George R.R. Martin was born on September 20, 1948, is still alive and kicking, and mostly famous (in our circles) for his fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire (hereafter simply known as ‘Ice and Fire’, because the full title is too long, and the acronym ASoIaF is almost as bothersome to write).

When writing this first sentence I checked out Robert Jordan’s biography to see when he was born, so that I could scare you by drawing some parallels between unfinished epic fantasy series and old age. Uncanny as it might seem, Jordan and Martin were born on the same year, with only one month between them. Jordan, however, has already unfortunately passed away, and although his epic series The Wheel of Time is being finished by Brandon Sanderson, I guess I’m not the only one to think that it’s just not the same.

So fans of Ice and Fire ought to be slightly concerned, because Martin has become notorious for delaying the books. Although it was only two years delay between the first three books it was five years between the third and fourth, and the delay between the fourth and fifth is to be of the same span (four years so far). The books are very large – seven hundred up to a thousand pages – but readers become more and more frustrated with each delay, and the prospect of waiting five years between the last books (the series is planned to be seven books) is not enjoyable.

Up until recently my world of George R.R. Martin consisted of Ice and Fire, and only Ice and Fire. So he had written some other stuff, but that was [cue twitching eyebrows and a sneer] science-fiction. Or so I had heard. Luckily I came across a book with Martin’s name on it – called Dreamsongs – which included the short story Hedge Knight that takes place before the Ice and Fire books. It was the only reason I picked up the book, even though Hedge Knight is only a fifty page story of a book that is twelve hundred pages. Silly, I know.

The book is a collection of selected short stories, novelettes and novellas, with some commentary in between where Martin explains what happened in his life. What becomes clear is that Martin isn’t afraid to let personal emotions influence his writing and a lot of the mood in stories is explained by what happened in Martins life at the time of the writing. It’s an interesting behind-the-scenes tour of a writer’s mind as he leaps from superheroes to science-fiction to horror to TV scripts to fantasy, and mixes of all those. Martin shows an incredible talent to tell a deep and intriguing story no matter what the setting might be – the “furniture rule” as he calls it.

Another of Martin’s rules is to “never throw anything away”. Although it make sense never to throw away something you worked on but could never finish, it make less sense to keep something so bad that it would never be published. Like the quite dull story The Fortress which tells the fall of the Swedish fortress Sveaborg in 1808. Or so I thought, until I later in the volume came across The Siege. It was the exact same story, with the exact same characters, but with just one twist: mutated time-travelling Americans journeyed back in time from a war-torn world to stop the Soviet before it was even created. It was a brilliant story that really shows the kind of imagination that Martin has. And the rule to never throw anything away suddenly makes so much sense.

The volume is full of fantastic stories like the Hugo and Nebula Award winning horror/science-fiction story Sandkings (and I don’t even like horror), or the incredible deep and tragic A Song for Lya or… the list can go on for a while. But in the end it comes back to A Song of Ice and Fire, which has become the pinnacle for Martin. Maybe not the pinnacle of writing, because as much as it hurts to say, some of the stories in Dreamsongs slaps Ice and Fire around with a large trout any day. But it’s definitely the pinnacle for success, epic scale, and a step in the right direction for the fantasy genre.

Ice and Fire is a gruesome story in a world which resembles our own world in very unflattering way. It is ruthless, vulgar and dark world, filled with people capable of both the noblest and gruesome of acts. Gone are the cliché heroic warriors rescuing fair maidens. Here the heroic warriors get stabbed in the back by their best friends and the fair maidens raped before their families. It is an adult story, and Martin is not afraid to use vulgar words, detailed sex scenes, torture, severed limbs, incest, and all kinds of things that at first seems a bit over the edge, but a bit more understandable when you come to the realization that Martin is not exactly creating his own world as much as mirroring our own.

We see things from a lot of perspectives – even those that opposite each other’s – and just because someone is working against a main character does not mean he is any way evil, although the characters might see it that way; it’s all a matter of viewpoints. And speaking of viewpoints, there is a lot of them. In the four books there are a total of twenty-five characters points of view we get to follow. It creates a wide understanding of the happenings, on both sides of conflicts, so it’s hard to see anyone as purely good or evil.

If you want to start reading books by George R.R. Martin I recommend A Game of Thrones, the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire series. But when you are finished reading the series and are sitting and waiting for the next part like everyone else you should pick up Dreamsongs and be dazzled by the stories found there.