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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Pendragon" data-source="post: 124311" data-attributes="member: 707">There may be SPOILERS in this reply!!Someone said it around page 2 or so, but it bears repeating.  Although I find GRRM to be a fantastic author, he's not the best at everything.  There are a dozen and more ways that a novel can be engaging to the reader, that it can be successful as a story, and each author is successful in each way in varying degrees.George RR Martin is a good author for me for exactly the same reasons cited by Eric Noah.  He's fearless.  Like a deist god, he sets down his creations and then leaves them be, allowing them to face his very harsh world no-holds-barred.  He's suspenseful, and you never know if your favorite characters are going to come out all right.  But there are other authors who are better than he in different ways.[color=sky blue]Jennifer Roberson[/color] is the queen of harsh and emotionally devastating dialogue.  The exchanges between characters in the Tiger and Del novels are the sharpest I've ever read.  At times, people say such horrible things (not graphically, but emotionally painful,) that I felt myself feeling real sympathy for them.  She isn't as willing to see her characters die as Martin is, and her plots are far more transparent, but there is more emotional charge in one of her novels than Martin's entire series.David Eddings is the master of easy dialogue.  There's no real danger in his worlds, as his characters usually amass godlike (or more frequently, beyond godlike) power rather quickly.  But more than any other author, he manages to make me see his main characters as friends.  They aren't just plot-devices that happen to be in the same town, they really care about each other.  In ASoIaF, Ned does a good job of handling little Arya, but it doesn't hold a candle to the relationship Eddings shows us between Belgarath and Polgara (especially in the first series.)Tad Williams writes poetry.  It's prose, but it feels more like poetry.  Some find his writing to be verbose, but there's a beauty in the language itself that I find compelling.  One of the last scenes, where Miriamele comes to Simon over the melting snow, was so perfect I had to re-read it several times, just enjoying the words.  GRRM is a good prose-writer too.  But I was never gripped by the words themselves in his writing, as I was with TW.  TW is akin to Tolkien in this way, in that the way something is said is as important as saying it in the first place.I turn to Robert Jordan when I am looking for an epic feeling.  His series has been dragging on now, and I suspect several of his later plots of being filler (Suddenly it's hot, and the only way to save everyone is if Nynaeve and Elayne find this magic bowl?! Ugh.)  But Jordan has a way with creating powerful scenes.  There are times when I can feel the foundations of his world shaking.  Where I can feel the power of the events taking place.  I got goosebumps when Mazrim Taim commanded the Aes Sedai to "kneel before the Dragon Reborn!"  His world was changed forever.  GRRM hasn't managed to do that yet.  Perhaps he will in the future, but Jordan has already shown himself a master of this, no matter what his other failings.There are other authors as well.  Too many to name, really.  Guy Gavriel Kay, Esther Friesner (the fantasy humorist, in my opinion,) Dave Duncan, et al.  And none of it is "shlock" in the slightest.  Most of today's greatest authors can't do what GRRM does best, but neither can he do what they do best.Hmm...I guess the point of this post is that there are a lot of great authors out there, and that they all have something special to offer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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