Ross Douthat, the intellectually honest, socially conservative young New York Times columnist, is apparently a fantasy reader, and has an article and a link for us:
"Lanchester comes up with several reasons (besides, of course, the whole
HBO thing) why Martin has managed to break out of the ghetto, including
his ruthless willingness to kill his darlings (the major characters,
that is) and the fact that his world is “low magic” and thus more
accessible to people allergic to magic rings and wizard’s orbs. These
are excellent points, to which I’d add that the whole “Wars of the
Roses”-style frame that Martin’s story uses — the emphasis on gritty
dynastic politics — lets him exploit what I’ve always thought was
fantasy’s most underappreciated advantage as a genre: It’s ability to
benefit from feudalism’s gift to fiction — the intermingling of family
relationships and political machinations that so many historical
stories, from Shakespeare’s York-Lancaster plays down to Hilary Mantel’s
books today, rely on for their power — but with the added narrative
bonus that even the best-informed the reader won’t have any idea how the
fantasist’s story of betrayals and beheadings ultimately turns out."
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/games-of-thrones-and-the-fantasy-authors-challenge/
These meditations were inspired in part by this enthusiastic article on fantasy and the 'Game of Thrones' phenomenon (the tv show as much as the novel) in the 'London Review of Books':
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n07/john-lanchester/when-did-you-get-hooked
"The climate change aspect of this is obvious to the contemporary
audience, but there’s something more subtle and subtextual at work here
too: another economic metaphor, another kind of difficult climate.
Westeros is like our own world, in which hard times have arrived, and no
one feels immune from their consequences, and no one knows how long the
freeze will last. Our freeze is economic, but still. Put these two
components together, and even the fantasy-averse, surely, can start to
see the contemporary appeal of this story, this world. It’s a universe
in which nobody is secure, and the climate is getting steadily harder,
and no one knows when the good weather will return."
