WARNING: Please note that this conversation tends to assume you already have as much familiarity as you want to have with the series published by these men, up through Jordan’s Winter’s Heart and Martin’s A Storm of Swords (both published in 2000), and Goodkind’s Pillars of Creation (published in 2001). There are no explicit Spoilers for CoT, however.
RJ: GRRM, what’s up with that Great Wall of China of yours? I mean, seriously, if that wall is all that stops giants and outlaws and zombies and who knows what else from sweeping down across the bulk of Westeros, why all that nonsense about only having the wall thinly manned by convicted criminals (and the occasional foolish volunteer) who aren’t even allowed to get married and develop family ties, for no apparent reason? There’s a brain-dead recruiting strategy for the army that’s supposed to protect the land from catastrophe!
GRRM (firmly dodging the main point of the question in the best tradition of any Tor fantasy author giving an interview): Actually, it’s more like Hadrian’s wall writ large. Nothing particularly Chinese about it.
TG: Oh, that’s right. You’re obsessed with fulfilling every Englishman’s frustrated fantasies of a world where England is practically half of human civilization all by itself, instead of the rundown little island that it’s become (what with all that pesky socialism running it into the gutter), so you simply made it what, a few thousand times as large as it really is? I guess the Wall had to get a lot bigger in proportion.
RJ: And if we assume that the area north of the Wall is essentially Scotland, you’re basically warning us that Scotland is the home stamping ground of a bunch of nasty zombies.
GRRM: Hey! Let’s not read too much into this! I haven’t even asked you why your own Borderlanders don’t get more support from the dozen or so nations located further south, if they’re bravely holding the line, year after year for millennia, against the endless hordes of Trollocs who must breed like rabbits considering the way the Shadow never worries about the possibility of running out of them despite launching attacks every single spring, as it seems! (What the devil do all those hundreds of thousands of Trollocs find to eat in the Blight, generation after generation, without stripping the local ecology bare? Somehow they don’t strike me as the type to settle down and maintain farms.)
RJ (grandly sweeping aside objection): Well, since you specifically stated you haven’t even asked me about those things, I don’t need to worry about answering.
TG (chuckling): He’s got you there, George!
GRRM: Let’s talk about you, then! Terry, what about the last book you perpetrated, Pillars of Creation. You start out by introducing a brand new character we never heard of before, who just happens to be the half-sister of the series hero, then you have her meet and become the lover of a guy we never heard of before either, then he starts giving her a snow job about how Richard Rahl is just as bad as his daddy Darken was, or maybe a tad worse, and only the virtuous Emperor Jagang and his faithful servants can block Richard’s fiendish plans for world conquest. The only problem being that any reader who’s glanced at any of your previous volumes knows from Day One that this is a pack of lies. Leaving us glaring at the book for the next seven hundred pages or so, waiting for Jennsen to reach the “surprising” realization that her new boyfriend is lying scum and her brother Richard isn’t. Didn’t it occur to you that we might be screaming, “Get a clue, girl!” at regular intervals and wondering when, oh when, you were going to steer the plot back toward the Main Couple, Richard and Kahlan, and advance the overall series a little bit?
TG: That’s fine talk from the man who created Catelyn Stark, The Woman Who Is Always Wrong When It Matters! Even though she’s the mother of most of your endearingly cute juvenile characters and it would be nice if we felt more confidence that she might actually have pounded some common sense into their heads when she had the chance!
GRRM (coughing for a moment): Ahem – that was entirely different!
RJ: I read your last book too, Terry. Man, talk about having the latest installment of a monolithic series totally fail to advance any of the plotlines longtime fans were dying to see develop! I’d never do anything like that!
[TG and GRRM gape. TG finally breaks the silence.]
TG: That’s your quirky sense of humor speaking, right? I’m impressed that you managed to say it with a straight face. Am I supposed to be laughing?
GRRM: I’m not laughing.
RJ: What? What do you mean?
TG: I give up. Let’s drop this topic and move on to a fresh one.
RJ: I’ve got one! The names we use on the covers of our books! George, what’s with this “I always use two middle initials, and they’re both R” nonsense? Do you have any idea how pretentious that looks? As if you’re bound and determined to always have your book covers remind people of the late, great J.R.R Tolkien? And Terry! Do you have any idea how jarring it is to pick up a book with the name “Goodkind” on it and then, instead of good and kind behavior, see rape and torture scenes?
TG: Well, “Robert,” at least some of us have the guts to use our real names instead of hiding behind an alias. An alias, I might add, which was obviously stolen from the protagonist of an Ernest Hemingway novel in the hope that a little literary quality might thereby rub off on you!
RJ: Why . . . ah . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about!
GRRM: Don’t you? I do. The protagonist of Hemingway’s classic For Whom the Bell Tolls was named Robert Jordan.
RJ: Really? What an astonishing coincidence!
TG: Of course you’d say that. You took the easy way out by having all three of your major male heroes be Walking Talking Coincidence Magnets so you didn’t have to try too hard to explain ANYTHING that might happen to them! Is Coincidence the cornerstone of your religion in real life?
GRRM: Look, Bob, if you want your scribblings to be taken seriously as Great Literature, the alias you use isn’t the most important to discuss. Let me give you some advice. You haven’t had a single bit of incest in your series yet that I can recall. The nearest you came to even discussing the issue was when Rand was trying to figure out what his mother’s relationship had been to Elayne’s mother, and he eventually got it straightened out that they called themselves “cousins” to reflect their common descent from the original Queen of Andor, but it was such a distant thing that genetically speaking it didn’t really mean a significantly higher-than-average risk of babies with two heads or whatever.
RJ: I didn’t actually describe him worrying about malformed babies. I only said –
GRRM (overriding him): The thought was there, lurking between the lines in the subtext. You should have been more specific about all those disturbing possibilities, though. Mention cases he had seen of excessive inbreeding back home in the Two Rivers, for instance. You don’t make nearly enough use of birth defects and the mentally or physically handicapped in your books. I mean, look at my adroit use of Tyrion the Imp! Or the way I crippled a little boy early in the first book to make people feel sorry for him! And look at how Joffrey turned out, clearly due to his inbred DNA with some nasty recessives doubling up!
TG: There’s a recessive gene for being a sadistic beast whose mother has spoiled him rotten?
GRRM: There could be. That’s not really the point.
RJ: I can’t believe you are lecturing me about realism in genetics in my universe, when you wrote yourself into a corner in AGoT and could only have Ned figure out what the heck Jaime and Cersei were doing together by having him come to the marvelous realization that no matter how many zillions of times black-haired Barratheons had mated with Gold-haired Lannisters (or any other blond, I imagine) over the ages, ALL their OFFSPRING were ALWAYS black-haired too.
GRRM: Sure! Black hair is dominant and blond hair is recessive! Any high school biology student knows that!
TG: I think I see where Robert is going with this. George, I’ll try to break this to you gently. I’ve known black-haired fathers to mate with blond women and produce at least some blond-haired children in the real world. I’ve even known cases where both parents had dark hair but at least one of their offspring didn’t.
GRRM (gasping for breath, almost fainting in shock): You . . . you HAVE? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
RJ: If a man is the product of a black-haired family and a golden-haired family, there’s a good chance he ends up with one recessive blond gene paired up with one dominant black-haired gene. But when he, in turn, mates with a woman who doesn’t have a black-haired gene at all, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance of his passing his own “dominant” black-haired gene along to any given child he sires. You seem to believe it’s a one hundred percent chance that the dominant will always make it into the next generation, century after century . . .
GRRM: Well, the Gods of Westeros must have arranged it that way.
RJ: The really galling part was the way I wondered if we were supposed to have figured this out too based on hair color genetics working in your world in an entirely different way than it does in the real world. As if you thought you had provided legitimate clues in a mystery we were meant to be able to solve the same way the “detective” eventually did. And yet people talk about “realism” in your stories, for some odd reason.
TG: I use a lot more rape in my stories than you do, RJ! Now that’s nitty-gritty realism!
GRRM: HA! I use more incestuous ancestry for my characters than both of you clowns put together, and I’ve only published three volumes so far!
TG: Betcha I have more scenes of pure torture, though!
RJ (staring): More rape, more incest, more torture . . . and you guys are PROUD of this distinction? Did it ever occur to you I don’t even WANT to dwell on those distasteful subjects?
TG: Why not? They sell, don’t they? Even if many of the customers claim they only buy the stuff so they can cluck disapprovingly at the trouble characters get themselves into!
RJ: Look, Terry, I think you were unfair earlier when you cast aspersions on my statement that the whole Ernest Hemingway resemblance was coincidental. I haven’t said a word about your whole idea of “Sisters of the Light” who secretly include “Sisters of the Dark.” And how it parallels my own Aes Sedai and Black Ajah.
TERRY: Well, go right ahead and mention it if it will make you feel better! See if I care! NEWS FLASH, Mr. Jordan: You didn’t invent this whole “Good guys associated with Light; bad guys associated with Darkness (or Shadow, or whatever)” concept! Not by thousands of years!
GRRM: Sounds positively Zoroastrian to me.
TERRY: Hey, Zoroaster probably stole it from an even earlier source.
GRRM: I wouldn’t be surprised. Don’t we all?
RJ: It’s not just their names. It’s also the whole “male wizards aren’t safe to be let alone; we’ll have to hunt them down and drag ‘em back to headquarters and prevent them from indiscriminate magic-using for their own good!” concept.
TG: Well, it stands to reason that males, by their very nature, would be more wild and violent and undisciplined in the use of magic. You’re the one who had them all go insane, though – and gender warfare between super-powered indivuals isn’t a brand new idea in your books either.
GRRM: I have to admit, Terry, you kinda left yourself vulnerable to the WoT Copycat charge when you titled one book “Stone of Tears.”
TG: Nonsense. If it was titled “The Stone of Tear,” that would be perilously close to plagiarism. Particularly if the aforementioned Stone turned out to be a fortress on the south coast of a continent. That would be a problem. But I didn’t do that. Is RJ planning to apologize to anyone in history who ever used the phrase “The Great Hunt” before he came along, even if their Great Hunt had nothing to do with a frantic search for a long-lost magic horn? Have you, George, checked out all of literary history to see if anyone else ever referred to a game of thrones or a clash of kings in any context at all before you wrote your books?
[Brief silence, as RJ and GRRM ponder this point. Before they can formulate their replies, TG reads their silence as surrender (or will later claim he thought so) and hastily changes the subject.]
TG: Robert my boy, let me read you a few words from one of my own books, at a time when the main hero and his grandfather had just recently reunited, face to face, after a long separation. Zedd, the grandfather, gets increasingly disturbed by the strange things Richard is telling him and finally says: “I want to know everything that's happened since I've last seen you, Richard. Since the beginning of last winter. The whole story. Don't leave anything out, the details are important. You may not understand that, but details can be critical. I must know it all." (Soul of the Fire, page 39, hardcover.)
RJ (blankly): What’s your point, Terry?
TG: When was the last time two of your major “heroic” characters, allegedly friends or even lovers, met after a long separation and showed half as much common sense about the need to pool information as Zedd showed right there? And your characters actually have teleportation – Traveling, which amounts to the same thing – that could let them coordinate things better, except they’re too dumb to see the advantages. Since the Shadow isn’t QUITE that dumb, it’s no wonder the Forsaken are still causing so much trouble!
GRRM: Let’s be fair, here, Terry. You had Zedd SAY that, conceded. But they never followed through on it. A few minutes later Zedd decided he had to run away at high speed to go do something about those pesky “chimes” without sticking around for a few days to chat with his grandson and find out every OTHER vitally important thing that might have happened to him in the last three books or so, even though as he left Zedd tried to deceive Richard into thinking that everything was hunky-dory with those chimes, thereby undercutting your argument that your heroes set a really good example in the “sharing information for the common good” department.
TG: I didn’t say they set a good example in practice! Did anyone hear me that? All I suggested was that Zedd shows a heck of a lot more common sense than all of RJ’s “heroes” put together! It was perfectly legitimate for me to then derail his plans to FOLLOW THROUGH on his realization of the need for shared information by giving him a crisis he felt just couldn’t wait! How often do any of us derail the best laid plans of our characters in that fashion to distract them from whatever they ought to be doing if we were willing to let them wrap up the plot several volumes ahead of schedule?
RJ: So what I need to do is have my next book show Egwene saying, “I’ll sit down at a meeting with Rand and Elayne and Mat and Perrin and Nynaeve and Cadsuane and so forth, as soon as –“ and then make sure something terrible happens to put that idea on hold while she scrambles to survive?
GRRM: Bingo! Look at the way it must have seemed (to my more gullible readers) that I was going to let little Arya Stark link up with her family again in my last book after she probably hadn’t seen ‘em for over a year! She was almost in sight of them when everything went terribly wrong and her status quo (fugitive on the run, no one handy to trust) remained exactly the same! But the THOUGHT was there!
TG: Tell me, George, has it ever occurred to you that it might be easier for your fans to compare notes on your books if each chapter had a number, or even a unique title? So that those with different editions (hardback versus paperback, or foreign editions) could check each other’s references easily even when page numbers weren’t the same in each edition?
GRRM: Who cares? Any true-blue fan of mine will be able to remember at a glance EXACTLY where any given passage occurred! The words are written indelibly on his brain!
RJ: Huh. There’s an ego for you. Just reading your books is supposed to give ordinary people photographic memories all of a sudden?
TG: You’re a fine one to talk, Mister “I Introduced Another Hundred Characters In This Volume, But I Would Rather Die Than Provide A Comprehensive Listing Of Them At The Back Of The Book!” In that regard, George here will always be more user-friendly than you are!
RJ (defensively): You don’t provide cast listings either!
TG: Yeah, but I keep the focus on a much smaller number of characters. And some of the interesting people introduced in each new book are always dead by the end of the SAME book, saving the reader the trouble of trying to recognize lots of obscure fellows who pop up again five or six volumes later the way you’re always doing.
GRRM (pointedly): As opposed to your approach, RJ, where you can’t bear to kill anyone who’s had more than about six sentences of dialogue in her entire career.
RJ: I think that’s an exaggeration . . .
GRRM: I wasn’t counting the Forsaken. They’re the obvious villainous cannon fodder, and besides, most of the ones who die don’t REALLY die, they just bounce back a few volumes later in new bodies.
RJ: Look, I never thought this series was going to last so long, okay? I figured around Book 4, the Last Battle would occur and all those weird running characters I went to such trouble to establish in the first two books would get to do the various Vitally Important Plot Functions for which they were created, after which half of them could die in the last hundred pages of the series. I still hold to that plan – it’s just taking a little longer to get there than I expected!
GRRM: A LITTLE longer?
RJ: Well, considering that you’re the guy who originally swore he was doing a four-part epic and after #2 was released, said “four more,” and has now published three, with an estimated four MORE to come, I don’t think you’re in a position to throw stones!
TG (laughing) Ha ha ha ha ha! You guys are such amateurs! Actually “promising” or even “estimating” how many more books you’ll “need” to write! You ought to take a look at what I said on the subject on http://www.terrygoodkind.com/terryinfo/interview/interview3.html
RJ: What did you say?
TG: Well, I started out by saying I’m frequently asked that question about the total number of books, pontificated for fifteen paragraphs, and the conclusion was I don’t know yet, and if I did set a fixed number, I’d be cheating the reader somehow. (Implication: So get off my back!)
GRRM: CURSES! Why didn’t WE think of that, Robert? We could have just brazened it out instead of foolishly mentioning specific numbers as if we actually had an exact plan for what we were doing!
RJ: I know! I know! This twerp actually outdid us for once! Am I turning green with envy?
[We will now pause to let these Actors recover. We may hear more from them at a later time.]