Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago

by James Lowder

  Daenerys’s journey from child bride to first female ruler of a khalasar is one of the more dramatic examples in the Ice and Fire series of a woman taking power. However, hers is not a journey without problems—both for the character and for readers. The most obvious of these is the fact that she falls in love with Khal Drogo. For a modern reader, this is inevitably problematic—being a mere thirteen, she can hardly be said to have consented to her marriage, much less to the sexual acts that take place within it. However, in Westerosi society, she’s considered of marriageable age once she has physically matured to a point where she can bear children. Her emotional maturity and personal desire for the union are irrelevant in a culture where the woman’s role is to bear a man’s children and to submit to him.

  Daenerys is sold to Khal Drogo by her brother, whose goal is to use the khal’s men to invade Westeros and regain the throne he believes is his birthright. And Daenerys understands that being bartered off to a powerful savage, to cement a political and military alliance, is simply part of the role women must play in her culture.

  It’s clear that Viserys has been emotionally abusing Daenerys for years. It’s also clear that she has internalized this abuse, as she often makes excuses for his behavior. She accepts her situation vis-à-vis her brother, her status, and her forced marriage, even as she fears the outcome. Like Sansa Stark, Daenerys doesn’t question the world in which she lives.

  Because she has been bartered like chattel, coerced into a marriage about which she has no say, Daenerys’s first sexual experience is, unsurprisingly and disturbingly, as a victim of rape at the hands of her new husband. Though she “willingly” goes with Khal Drogo, she cannot be said to have consented. She doesn’t want to have sex with him. Her agreement to the sex act takes place under duress. And, as she has no true agency of her own, she cannot truly agree to her role in the bargain Viserys has made.

  By modern standards, if not those of Westeros, age and coercion make every sexual encounter Daenerys has with Khal Drogo amount to ongoing marital rape. Eventually, she does take control of their sexual life, after learning ways to manipulate Drogo sexually. It could be argued that this was her way of regaining power. However, the canard of the woman who falls in love with her rapist is extremely difficult to overcome for many readers.

  And it may be that we aren’t meant to overcome it.

  There’s an enormous amount of violence against women in A Song of Ice and Fire, and its portrayal is uniformly negative. It is always uncomfortable rather than titillating. Rape and sexual violence, both from “protectors” and from strangers, are persistent threats to all the female characters. Robert Baratheon drunkenly rapes Cersei; when she tells him he’s hurt her, he blames it on alcohol. Sansa, Arya, and Brienne all experience verbal threats of sexual violence from a wide variety of men. This omnipresent threat in these women’s lives creates what amounts to an environment of sexual oppression. That this circumstance is rarely remarked upon by the characters shows just how entrenched it is in the culture.

  Given her circumstance, Daenerys has only two real options. She can either resist Khal Drogo—a losing proposition both for her and for Viserys—or she can find a way to live with her situation. She chooses the latter. With this choice, she begins to gain power, first through Khal Drogo, who grants her both his protection and the authority that comes from being his mate, and, later, through her own agency when she emerges unscathed from Khal Drogo’s funeral pyre with the baby dragons. Only with Khal Drogo’s death is she free to make her way in the world, largely unencumbered by male control.

  Of course, none of this power comes without a price. As she gathers her army together, Daenerys begins to sacrifice aspects of her personality. She becomes harder and less compassionate, her choices less personal. A sweetness that she had at the beginning of the series is slowly burning away as she becomes more and more powerful.

  The Price to Be Paid

  These female characters, along with many others in the series, are a striking group of powerful women making their way through a patriarchal world where the mere fact of their gender would deny them power.

  Sansa, Arya, Cersei, Brienne, and Daenerys are all on journies to create a place in the world for themselves in the face of massive obstacles thrown at them by an oppressive society. Though their paths through this maze toward autonomy are different, most of them seek the same thing: control over their own lives.

  Sansa loses her power within the culture after her father is killed. She lives her life buffeted by others, refusing to take any action that would create a more autonomous life for herself. Arya seeks to avenge those who have wronged her by seizing power where and when she can—no matter that the kinds of power available to her drive her further and further from the girl she once was. Cersei takes power through guile, manipulation, and murder. She’s indifferent to how the power affects her because power is the only thing she understands and values. Brienne adopts the trappings of masculine power even though it makes her a pariah and the butt of jokes. Her power is blunted both by her own self-loathing and the approbation of the culture around her. Daenerys is the one woman who holds her life in her own hands. Orphaned, widowed, possessing real power—in the form of the dragons, her own possibly magical nature, and the warriors at her command—there are no men who rule her.

  Unfortunately, power comes at a cost to all these women, just as it does to the men who wield it. Such is the nature of power in A Song of Ice and Fire.

  In Westeros, George R.R. Martin has created a brutal world where unspeakable acts are commonplace, where the shares of power allotted to men and women are clearly out of balance, where women must struggle, steal, and fight for every ounce of autonomy. The stories of Arya, Cersei, and all the other female characters are harsh, but they shine an even harsher light on their society and the lies that poison its heart. And that’s where Martin does something remarkable. In the midst of what appears to be a traditional male-power fantasy about war and politics, he serves up a grim, realistic, and harrowing depiction of what happens when women aren’t fully empowered in a society. In doing so, by creating such diverse and fully rendered female characters and thrusting them into this grim and bitter world, Martin has created a subversively feminist tale.

  CAROLINE SPECTOR has been an editor and writer in the science fiction, fantasy, and gaming fields for the last twenty-five years. Most recently, she has had stories in the Wild Cards collections Inside Straight, Busted Flush, and Suicide Kings. Before joining the Wild Cards consortium, Caroline authored three novels—Scars, Little Treasures, and Worlds Without End—editions of which have been published in English, French, German, and Hungarian. She has written and edited several adventure modules and sourcebooks for TSR’s game lines, most notably Top Secret/S.I. and Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying, both on her own and co-authored with her husband, gaming legend Warren Spector. In addition to her writing, Caroline spent two years as Associate Editor at the magazine Amazing Stories.

  JOHN JOS. MILLER

  COLLECTING ICE AND FIRE IN THE AGE OF NOOK AND KINDLE

  GEORGE R.R. MARTIN’S EPIC fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire, currently incomplete at five volumes, is a book world rarity: a genre series that has broken through the walls of the fantasy/science fiction ghetto. It’s immensely popular among mainstream readers and critics and is garnering a lot of attention in academic circles, even before the final book in the series has been published.

  Although concrete, reliable data is hard to come by, it seems fair to say that Ice and Fire has sold at least 15 million copies worldwide, though this is without sales from the most recently published volume, A Dance with Dragons. It has been widely reported that Dance sold more copies on its first day of availability than any other book in 2012, totaling 298,000 copies (170,000 in hardback; 110,000 as an e-book; and 18,000 as an audiobook). Total sales to date are unknown, or at least so far unpublished.

  There are several good reasons for its astounding popularity. The world of Ice a
nd Fire is epic in scope, peopled by dozens of carefully delineated characters, and written in wonderfully descriptive prose. A masterfully produced, written, and acted television adaptation of Martin’s universe doesn’t hurt, either, drawing in a multitude of readers who would otherwise have not been aware of the novels.

  A Song of Ice and Fire also sits directly astride the e-book/paper book publishing chasm. Although this doesn’t entirely account for its widespread popularity, I suspect that embracing the new publishing technology has something to do with its phenomenal success. A Game of Thrones, the first volume in the series, was published in 1996 before there were such things as e-books. The most recent volume, A Dance with Dragons, appeared in 2011, a time of booming e-book sales. What does this mean for readers in general and, more germane to this article, book collectors specifically? Obviously, the final words in this debate are yet to be spoken, but we can make some educated guesses.

  The first of Martin’s Ice and Fire volumes to have a simultaneous e-book/paper copy release was A Feast for Crows in 2005. Around that time earlier volumes were also translated to the e-book format. A Dance with Dragons had a simultaneous e-book/paper copy release, as presumably will later volumes in the series. For the first few titles e-book sales lagged behind even audiobooks, but with the publication of Dance sales for e-book and hardcover releases are, according to Martin, running neck and neck. Sales patterns are clearly shifting and will likely tilt further in the future. To what ultimate end is currently uncertain, though I doubt that the proliferation of e-books means the end of paper editions.

  Several factors contribute to this belief. First, collectible book sales remain unaffected by the advent of e-publishing. More detail is presented below, but publishers, both large and small, continue to eagerly produce various Ice and Fire editions, and once purchased, their owners are quite reluctant to part with them.

  Humanity can be sorted into—among other things—collectors and noncollectors. To be up front about my own bias, I’m firmly in the collectors’ camp. I enjoy the process of finding and acquiring objects (including books) that interest me, and I enjoy owning things that have an actual physical existence. To me and many others, collecting is a primal urge equivalent to eating and sleeping. This trait is not going to disappear from human nature anytime soon.

  Some changes in the publishing world are coming, though. The rising popularity of e-books probably means the death of the mass market paperback. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as return policies associated with this format—specifically, cover stripping for return and the shredding of the book’s body—are both costly and wasteful. E-readers are a convenient, easy, and increasingly affordable alternative to shipping masses of books that ultimately go unsold and are eventually pulped for little purpose.

  Also, many limited editions are produced by small publishers, not the huge ones owned by multinational corporations. (There are exceptions; as an example, see the HarperCollins slipcased editions of the Ice and Fire books.) These small publishers largely have a better sense of aesthetics than the utterly profit-driven multinationals. But even the giants can and do produce superlative volumes when the mood strikes, as with the signed and limited editions of the Robert Silverberg–edited Legends.

  Although today’s economic climate is tough, there are a multitude of small and not-so-small presses producing short-run first editions of highly artistic limited editions, not only of Martin’s work, but of a wide range of authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. In fact, there are probably so many limited editions that only the most well-heeled collectors can even attempt a complete genre collection, which was something that could be fairly easily done in earlier decades.

  Despite hand-wringing from the doomsayers—which has been going on since well before Dickens; I suspect that if there’d been publishers in Homer’s time, he’d have heard pretty much the same poor-mouthing as we do today—the publishing industry is not going to go away anytime soon. Both e-books and paper books will remain part of their business model, in some proportion or another, for the foreseeable future. That’s not to say that ideas of what constitute a book or even publication are not changing.

  Since the proliferation of e-books makes revision easy for even published texts, an artistic question arises regarding the concept of the “finished work.” Some authors—particular examples in the science fiction and fantasy field are Michael Moorcock and F. Paul Wilson—frequently revisit older works, polishing or even substantially altering them to fit more readily into a series framework.

  As a reader and collector both, I have mixed feelings about this practice, but it seems Ice and Fire fans have little to worry about on this score. Martin has no plans to revise earlier volumes. “The work is the work,” he told me not long ago. “Nothing has been cut from it, so there’s nothing to put back in.” Any side-trips into his universe will continue with shorter works (e.g., the Dunk and Egg stories) to illuminate incidents outside the main story. There will be no need to collect later editions of Ice and Fire volumes to remain au courant with the finished story.

  If you are going to collect any editions of the series, there are some things you should probably consider.

  As with any field of collectibles, book collectors have constructed their own set of rules, a shared common wisdom, built up over centuries of experience, though personally I regard these rules, as the saying goes, more as guidelines. Shape your collection the way you want, not by strict laws that might diminish your enjoyment. For example, common wisdom says that if you collect signed books you should have the author write just his or her name—called “flatsigning”—without a personal inscription, because some dealers believe that a flatsigned book is easier to sell and thus more valuable than one signed, “To My Dearest Humperdink.”

  I think that’s a mistake. First, I don’t particularly care how much my collection will someday sell for, because when it’s dispersed I’ll be dead and its monetary value will be entirely irrelevant to me. Second, I enjoy signed books because of the sense of personal connection they gives you to the authors. An inscribed book entails a closer connection than one simply signed. Even if the book isn’t inscribed to me personally, the sentiment reveals something of the author’s thoughts and personality. To me that makes the volume more interesting and thus more valuable than a simple signature.

  But that’s me. As a collector you should follow your own rules. With that in mind, though, there are some basic parameters that lift an ordinary volume into the collectible class. These parameters fall into three areas: primacy, scarcity, and aesthetics. Once these factors are taken into consideration, condition also comes into play. I shall briefly examine these categories as they pertain to collectibility, then relate them to the Ice and Fire books.

  Primacy relates to the notion of first edition, which may be more complicated than you think. Collectors value the earliest iteration of a title. Information regarding this can usually be found on the indicia or copyright page, which appears after the title page and before the text begins. Although for some publishers in certain time periods this information is tricky to interpret, it’s completely straightforward for all the Ice and Fire books. I’ll use just one as an example, but the data is presented in a similar manner for all. The American first edition of the first volume, A Game of Thrones, reads:

  A Bantam/Spectra Book / September 1996

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The first British edition reads:

  HarperCollins Publisher 1996/123456789

  The numbers refer to the specific print run (more on which can be found below).

  Sometimes fine distinctions are made when changes occur partway through a print run, such as a change in color or minor textual addition or subtraction on the dust jacket. Varieties such as these are called “states,” and again, it’s up to the individual collector to decide what’s significant enough to him or her to worry about. Fortunately, this complication doesn’t apply to Ice and Fire because no distincti
ons of state have arisen, at least in the British and American editions.

  The notion of “first edition” is also blurred by some sellers who describe a particular book as “first edition, nth printing.” The number of a specific book’s actual print run can be found among the indicia, as noted above. I’ve frequently observed this distinction in listings of Ice and Fire titles. Again, it’s up to individual collectors, but for the most part you will not find much of a premium on early, but non-first, print runs for any of the Ice and Fire books.

  Scarcity is somewhat related to primacy. First editions commonly have smaller print runs than accumulated later editions, and the initial book in a successful series usually has a smaller first print run than subsequent titles. That’s certainly the case with Ice and Fire. The series has grown enormously more popular with each volume, so each subsequent title has larger and larger first editions. Only a few thousand copies were printed in the original edition of A Game of Thrones compared to several hundred thousand for A Dance with Dragons. All five books have gone through numerous printings and editions. Although trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks of Dance haven’t appeared as of this writing, it’s only a matter of time until they do.