This is a masterpiece of world-building, with much attention given to intricate details about the colors of the dragons, the clothing people wore on certain memorable occasions, and how the battles they fought played out. The tangled web of intrigues is laid out clearly, noting how each succeeding generation navigated the turbulent political landscape. While not structured like a conventional novel, the book tells a coherent story, and it does not require that the reader have a familiarity with previous books in the Song of Fire and Ice series ... anyone with a taste for richly, even obsessively detailed historical fiction or fantasy about royalty will enjoy this extraordinary work ... a richer, deeper exploration of the world of Westeros—and this is just volume one.
Somehow Martin manages to make these warring kings and queens and exiled princes, with their dragons and purple eyes and white-blond hair… dull. Martin appears to have made the assumption that historical writing should be dry and clinical, and that the excitement of the events themselves should be left to do the talking. Yet the prose is so dry that even descriptions of a battle in the sky between two brothers manages to fall as flat as the losing Targaryen and his dragon ... Asides from the writing style, the main problem with Fire and Blood lies not in its length (an eye-watering 706 pages) but in its complexity. The first 100 pages are OK, but as the history continues, the reader struggles to keep up ... ideal for fans of the stories who love to obsess over the most minute of details ... the sheer scale and exhaustive detail in Fire and Blood makes reading it feel more like you've been assigned a mildly interesting, but often tedious, piece of homework.
Think of it as anglosphere manga, but written down ... At some points, this gets frankly impenetrable ... Even this would be forgivable if the story drew you in, but it does not, because there isn’t one ... Occasionally the narrative shows signs of flaring up into what could have been a proper story if Martin could have been bothered to write it properly. Essentially, it is all one long synopsis for about 50 books that he will never get around to writing, which itself has only been written because he can’t get around to writing the other two Game of Thrones books that his fans are waiting for. ... Worse still, after a doorstop of a thing, we’re still a century and a half short of GoT even beginning, which means there’s another volume of this interminable, self-indulgent crap to come.
To understand the disappointment with which Fire and Blood will inevitably be greeted by all but the most committed Martin aficionados, imagine Tolkien choosing to follow The Two Towers with an almost decade-long wait for a sequel, and releasing The Silmarillion in between. However, Fire and Blood must be judged on its own merits – that is, as a carefully conceived and exhaustive (to say nothing of exhausting) examination of a fantastical historical world ... At its most tedious, the book lists names for paragraphs on end. There will be a core group of Martin’s readers for whom the volume answers countless much-debated questions and riddles, but the average fan is less likely to care ... Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy here. Martin’s usual sense of richly irreverent humour is present throughout ... If this book took itself more seriously, it would become a chore to plough through; as it is, its author is clearly in on the joke ... At the very least, Fire and Blood will reward loyal devotees holding their breath for The Winds of Winter.
I love [this book] so much. Fire & Blood is Martin Unbound — imperfect by nature, a great big pile of story — and I couldn’t put it down ... In the wrong hands, all these semantics could be a parody of doddering historiography — or worse, the kind of High Pedantry you sometimes found in comment boards about Star Trek chronologies. Instead, the thrill of Fire & Blood is the thrill of all Martin’s fantasy work: familiar myths debunked, the whole trope table flipped ... There’s such a detail-drunk quality to the writing here, though, and a fabulous forward motion. Certain incidents resemble classically burly fantasy stuff: airborne dragon duels, swordplay diplomacy. But Martin has a love for realpolitik soap opera: There’s a government initiative to find one gloomy king a wife, and the fate of the realm depends on who gets pregnant when. There are throwaway images so surreal they could only properly exist in this half-sketched, heavily described format ... Heavy stuff, but Fire & Blood flies.
Martin is really, really committed to a dry, dusty historical screed for his style of writing ... What we need is something different. Something sunnier, sandier, more lustrous and less shambolic than the way the TV show did Dorne. Fire And Blood, already, proves that’s not what this book has any intention of being. At least give us some plot to keep us interested in the meanwhile.
... the overall narrative of the book is wonderfully fluid. The details of the Targaryens’ history start simple and pure, building and building so that by the time you get to [a dense section] you’ve well internalized the expository details, allowing Martin’s funnier, looser-tongued characterizations to shine through. Fire & Blood also benefits enormously from adhering to a strictly chronological telling of the Targaryen dynasty, which evokes the same propulsive storytelling we’re accustomed to from the main novels of A Song of Ice and Fire ... There are also lots and lots of Easter eggs scattered throughout the text for readers who have really pored through the Song of Ice and Fire novels and their associated materials ... Fire & Blood was a great surprise to me. I found myself becoming deeply emotionally invested in the Targaryens, thrilling when they achieved great victories and lamenting when they succumbed to their more idiotic desires.
... lean and efficient and slyly seductive and instructive prose ... Although the text is, for the most part, a recounting rather than an enacting... the text is filled with such a wealth of incident and so many colorful characters ... There are scattered moments when the vividness quotient shoots up—a royal traitor being given to a dragon for the beast’s breakfast, for example—but generally one’s pulse will not pound. The book is far from a mere set of author’s notes to himself, but is more formal than otherwise.
