took that as an example of how SF and Fantasy must be watered-down for mass audiences, and her repeating it showed a very strong preference for character-driven books, and no interest in worldbuilding at all. “How on earth can the planet be a character” was another line.

And that’s my problem. The sort of fantasy and science-fiction I prefer is always driven by the worldbuilding, in the broadest sense. Not just the physical environment that’s so centre-stage in Dune, but the back-stories, history and cultures. For me, the setting is far more than just background, but rather the context for both the characters and the story. Instead, “A Game of Thrones” takes as it’s plot a retelling of the Wars of the Roses, and takes it’s characters from the archetypes of American soap opera.

Not that I’m suggesting characters the readers can strongly identify with, or gripping plotlines don’t matter. Any worldbuilding is wasted if the world the author ends up with isn’t one in which he or she can tell a great story. But I read SF and Fantasy to have the author take me toanother world. It’s got to be a story which couldn’t have been set in suburban Bracknell.

On this subject, Charlie Stross agrees with me. That’s why I like his books.