Disillusionment in A Game of Thrones

[Note: I have felt for a while that I should probably put those of my academic essays that fit this blog's purview up here. As it would be hard to find a book more fitting to what I do on The Hat Rack than A Game of Thrones, I figured that this is where I would start. This paper was originally written for the class "Fantasy Literature and the Historical Imagination" and was intended to explore Martin's usage of both in-world history and world-building. 

Alas, I do have the habit of copious footnoting in my academic writing, and I don't know a graceful way of integrating that with a blog's formatting. I'd recommend having a second tab open at the bottom of the page to read them as you go.]

A Game of Thrones is the first book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In it, Martin sets out to shatter his characters’ illusions. After building up a great store of cultural knowledge and ideals, he sets about destroying it. He shows his characters that war and politics are nothing like that they expect. But he doesn’t sotp there. By the time he is done, he has shown them that their very world is not as they thought it was.

The people of Westeros^[1] have a great deal of lore. Knowledge and ideas are preserved and spread in a large body of songs and stories that are often alluded to. ^[2] The oldest woman in service to the Starks is Old Nan, whose purpose seems to be telling bedtime stories to each generation of new lords. Not all of what the Westerosi know comes from general knowledge and oral traditions. Chroniclers record the details of major events (Martin 102), and lords’ castles hold large libraries. Books are so prized that they can be considered sufficient wedding gifts for a princess: Daenerys receives – and cherishes – volumes of songs and histories of the Seven Kingdoms (Martin 86). The past isn’t just something for the political elite to toy with. The maesters are a Westerosi institution that can be cheesily summed up as the “knights of the mind” (Martin 484). Groan-worthy propaganda aside, maesters study for years in Oldtown before dispersing through the realm as learned advisors. They are educated in  histories, herbs, ravens, architecture, and far more (Martin 485), and their chambers are overflowing with books (Martin 615).

This knowledge – particularly the stories and songs – serve as a guide to the world for Martin’s many child characters. Bran, for instance, thinks he knows what to expect in the capital from the stories that he has heard (Martin 64). Sansa goes farther, building her life around songs, desiring nothing more and nothing less than “for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs” (Martin 119-20 This isn’t just idle dreaming about how things should be. Betrothed to Prince Joffrey, Sansa believes that her life will be just like the Age of Heroes, only with more lemon cakes.

Alas, treating life as a story ends disastrously. As Littlefinger says, “life is not a song” (Martin 395). The children learn this to their great sorrow. Bran dreamed of being a knight. Instead, he watches the knights ride to war while he sits by, crippled. Jon discovers that the legendary defenders of the realm, the Night’s Watch, are not heroes driven solely by honor. As one character Jon complains to eloquently puts it, reality likes to “piss on the stories” (Martin 153). But it’s Sansa that gets the most brutal blow. Long after the others have given up their idealized dreams Sansa becomes capable of “seeing [Joffrey] for the first time” (Martin 622). That moment of revelation comes when her gallant prince decides to display her father’s severed head for all to see.

Adults, too, suffer from their ideals. Ser Hugh came to participant in the Hand’s Tournament, the tournament that, to Sansa, proves “better than the songs” (Martin 246). Hugh came because he was “desperately” seeking glory to justify his recent knighting (Martin 256). In the jousting, he gets a lance through the throat. If the killer’s brother can be believed, that deadly deviation from the songs was no accident (Martin 253). Indeed, knighthood falls far short of its romanticism throughout the text. One telling difference between storied battle and actual combat is how “in songs, the knights never screamed nor begged for mercy” (Martin 453). Of course, there are things to believe in besides stories. Not all of the novel’s^[3] characters go on believing their adolescent fantasies to and through their knighting. Martin delights, therefore, in showing that these mature ideals are just as impractical and illusory Eddard believes in honor. When he gains documented proof that King Robert supports him, he thinks the battle won. Cersei tears the document to pieces. “Is this meant to be your shield, my lord?” she asks him. “A piece of paper?” (Martin 441) His honor, and even the king’s legal will, are as much paper shields against reality as a cherished book of childhood stories. No storied knowledge or grand virtues, it seems, matter in the face of the real (Westerosi) world and the men in it with swords.

The final source of disillusionment is the greatest, and it is also where the disillusionment moves from the histories created by the people of the world to the very history of the world and the world itself. The world of Westeros is not what the Westerosi believe it is. The children delight in Old Nan’s stories of Others and other fantastic creatures. But the rational adults know that these stories are just stories, irrelevant to today’s modern (medieval) world even if they might once have had some grain of truth. As Ned says, “The Others are as dead as the children of the forest, gone eight thousand years. Maester Luwin will tell you they never lived at all” (Martin 20). The Maesters confidently state that “magic ha[s] died” (Martin 197), their only qualifier being that it may never have existed. In legends, the Night’s Watch raised the Wall to combat the Others, but everyone knows the Night’s Watch really just keeps the nasty northern barbarians out. As Tyrion mocks, the Night’s Watch is “watching for grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about” (Martin 104). The Others have been left with no more dignity than the monsters in a children’s movie.

But the Others are not extinct. The prologue shows three men of the Night’s Watch venturing beyond the wall. Ser Royce, a knight new to the Watch, leads them, and, before long, they are slaughtered by the Others. On the surface, this seems the typical story of an inexperienced and overconfident commander leading his men to ruin. That is true, but it is also insufficient, because the good Ser Royce is not really a buffoon. He is intelligent enough to realize that the temperature was too warm for the men they were pursuing to have simply frozen (Martin 4), and he is courageous. He alone stands and “bravely” face the Others (Martin 7). He was out of his depth, but any commander would have been. Only silly stories passed down through the ages shed any light on the Others, and the three are forced to rely on tales from their “mother[s]” and “wet nurse[s]” as soon as they pass the Wall (Martin 3). ^[4]

The supernatural was likely dismissed from official records and general belief for political reasons. Dragons, unlike Others, are not from the Dawn Age or the Age of Legends but from the Targaryen Conquest a mere three hundred years ago. Nonetheless, characters confidently assert that “dragons are gone,” and “it is known” that they are not coming back (Martin 197). Part of their reasoning is that the last known dragons are dead. Similarly, when proving that Others do not exist and maybe never did, Eddard says “no living men has ever seen one” (Martin 20). But the dismissal of dragons is also political. When the Targaryens ruled, they kept the memory of dragons alive, for the symbol of the dragon was tied to their power and reign. When King Robert dethroned the Targaryens, he took down the dragon skulls that adorned the throne room (Martin 102). It was in his interest to forget the old, to have the people dismiss dragons as a relic of the past that could never recur, and to embrace his new reign. The same reason could explain why Others are so categorically dismissed despite ancient evidence. When the Targaryens took over three hundred years ago, it was in their interest to have the people forget their prior rulers and the legendary foes those rulers strove against. Unfortunately, neither Others nor dragons care much for Westerosi politics. The Targaryens may have reduced the Others to a laughingstock, and Robert may have stuffed all the dragon relics out of sight, but both beasts are returning in defiance of all the rational learning of the maesters.

Admittedly, these supernatural beasts are not yet in Westeros, and the maesters are correct for the moment that magic is dead in the world. After all, they define the world as Westeros. The Wall marks the “end of the world” (Martin 173), no matter that there is plainly territory beyond it. But while the Others and other magic are still outside the world, they are coming. A Song of Ice and Fire could be called the story of magic gradually but inexorably returning. In A Game of Thrones, we have direwolves returning to the realm for the first time in two hundred years (Martin 15). Outside Westeros, we see Others, dragons, and Wights, the last of which end up attacking the Wall itself. By the second volume, A Clash of Kings, one of the faction’s competing for the throne has a sorceress of sorts. In the third, A Storm of Swords, we have the Night’s Watch battling Others. The progression continues from there.

A Song of Ice and Fire, therefore, becomes something like a secondary world intrusion fantasy. This can be seen in contrast with The Worm Ouroboros. E. R. Eddison’s sub-creation is wholly consistent and integrated. Its denizens know the rules of the world and what is possible. They might express amazement at the exploits of the wondrously named Brandoch Daha or at the spells of one of the many Gorices, but their awe would be like our awe at someone who climbed Mount Everest. These are incredible feats, but they are not impossible feats. It would not be like our reaction to someone who claimed they could fly. No fundamental (or seemingly fundamental) rules of the world are violated by their exploits. It is not so in Martin’s work. The seemingly impossible does happen. The maesters are convinced that magic is gone, but what could be accurately described as a frozen zombie attacks the Night’s Watch. Now, this does not actually violate the rules of the world. By starting with his prologue and the Others, Martin makes sure to let the reader know the real rules of the game. But the characters do not have that luxury. Their worldview is incomplete, and it is violated by what is (to them) the supernatural. From the Westerosi viewpoint, the Others marching south of the Wall is the quite literal intrusion of the fantastic into the world. Martin’s characters are subjected to something akin to Cthulhu rising from the Pacific.

This does not, of course, mean that A Game of Thrones or A Song of Ice and Fire is not an immersion fantasy. It is set in a detailed secondary world and, save the paratexts^[5], contains no hint of Earth. Its story is certainly one about the world of Westeros. In fact, the idea of ancient evils returning – essentially, intrusion fantasies – is not a rare one in immersion fantasies. Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time – another recent, sprawling, and best-selling fantasy series – uses the same concept. Even The Lord of the Rings plays on similar ground. Suaron, after all, is a foe from past ages, though characters like Galadriel that can speak about that ancient history with perfect accuracy complicate the effect in Tolkien. The techniques of an intrusion fantasy are compatible with the world of an immersive fantasy and allow an author to create a different effect than can be had from simply establishing one set of rules and never toying with them.

For Martin, this technique is the final hammer he can use to hit his characters’ illusions. A Game of Thrones and the books that follow it set out to prove to their cast that nothing is what they thought it was. The characters’ songs, stories, and ideals of honor and knightly valor hide the truth of death screams and begging for mercy. Even their world, Martin reveals, is vastly more complex than they imagined.^[6]

Works Cited

Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Books. 1996. Print.

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^[1] Westeros is the continent on which the vast majority of the series’ action is set. It is also (somewhat confusingly) the name of the world.

^[2] In later volumes, Martin does include the words to some of these songs, such as the Rains of Castamere, but none are present in A Game of Thrones.

^[3] Though A Game of Thrones has many aspects of a romance, Martin’s too concerned with “character development” and the psychology of his narrators to not be considered a novelist. Indeed, it is precisely that character development that he so often uses to poke holes in romance and romantic ideals. [Note: a central issue in our class was whether works of Fantasy qualified as true Novels as opposed to as Romances.]

^[4] It’s too simple, therefore, to say that Martin thinks all knowledge – songs, stories, books – is misleading. In the first place, he seems to divide between cultural lore or stories and what is critical, studied. The former is a very poor guide to the day-to-day world, while the maesters really are valuable advisors. But the maesters are worthless against supernatural menaces that defy all reason.

^[5] Though it’s never stated in the text itself, an argument could be made that the genealogies in the back are in-world texts. They never explicitly address an out of world reader, and, as we see Ned reading The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses, we know that there are genealogies created by and for Westerosi.

^[6] Finally, I should note that A Game of Thrones did, thankfully, hold up to my memories of it. I can no longer quite call it the greatest book of all time, but my fears of finding out that everything I’d loved about it were just cool due to having read less at the time proved unfounded.

George R.R. Martin - Nightflyers

Nightflyers was George R.R. Martin's fifth collection, but, save the title story, its contents seem to have first appeared a few years before those in Sandkings. Unlike the stories in that other collection, only "Override" and "Nightflyers" are genre benders here, the rest being straight up Science Fiction. Furthermore, despite Martin's (well deserved) reputation as a writer of characters, most of these stories are not hugely character based, zeroing in instead on the forces that drive and overpower the characters in the tales. It may be too easy to split the collection into two halves, but the four stories we'll be looking at lend themselves to it rather easily. The first pairing, "Weekend in a Warzone" and "And Seven Times Never Kill Man," focus on the irrationality and violence that lurk beneath our society; the second, "Nightflyers" and "Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring," don't look as closely at men but rather at the immensity of the cosmic backdrop behind them. Of course, that's leaving two stories out, but I'll be doing that throughout this piece; "Overdrive" and "A Song for Lya" appeared in A Song for Lya before this, and I'll be covering them when I review that collection. And as I've also covered "Nightflyers" the novella separately here, that means this is going to be a rather fractured review, but hopefully it'll get its insights in as well.

The future we see in "Weekend in a Warzone" is a nice one, prosperous and with war safely a thing in the past. Only, the lack of struggle hasn't changed man, and the lack of strife hasn't taken away our need for discord and to prove ourselves. Our need for violence. That's where Maneuver, Inc. and its various foes come in. In exchange for a hefty sum, you get to walk through the forest with your buddies and an assault rifle, to kill or be killed. As they put it, "a man hasn't lived until he's seen death" (p. 139).The narrator – and, no doubt, the reader – is horrified at this bizarre custom and can't wait to get back to the civilized world. According to those he meet, though, it may not be that simple, the worst parts of ourselves that isolatable:

"It's war […] here in the zone, yeah, but out there too. We just don't call it war, but it still is. There are guys after you every minute, after your woman, after your job, pushing shit on your kids, trying to stick it to you. You have to fight back, and this is one way." (p. 143)

It's not long until walks between the tree trunks turn into deadly encounters, and it doesn't take long for the narrator to realize that he's a coward. But, when the danger's passed, he realizes something else…he enjoyed it. More, watching as a man "screams and dies and clutches at the air […] dies hard" leaves our narrator with a "hard-on" (p. 154). He is, he realizes, "as bad as they are" (ibid). All of this is written in a friendly and terrified conversational style, the narrator rambling on about the cold and his misery right up until the end. Some phrases get repeated a bit too much, the premise is a tad hard to swallow, and the turn's not wholly surprising, but the piece is still hard hitting and effective, if not one of Martin's best.

With "And Seven Times Never Kill Man" we return to Martin's regular Thousand Worlds universe, and society's not nearly as cozy as it seems in "Weekend in a Warzone." No, here the universe is a hard, unforgiving, and uncaring place, and the "stars will break those of softer flesh," (p. 162) as the Steel Angels preach. Their religion has removed their doubts and fears, driven them to power, and left their morality as nothing but the "right of the strong" (p. 168). These warriors of faith, with their "roman collar" (p. 160), are spreading across the world of the Jaenshi. The Jaenshi, too, are creatures of faith, no more focused on curiosity or reason than the Steel Angels that advance upon them.

The story is told from a trader's viewpoint. He's grown to know, if not quite understand, the Jaenshi culture, and he loves their beautiful statuary. No matter how stark the circumstances, he cannot convince them to fight. It's only those the Steel Angels have already exiled, the "godless" (p. 174), who understand. But they lack the strength and the fervor of the Steel Angels, and they can do nothing to stop them. The tale's end is not, though, the climactic tragedy that seems inevitable, but rather a crumbling away of both sides. When the trader's ship returns for him, the Jaenshi culture has melted entirely from sight, and the Steel Angels are now charging towards their own starvation and annihilation, their fanaticism rendering their ability worthless. As a final, punishing twist, the crew that's come for the trader doesn't understand what's transpired and never well, and they know that the Jaenshi statuary is, to the galaxy at large, "worthless" (p. 195).

Judging by the story's inclusion in Dreamsongs, Martin is evidently quite proud of "And Seven Times Never Kill Man," and it does have a melancholy and hopeless dignity about it, but I can't help but feel that it's the skeleton of a much stronger piece. Though hardly long at forty-two pages, the contest is so mismatched that even the relative surprises at the end can't inject too much excitement into it, and repeated scenes with the Steel Angels fail to deepen them beyond the (admittedly badass) role of stock space crusaders.

"Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring" takes place in the same universe as "The Second Kind of Loneliness" and could, I think, be seen as a fulfillment of that story's isolation. In "The Second Kind of Loneliness," we learned of the first kind of loneliness, that of a man cut off from his fellow man by distance, and we learned of the second kind, that of a man surrounded by his fellows that was, nonetheless, unable to reach any of them. In "Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring," we learn of the final kind of loneliness, the ultimate one, the isolation that weighs heavy on the entirety of the human race.

The story takes place at the far end of a Star Ring, a wormhole of sorts, but this Star Ring has taken them to a place where they see nothing, not even the faintest glimmer of a star. No light races across this void; no matter mars its perfection, (p. 204) Martin writes. This is a future filled with technology and promise, and all that promise has run up against its edge, against the untamable and incomprehensible infinite. This is a Science Fiction Weird Tale as only Martin can write it, a view from such a high vantage point that shows Whatever we have, whatever we believe in, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, except the void out there. That's real, that's forever. We're just for a brief meaningless little time, and nothing makes sense. And the time will come when we'll be out there, wailing, in a sea of never-ending night. (p. 212) Faced with that infinite, we can do nothing but "make noises" (p. 217).

Despite the story's grandeur, it's got heart and what is likely the most immediate, emotionally powerful narration of any of Nightflyers' stories (not counting, at least, "A Song for Lya," here only as a reprint). The scientists aboard the Star Ring work with this infinite, but it's Kerin who feels its presence, who must convey it to the rest; Kerin, "the displaced poet who fought the primal dark," (p. 205) whose role blends with Martin's as he strives to "make someone else feel what I feel when I'm out there" (p. 209). All of this is done without interpersonal melodrama or needless action, and here Martin pens some of his most evocative lines, such as: "For years, we've been falling through space, and the only light and sound and sanity is far behind, lost in the void" (pp. 211-2).

At its close, "Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring" makes it clear that, though we are unable to grasp the immensity of what's around us, those noises that we make can have tremendous effects. The ending here is hard to believe even while reading and yet jaw dropping, audacious beyond belief. A habit of endings like this could look like Martin was fleeing his conclusions into sentiment and cliché. Just one, right here? Perfect.

It seems to me (an impression perhaps bolstered by my own preferences and obsessions) that "Nightflyers" and "Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring" are both noticeably stronger than the interesting but flawed other pieces, and the latter of those is really the only essential story here that's not reprinted in Dreamsongs or elsewhere. Still, while I wouldn't start a foray into Martin's backlist with Nightflyers, every story in it is still interesting and more than competently executed. Not to mention that the price of a used-copy-admission are no doubt worth it for "Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring" alone…

Standouts: Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring, Nightflyers

Martin, Nightflyers, and The Speculative Scotsman

If you exit the Hat Rack, take a right, and cross the Atlantic Ocean, you might find yourself at the Speculative Scotsman's. But while we may be a tad geographically distant, we're a fair bit closer in terms of content. And so, when Niall asked if I'd be interested in doing a guest post on the SS while he tours these here states, I responded with a multi-paragraph version of "Hell yes!" The piece's up now, a review of George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers novella that hopefully does both the story and the blog it's hosted on justice. And above and below it is praise for this here Rack that just can't be good for my ego...

Best Reads of 2011

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and nine volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.

George R.R. Martin - Tuf Voyaging

The plague star twinkles but little, shines down upon the land with a clear bright light. This is wrong, I told Janeel once; a plague star ought to be red. It ought to glower, to drape itself with scarlet radiance, to whisper into the night hints of fire and of blood. This clear white purity, what has that to do with plague? That was in the first days, when our charter ship had just set us down to open our proud little trade complex, set us down and then moved on. In that time the plague star was but one of fifty first-magnitude stars in these alien skies, hard even to pick out. In that time we smiled at it, at the superstitions of these primitives, these backward brutes who thought sickness came from the sky. (p. 14-5)

Tuf Voyaging opens with a planet bound glimpse of the orbiting Ark, a ship of the long lost Ecological Engineering Corps that, now abandoned, rains plagues down upon the surface of a ruined world. Our focus soon shifts upwards, as Haviland Tuf, the Tuf of our title, gains control of the ship and its near unlimited power. Though composed of eight distinct short stories, this is a collection with a strong arc, and it's one of power, responsibility, maybe even divinity, and – let's not forget – more inventiveness and wit than your average author can dream of.

The first and longest tale, The Plague Star, brings us to that celestial doom bringer and forces us to cower, antlike, before its mass. Like almost all of the collection's pieces, we are relegated to a somewhat distant view of Tuf, but here we don't see him as a titan come with benevolence or malevolence but rather as a man, a down on his luck trader hired to be the most expendable part of a crew made of near nothing but, hired to take them all to a prize so vast they'd all gain wealth beyond comprehension if they could secure it. Of course, as soon as Tuf's Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices ferries their crew of retired soldiers, bodyguards, cybertechs, and career criminals to the colossal Ark, things fall right to hell. The Plague Star shows every character gunning for every other, a free for all filled with violence, cleverness, and trickery amidst the echoing corridors and dormant cloning tanks. Before long, a handy tide of delightful monsters and plagues have joined the fracas. Yeah, it's clear from the get go who's going to be relaxing on the bridge at the end of all the shooting, but that doesn't detract one bit from the mayhem. This's a rather different tale from the collection's others, focused more on action than theme, and it's likely the most fun, even if not the best.

From then on, with Tuf in firm (and sometimes not so firm) possession of the Ark, the collection becomes the story of his change (or, depending on your interpretation, lack thereof). In each of the tales to come, Tuf is presented with a seemingly impossible ecological problem and must find the solution. This is where, in my opinion, some of Martin's most colorful creations can be found. Handed the life-generating powers of the Ark, with the limitations and to some extent necessary realism of long form work removed, Martin lets his imagination fly here, presenting us with a variety stunning sights and ideas. In Guardians, for instance, we see a war between horrors beneath the sea and those in the seedships vast cloning vats: To hunt the drifting fire-balloons [Tuf] brought forth countless fliers: lashtail mantas, bright red razorwings, flocks of scorn, semi-aquatic howlers, and a terrible pale blue thing – half-plant and half-animal – that drifted with the wind and lurked inside clouds like a living, hungry spiderweb. Tuf called it the-weed-that-weeps-and-whispers. (p. 235)

The height of all that, though, is likely A Beast for Norn, which readers of Dreamsongs have experienced in slightly different form (along with, actually, the also just mentioned tale Guardians). A Beast for Norn has Tuf visiting a planet famed for its gladiatorial combat, each of its great houses pitting its monsters against the next. That, of course, is a situation just waiting for a man with a titanic vessel filled with all the great beasts of the ages, and so it proves, Martin somehow managing to balance a stylish and moral tale with exhibiting a menagerie resplendent with potential and sheer fun.

Tuf's genesis, Martin reveals in Dreamsongs, was an attempt to generate a proper series, one centered on a "larger than life" (p. 563, Dreamsongs) character who "the readers would enjoy following story after story." (p. 562, ibid) To say that he succeeded is an understatement of the kind that Tuf himself might find rather excessive. Tuf is a vegetarian and a pacifist, the possessor of untold power and unmatchable physical strength besides, a fussy and fastidious man, as obsessed with formality as he is irreverent towards the customs of others. He's implacable and huge and hairless; his only sentimental attachment is his cats – named Dax, Suspicion, Doubt, Hostility, Ingratidue, and Foolishnes to commemorate the rude treatment he receives at his various ports of call – and he often extols the virtues of the feline to any and all who will listen (or, of course, that must listen). And none of that's yet touching on his fantastically dry wit. At one point, a military officer tells him that his seedship is "impossible," for "the EEC was wiped out a thousand years ago, along with the Federal Empire. None of their seedships remain." Tuf's response, in all its wry glory: "How distressing […] Here I sit in an illusion. No doubt, now that you have told me my ship does not exist, I shall sink right through it and plunge into your atmosphere, where I shall burn up as I fall." (p. 206)

But there's a troubling, thought-provoking, and nigh unforgettable core beneath all the collection's levity.  As things proceed, a truth soon becomes clear. It is not enough, and is not even possible, to simply solve the environmental symptoms of the problems that Tuf encounters. No, he can liberate the men he finds from the consequences of their mistakes, but he knows that, as he departs, they will make those mistakes again. And so Tuf changes again, and he begins to alter the men themselves.

The center of the collection's arc is the trio of tales set on S'uthlam, a world beset by overpopulation and long ago exceeded resources. The first time, Tuf tries to save them with simple technology. But, as he is shown again and again, there is no possible solution that is merely technological. So Tuf, witnessing a universe filled with problems, and aware that he has the ability to solve them, steps in to fix them. It's something he must do, he argues, no matter how much the people of that world wish him not to. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, (p. 438) he says. Tuf remakes the worlds around him to match his own ideas of progress.

The dilemma of right and intervention is an interesting one, but the true blow from all this comes from the reader's own realization. Each of the collection's tales is an escalation from that preceding it, both in moral complexity and in the scale of Tuf's intervention. And while I'm sure the exact point each reader begins to feel queasy will vary, that moment of revelation will come, and it's that revelation – the realization that the reader has been blithely supporting this remaking, unconsidering and as unable to see beyond Tuf's exterior as the characters – that gives such awful power to Tuf's debatably megalomaniacal declaration to the man named Moses in the second to last story, Mana from Heaven:

"I was born human, and lived as such for long years, Moses. Yet then I found the Ark and I have ceased to be a man. The powers I may wield are vaster than those of many gods that humans have worshipped. There is not a man I meet but I could take his life. There is not a world I pause on that I could not waste utterly, or remake as I choose. I am the Lord God, or as much of one as either of you is likely to encounter.

"It is a great fortune or you that I am kind and benevolent and merciful, and too frequently bored. You are counters to me, nothing more – pieces and players in a game with which I have whiled away a few weeks." (p. 382)

Tuf Voyaging is the story of a man turning into a god, though whether it's a benevolent or malevolent diety he becomes is a question best left to each individual reader. This is not a collection that can be enjoyed in the same way as some of Martin's other work, like his landmark A Song of Ice and Fire. Reading, you don't sympathize with Tuf and, really, there's never any doubt at all about whether he'll succeed. This is, nonetheless, an excellent read well worth the attention of any of Martin's fans or any Science Fiction, a narrative of spectacle and humor with enough depth to comfortably envelop Tuf's vast ship.

[Note: all page numbers from the Meisha Merlin limited hardcover edition]