Not exactly a phone book, but close

I have occasionally opined that some best-selling authors have slid so far into everything and anything that has their name on the cover is sellable territory that their publishers could run off copies of the New York City phone book and make a killing. So far as I know, no one has tried that (yet), although I'm reasonably sure writers like Stephen King or John Grisham could pull it off. 

Well, George R. R. Martin hasn't exactly decided to print out a phone book, but he's come close. I made the mistake of paying actual money for Fire and Blood, a work set about 300 years prior to the events described in the Fire and Ice series (A Game of Thrones, A Feast for Crows, etc.). Martin fans have been waiting for what feels like forever for Martin to finish the series, although we did get a look at what it might include when the HBO series wrapped up by killing off the person way too many viewers had decided was the heroine. I wasn't one of those people -- I'd seen enough foreshadowing in the way Martin shaped Daenerys Targaryen's character and story arc to know she wasn't going to do a living happily ever after in the arms of her nephew despite the Targaryen tradition of marrying relatives. Besides, Martin is notorious for never giving anyone a happy ending.

So what's the deal with Fire and Blood? Martin has pulled off an interesting publishing coup. One of the things every author of fiction has to deal with is the back story for the characters. What happened to get that person to where they are now? Where are they from? What's the social/cultural/political context? How much of that background do you have to create in order for you as the author to get into your characters' heads and figure where they're coming from and why? How complex does that back story have to get? Can you get by with a few notes on index cards ("father went nuts and had to be killed by his own body guard") or do you end up filling notebook after notebook with complicated genealogy charts, maps of imaginary continents, speculations about how you'd tell the sex of a dragon (wait to see if it ever lays eggs?), and so on. 

Martin apparently opted for the latter approach. Mountains of notes, databases crammed with spreadsheets, long lists of vaguely Celtic sounding names to slap on the characters blessed with violet eyes. And then at some point he looked at the Everest-sized pile of paper, the mammoth backstory he'd created to help keep him straight with the Starks and the Lannisters and the Tullys and especially the Targaryens, and said, "you know, the fans keep complaining about the series not being finished. I wonder if being handed this mess would shut them up for awhile?"

I'm guessing the answer to that question is Probably Not. Or, more emphatically, No. It did not shut us up. It just gave us more material to complain about. I doubt that I'm the only person to read this book and mutter just what was the frelling point? Hundreds of pages of Targaryen trivia. 

I can see how keeping all this stuff in the background while writing the actual novels would be useful -- it's pretty clear why several centuries later why Daenerys is likely to go off the rails. It's a family tradition. For every Targaryen who turns out sane and is a competent ruler, there's another one who's a self-centered amoral psychopath. When you have a family tradition that promotes full sibling marriage, odds are multiple generations of in-breeding are going to produce some weirdness. Actually, not just some -- a lot. Lots and lots of weirdness. Infants dying young, infants born with major congenital defects, children who have rage issues or turn super promiscuous really young, children with definite sadistic tendencies. But does it occur to anyone in the Targaryen line that just like inbreeding isn't good for horses or dogs it might not work real well for people? Nope. They keep right on marrying each other. 

In short, Martin does a solid job of providing a background that explains why even a Targaryen like Daenerys who starts off looking like a hero can end up being a cold-blooded tyrant assassinated by the one person she may have loved. He's also apparently provided a lot of material for the showrunners for the HBO prequel to Game of Thrones to work with. Lots of battles, palace intrigue, dragons fighting dragons, lascivious and raunchy happenings in whorehouses and palaces. The prequel should be fun to watch.

Fire and Blood, however, is more odd than fun. There are long sections that are close to Biblical with the lists of names -- lots of begats and not much else. It's more like a summary of a novel (or novels) than it is an actual novel. I felt like I was reading an extremely long book report, an excessively wordy description of a book and not the book itself. 

On the other hand, the illustrations are nice.