Book Culture and Narrative in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

What do books represent in G.R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire? This article examines their role as objects and their limitations within a narrative obsessed with loss of knowledge. Books, which are handled, lost, found, read, or destroyed, are both a shorthand for a fantasy world’s material culture, but also a metafictional nod to the reality of the reader. Contemporary fantasy authors, I posit, are both fascinated by texts, and also troubled by their limited chance of survival over the very long periods that the genre tends to sketch. Deep time is hostile to book knowledge, and it is the loss of knowledge that poses the greatest challenges to fantasy realms so concerned with the distant past. Contemporary fantasy is occupied by the assumption that knowledge must be sought where it is hidden; that book learning is marginalised and dismissed; that there is a scarcity of both books and knowledge more generally; but that the ‘hidden truth’ might not, in the end, be trustworthy. In short, transmission of<br/>information is threatened; and if Martin’s epic is also a meditation on climate catastrophe, these anxieties conjure a feeling of transcience and threat.