there is a viral twitter post making the rounds in fantasy writing spaces. its chief claim is that George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish writing The Winds of Winter “killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.” this claim comes to us from the partisan instigator of the Sad Puppies fiasco — which GRRM had spoken out against. not a promising start. but i won’t litigate that controversy, i only want to consider the claim.
though the poster does make several other curious gestures. he claims “all the talent” went to LitRPG instead. he claims it and Romantasy are the “direct result” of the “smoking crater George left.” (because, one must infer, the tiktok girlies were just one butterfly flap away from being epic fantasy’s core demographic)
and throughout it all, the screed drips with venom. GRRM is “pretentious, bloviating bum” who is “shoving twinkies in his mouth instead of writing.” now, you could (not wrongly) accuse me of coming to GRRM’s defense. but i don’t care about the old guy’s reputation. i haven’t read his books, nor do i have much respect for him. but i do care about fantasy publishing, and i would like to learn more.
unfortunately, this post would be of no use. if it lines up with reality, it’s purely by accident. should i happen to guess what number a dice rolls, i didn’t provide you accurate knowledge about it, i simply got lucky.
a twitter poster ranting about GRRM, bitter from a decade old beef, cannot possibly inform me of anything, not in this format. no sources or specifics are provided, just a tidy narrative. but enough preface.
the story is simple enough to tell: GRRM didn’t finish his series, readers got pissed off, and this created a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom for any new writers hoping to get into the space. no one wants to buy their books until their series is for-sure finished, and no one has time to finish writing a whole series before trying to get it published. the exception is writers like our humble poster and brandon sanderson (often spoken of in the same breath this way, i’m sure) who have established readerbases.
and the causality here makes plenty of sense! when i expressed curiosity about the veracity, i got a response helpfully confirming there’s plenty of anecdotes of people not buying incomplete series because of Martin and Rothfuss.
but that’s not information. we all know about the years of backlash, that’s why the story is compelling to us. if the claim is “GRRM not finishing impacted book sales”, then it’s trivially satisfied by a single person not buying a book because of it. QED?
but this would be meaningless. i want a theory that says more than that. anecdotes, even in aggregate, can paint a misleading picture. at best we can conclude there is some effect. how strong is it? how broad is it? what confounds it?
like, we can boil the tweet down to an assertion that if GRRM had finished his books, more epic fantasy would have been published.
there are a few high level difficulties with this counterfactual
what if the ending sucked? would that outrage have hurt consumer sentiment more? even if what GRRM did was bad, it’s not a given that he necessarily could have done better. now, i’ll concede that he very probably could have, but always, the plausible explanations for why a writer hasn’t finished a book is because either they don’t give a shit or they’re having trouble, and both of these increase the likelihood that you’re sparing us from a trash ending
what if GRRM was inevitable? the very framing of the question already implies this; we speak of GRRM and Rothfuss, meaning there’s nothing either of them could have unilaterally done to prevent there from being at least one very influential incomplete series in the fantasy canon. (let’s not forget about The Locked Tomb, or the Gentleman Bastard series; nor is scifi exempt: tragically, my goat Peter Watts still hasn’t published the capstone to Firefall).
nor were they the first not to finish their series. so, how does one establish that this isn’t an argument akin to “we have to wear seatbelts because Barry sucks at driving and put his entire family in the hospital.” because no, seatbelts are inherently a good idea, because if people are driving cars, then people are crashing cars. if authors are writing books, then authors are not writing books. so when nega-GRRM blesses the brighter timeline with TWoW, soon enough someone else takes the fall. how much better is that?
what if GRRM has made us stronger? this is a rather unserious theory, so i wont spill too much ink on it, but it’s worth highlighting how tricky the causality is here. there’s a very visible backlash against GRRM for not finishing his series. but this demonstrably lights a fire under the asses of at least some writers to not wind up like him. would authors be less diligent in a world where there was no single target synonymous with author truancy?
so what if he’s guilty as charged? suppose the argument presented does hold. what do we do with this information? what does it mean to imagine an alternative timeline where GRRM finished his series? how did he do it? the simple answer is it just happens, that’s the premise, but in that case it becomes no more than a matter of luck that we have found ourselves in the dark timeline.
no, this information is significant primarily if it entails an ought: that a different set of actions on part of someone would have resulted in a better outcome. but who that “someone” is doesn’t matter, because whether the lever we choose is GRRM himself locking in, his publisher pressuring him, or fans making more urgent demands sooner, it all ultimately results in one conclusion: that authors ought to finish their stories.
but then our reasoning can only be complete if we proceed ask: does that make the world better? if what GRRM did was bad because it resulted in less publishing, it’s only fair to question if placing more stress and demands on authors result in more publishing or less.
these countertheories are all difficult to disprove. there’s no way to really peer into the multiverse and know, but how could we try? what would it actually mean to practically investigate this claim?
first, what is actually being claimed?
the first question is timing. by amusing coincide. A Dance With Dragons and Wise Man’s Fear both came out in 2011. clearly they could have not immediately heralded doom for any genres. so, by what year should we start expecting “an entire generation of epic fantasy authors” to be missing — no, murdered — in the data? 2016? 2021?
the second question is scope. this, at least, is something the claim comes equipped with: epic fantasy’s star fell, and LitRPG and Romantasy rose in counterpoint. does this make any sense? why are readers refusing to buy epic fantasy because of that devil with two middle names, but are perfectly willing to buy Fourth Wing and Dungeon Crawler Carl, both incomplete?
coarsely, there are three theories: George did nothing wrong, George ruined epic fantasy, and George ruined everything. if GRRM could tank epic fantasy, i would expect other kinds of fantasy to take a hit too. but this complicates our easiest metric for evaluation: comparing epic fantasy’s trajectory to other genres. if epic fantasy tanked, that’s a win for the middle theory, but if it didn’t, we’re hardly more sure about GRRM’s true powers.
…except that’s not it either, is it? would we even have evidence if we found epic fantasy began to flop? could it just be that our culture has lost its taste for epic fantasy for unrelated reasons, or other niches grew faster? (i can tell my own just so story: reading as a whole has seen a decline, and epic fantasy is hit the hardest because sprawling, multifaceted plots placed the greatest demand on readers with ever-more trouble focusing.)
publishing as a whole has seen better days. how do you disentangle any perceptible decline from a myriad other effects?
perhaps the easiest metric would be to remember the specific behavior that was described: readers now wait for the series to finish up before starting it. thus, the smoking gun would be if we could track an uptick in sales starting right after the last book drops, and show that this uptick is greater now than it was two decades ago. that’s the holy grail, but i can’t help but feel the prospect of finding a large dataset this granular could be dismal
but this whole tangent’s moot — yes, it’s quite hard if we have to divine it all from the data, but we can just ask. sales are only half of it, the other half is the notion that publishers won’t let you in the door unless you have your series wrapped up already. this isn’t strictly true because, as noted, we can find plenty of new unfinished series. but still, it would be highly informative if we could catalogue quotes from people working in publishing claiming that GRRM’s example has prompted them to harshen their stances. are publishers talkative about their internal processes?
now, these are very high standards i’m subjecting this (long) twitter post to. i’m being willfully unfair (can you blame me?) but these are the questions i’d want illuminated if i am to believe GRRM killed an entire generation of epic fantasy.