Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago (28 page)

There’s no doubt that the American Bantam editions are more common than the HarperCollins UK editions, though common in this case is a relative term. The only HarperCollins firsts for sale on AbeBooks are copies of
A Dance with Dragons
. I knew that
A Game of Thrones
was a scarce title, but I was surprised to find the first four books totally absent. Even
A Dance with Dragons
was scarce, with only six copies in collectible condition listed. Prices ranged from $153 to $65, with an average of $103. Note that all of these copies are signed, which adds a premium to their value. Note also that Martin is a willing and frequent signer and many signed copies of his books can be found on the market.

Many dealers are advertising the HarperCollins slipcased hardcovers as first editions, with asking prices for signed copies of
A Game of Thrones
as high as $350 and as low as about $50. By no means should these later editions be considered firsts. It remains to be seen what impact they will make on the collectors’ market.

The Bantam editions are somewhat more common. Let’s start with complete sets, for those who are really late to the game. If you’d like to acquire all the Bantam firsts in one swoop, a set of all five in Near Fine or better is available for $3,000.

All the copies enumerated below are in collectible condition (Near Fine or better), book and dust jacket both.

A Game of Thrones
shows eight copies available, all signed, ranging in price from $1,500 to $500, with an average price of $956. When I did the
Firsts
article in 2001, the price range for this title was $250 to $300.

A Clash of Kings
shows two signed copies available at $650 and $575; average $612. Three unsigned copies were also available with prices ranging from $250 to $150, averaging $200. In 2001 the price range for this volume was $30 to $50.

A Storm of Swords
is represented by four signed copies at $300 to $140; average $216. One unsigned copy was listed at $115. In 2001, this title was selling for $15 to $30.

A Feast for Crows
has five signed titles at $300 to $50; average $153. There was one unsigned copy at $60.

A Dance with Dragons
, with by far the largest first print run, has a relatively small population of twenty-four signed copies at $150 to $49 (average $82) and four unsigned at $40 to $31 (average $35). I would have thought there’d be more copies available. I would suggest checking used bookstores, but remember, again, you’re looking for first printings. Even though there were several hundred thousand, many seem to have already disappeared into the hands of the general reading public, who on the whole don’t know or care about the difference between a first edition or a book club edition. That can be good news for a determined (and lucky) collector.

The existence of e-book editions for all titles has had no discernible effect on the collectors’ market. Some time, obviously, the market will peak and prices will stabilize, but I don’t think we’ll see this for a while.

It might not be a bad idea to snatch up those available unsigned firsts of
A Dance with Dragons
and hope that George will appear in your area soon.

       
JOHN JOS. MILLER
has had about ten novels and twice as many short stories published, as well as comic book scripts, gaming books for the Wild Cards series, and over a hundred posts for the blog
cheesemagnet.com
. He also has written extensively on baseball history, especially nineteenth-century baseball and the Negro Leagues. He is one of the original members of the New Mexican group that created the superheroes-in-prose franchise Wild Cards. Besides having stories in three of the titles currently available from Tor Books, he has also authored two RPG volumes about Wild Cards for Green Ronin Publishing. His adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s “In the House of the Worm,” a Gothic horror story that takes place in the far future on a dying Earth, will be published by Avatar Press whenever the artist finally gets around to finishing it. His columns on
cheesemagnet.com
deal mainly with fantastic cinema and fiction. He also frequently gives away books and movies, so you should check it out just for the swag alone.

NED VIZZINI

How George R.R. Martin Fights the Genre Wars

WHAT’S THE HARDEST PART
of writing a book? It’s a good question—one I get often from aspiring authors wary of the pain—but the answer is never what people think. Beginning can be hard, yes, and ending can be downright brutal, as the protracted wait for
A Dance with Dragons
demonstrated, but the hardest part comes once you’ve finished your book and sold it. Then you must make a searching and fearless moral inventory and
try to get blurbs
. Securing other authors’ positive comments on your work is the closest you will probably come to asking out your celebrity crush; my strategy is to beg.

When I set out to get blurbs for a young adult novel with fantasy elements that I sold in 2010, the person I wanted to beg most was George R.R. Martin. While reading up on roleplaying games’ influence on American culture, I discovered his work through
Dreamsongs: Volume II
, which, if you’re already chafing for
The Winds of Winter
, documents Martin’s creative ventures in Los Angeles with Tyrion-esque cynicism. In
Dreamsongs
I found that in 1983 Martin started playing the
Call of Cthulhu
and
Superworld
games so much that he
stopped writing for a year and nearly went broke
. As he explained in an introduction to the Wild Cards novels that resulted from his obsession: “[My wife] Parris used to listen at my office door, hoping to hear the clicking of my keyboard from within, only to shudder at the ominous rattle of dice.”

This was the first time I’d read about a writer having a fantasy gaming problem, as opposed to, say, a drug or alcohol problem. Since I’d recently weathered my own ten-year addiction to
Magic: The Gathering
, I saw a kindred spirit in Martin, someone who might understand me—and dig my book. My publisher approved of my blurb quest, as Martin is a phenomenal success, with more than 8.5 million books sold in the Song of Ice and Fire series according to
USA Today
. But those sales are supported by a surprising development for an author steeped in roleplaying games and genre fiction—canonical critical acclaim.
Time Magazine
gave Martin the ultimate blurb in 2005: “the American Tolkien.”

But when did that become a distinction? Tolkien has been part of our culture for so long that it’s easy to forget that The Lord of the Rings was derided as escapist—and worse, foreign—when it first appeared here. You can get a sense of just how harsh the criticisms were in Michael Saler’s excellent 2012 critical overview of fantasy,
As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality
, from Oxford University Press. “Certain people—especially, perhaps, in Britain—have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash,” declared Edmund Wilson in 1956. “What apparently gets kids square in their post-adolescent sensibilities is not the scholarly top-dressing but the undemanding, comfortable, child-sized story underneath,” chided
Life
.

This argument—that fantasy is simple, formulaic, and for children—has kept it in a genre ghetto since its inception as a modern literary form in the nineteenth century. Although it has been creeping into academia for years, and Martin has accelerated its move toward acceptance by serious circles like the
New York Times Book Review
, it is still dismissed by many critics as by-the-numbers hackwork created to serve a market: nerds like me, Martin, and, let’s face it, you. Fantasy’s story, from formulation through critical dismissal to massive popular success and overdue academic assessment, is part of an ongoing intellectual conflict as grueling as the War of the Ninepenny Kings—
the genre wars
—that is only now approaching detente.

More than anything, “genre” is a marketing term. It’s meant to help booksellers shelve product, and thus it doesn’t have much relevance prior to the ascendance of the book as a mass-market product in England in the mid-1800s, where reduced printing costs led to an explosion of garishly illustrated “penny dreadfuls.” These serialized entertainments, marketed as literature to lower- and middle-class readers, forced critics to draw the first line in the genre wars: between “literary” and “popular” fiction.

It was clear to academics that the work of, say, George W.M. Reynolds (who never used the word “face” when “countenance” would suffice, and avoided “said” in favor of “ejaculated”) was not literature. It had to be something else, and “crap” seemed impolite. The problem was, people
loved
it: in ten years, according to The Victorian Web, Reynolds moved over a million copies of
The Mysteries of London
and its sequel
The Mysteries of the Court of London
, which would make them bestsellers even today. “Popular” fiction seemed a safe place to sequester his output from serious work.

Yet even when separated from literature, popular fiction was seen as a threat. Henry James warned against it in his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction,” aiming squarely at Robert Louis Stevenson, who had just written the well-liked adventure tale
Treasure Island
. For James, “a novelist writes out of and about ‘all experience’ and aims to represent nothing less than ‘life’ itself in all its complexities,” says Ken Gelder in his 2004 survey
Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field
. In contrast,
“Treasure Island
[. . .] is nothing more than a fantasy.”