On the recommendation of a friend, I started reading George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones”. I’m not sure I like it — in essence it’s “The Office” with broadswords — but there are moments where the deliberately archaic writing achieves a lovely poetry.<\/p>\n
I especially like a line I just stumbled upon: “The ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones.” This sentence has an elegant air of wistfulness. It sounds like the reminiscence of a old knight who has known happier times. In fact it is spoken by a young boy, while recounting a dream.<\/p>\n
One of the fun things about the fantasy genre is the permission it gives an author to blur the line between the actual and the poetically imagined. In a world where dragons are real, and a well timed magic spell might change the course of political history, there is no clear bright line between the dreams that trouble a character’s sleep and the waking world where he or she lives.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this very freedom seems to create its own restrictions, by encouraging a set of genre conventions that are in some ways more rigid than the strictures of kitchen sink realism. Apparently when magic rules the world, then such considerations as class distinction — particularly the accident of one’s parentage — become as unyielding as fundamental laws of physics.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether there is some sort of conservation law at work here. The more freedom of movement is allowed between dream and reality in a fictional world, the more rigid and unyielding is its social order. The castles in these worlds are lovely indeed, but the stables are full of bones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the recommendation of a friend, I started reading George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones”. I’m not sure I like it — in essence it’s “The Office” with broadswords — but there are moments where the deliberately archaic writing achieves a lovely poetry. I especially like a line I just stumbled upon: “The ravens … Continue reading “The stables are full of bones”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6928"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6931,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928\/revisions\/6931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}