Absolutely. When one book started to balloon into A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons, an editor should've recommended some serious pruning. Of course, who knows, maybe GRRM did hear that advice and didn't listen?
Yes, I think you could make an argument that the power of the editor / producer / publisher is inversely proportional to the power of the author / creator.
Look at George Lucas. The Star Wars OT is arguably better because he still had to listen to the studio execs and such, whereas he held all the cards with his arguably inferior PT.
Look at JK Rowling. The first Harry Potter book is reasonably slim. The later ones are much longer. I seem to recall a similar thing happening with Robert Jordan and the Wheel of Time.
As the author's voice gets louder, the editor's gets correspondingly smaller.
(Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions to this as well.)
If we are up to speculating, who knows, maybe GRRM did hear that advice, and trimmed it down to the two books we have, where before it was almost three books?
"Who knows, maybe..." can build just about any narrative we want about someone.
I'm pretty sure Robert Jordan's editor was his wife, no less.
You might be the only person thinking Winds of Winter will ever be completed.I can't be the only person thinking that once Winds Of Winter and the final book is complete (the former is 75% done now), that HBO should reshoot seasons 6 and onwards to match the books.
Game of Thrones deviation was a snowball rolling downhill.In a world of remakes, I would never discount anything.
Frankly I don't think remaking just the last few seasons would be the way to go. If they were going to go for a remake, I think they would go full tilt. Especially since they are unlikely to get many of the actors back (or the actors wouldn't look right for the role anymore) so you would have that mess where you go from season 5 to a new season with all new actors.
That said...I think the books get overhyped. Honestly the adaptations they do for the show is really good for the most part. They do a lot to condense a lot of confusing subplots in the book to a nice core story that is relatively easy to follow. The books just have dozens of characters that you would never show in a series.
Its not until middle of season 7 that I think the plot REALLY goes off the rails. Before that, it stays within the spirit to me.
Yep. Mind you, Harriet McDougal edited other things too - The Black Company and Ender's Game come to mind. She was Editing Director at Ace, one of the founders of Tor Books, and gave Jim Baen much of his start in the industry, leading to Baen Books.
So, whatever issues there were in the editing of those books, it wasn't that she was bad as an editor, in general.