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Book Entry · Fantasy
by George R. R. Martin · 1996 · A Song of Ice and Fire, book 1
Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell accepts the king's offer to become Hand — over his wife's objections and his own instincts, both correct — and rides south into a capital where honour is a tactical liability. Martin braids the viewpoints (a dwarf who reads people like ledgers, a bastard sent to a wall of ice, an exiled princess sold to a horse-lord with three fossilised dragon eggs) toward the beheading that announced the genre's new rules: the protagonist's plot armour is void, the children are players, and winter is coming regardless. The famous final image — Daenerys rising unburnt from the pyre — lit the fuse on the decade's biggest saga.
The founding volume of the dominant fantasy work of its era: Locus winner, Hugo-winning novella within (Blood of the Dragon), and source of HBO's Game of Thrones, which made Westeros a global lingua franca.
Westeros: a throne of melted swords, winter coming, dragons returning and nobody safe. The saga that retrained epic fantasy's expectations and conquered television as Game of Thrones.
In the Guide from A Song of Ice and Fire:
Locus winner and Hugo finalist, near-universally ranked the saga's peak; the Red Wedding episode ('The Rains of Castamere') became a global television trauma in 2013 and the standard demonstration of Martin's contract with the reader.
Grimdark's defining debut: the close-voice, blackly comic register it established is now the house style of adult fantasy, and Glokta is the subgenre's signature creation.
The most famous deep-end opening in fantasy and the launch of the genre's most ambitious completed epic: the ten-volume Book of the Fallen, delivered at a book a year, redefined what scale and difficulty a mainstream series could sustain.