I just received the book myself, and gosh I hope you are wrong, but you know what, I found myself nodding and agreeing with most of the things you’ve said. But right now, I’m just too happy to have the damn book into my hands to think of any hypothetical disappointement.
Martin is a really good writer, and he’s not alone out there, Robin Hobb, Brandon Sanderson… so I’ve got good faith that the fantasy genre still has some nice days ahead and might very well surprise and enchant us for a long time still!

Nadine

The LOST series formula… keep them going… why end? Till the day they have to end it ridiculously, and swallow it!

Bahhh! I no reviewer… just loved your profetic text above. Congratulations for expressing for many.
It could/should be so epical…
Why bother read the next? ¨years to deliver that? pufff

Hope is lost.

I just finished the book and I have to say it was a big disappointment. It made me laugh that your pre review was fairly close to what a dance with dragons ended up being. GRRM spends a good 50 chapters in the book just dragging his feet and not progressing much of anything. It seems like he has completely lost his touch and by redoing the book has completely derailed the series.

I also wanted to comment on the authors you mentioned. To their credit they had the ability to actual finish there series in a decent amount of time (exclude Robert Jordan who should get a waiver due to illness) and not hum and ha for 6 years over a book that is actually the second half of the previous book. Before I read the book I thought he was holding off just because of the HBO series and that he was trying to stale and amass as large a following as he could. Now, I feel more tempted to conclude that he lost the writing thread that made this series so good at the outset.

Renowned fantasy author George R.R. Martin expressed his extreme disgust with the series’ writers for producing this ending, saying on his livejournal: “Battlestar Galactica ends with “God Did It.” Looks like somebody skipped Writing 101, when you learn that a deus ex machina is a crappy way to end a story…Yeah, yeah, sometimes the journey is its own reward. I certainly enjoyed much of the journey with BSG…but damn it, doesn’t anybody know how to write an ending any more? Writing 101, kids. [wikipedia]

Today, while trying to blow off a little steam in the middle of work, I Googled “Dance with dragons sucks.” Your preview prediction page was at the top of the results. I’d like to compliment you on an excellent set of predictions, and an unfortunately well-founded analysis of the series at this point. You nailed it. I wish you hadn’t…

When the pleasure is more in the hype than in the viewing experience something is wrong. However, it’s hype potential that gets most movies made.

Even if you take this as an action flick (for which I have low standards), it holds up terribly compared to say the Bourne films, which also dealt with a character unsure about which parts of the world were real and which were not–albeit for more prosaic reasons. Those were the ideal “films of this type.” Beautifully shot, visceral action, suspense, and a filming style that matched the character’s state of mind and the tone of the plot (specifically I mean the fact that almost no shot ever lasts more than a second or two). They had characters you could care for, at least in an action movie kind of way. The movies cohered. I won’t go over all the ways that Inception fails to do that, since you just did much the same thing. However, I think it’s worth noting the trilogy as a kind of anti-Inception, an example of what intelligent, beautiful action movies can be.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
No Country for Old Men
The Reader

Toolbit out.

Sincerely, Timur I.