Tell Khal Drogo that he has given me the wind.” With these words, spoken by Princess Daenerys Targaryen in an early chapter of George R. R. Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones, my apprehensions were crystallized. How could I, a finicky and tender-stomached reader, digest without upset Martin’s maximally invented Dark Age world—the maps, the myths, the heraldry? Historical fantasy, as a genre, is not my cup of tea. The books are too long. The names are too silly. And there’s that stony-faced proclamatory style—as if irony were a late-20th-century novelty, like the digital watch. Surely Khal Drogo was about to give me the wind?
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