Just Finished Reading Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin

 In 2018, while the reading world was eagerly expecting George R.R. Martin, acclaimed author of the fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire series...adapted to the HBO series Game of Thrones with seven years having elapsed since the last published book...to finally come out with volume number six, he surprised us with Fire and Blood, prequel novel to his ongoing series.  At the time I was miffed, thinking that the author could have better spent his writing time getting on with the next series book, The Winds of Winter...well, it's 2021 and I'm still waiting for that one...and after just reading Fire and Blood, I'm still miffed...

Once, after having read J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterpieces The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I picked up a copy of his prequel The Silmarillion and was gravely disappointed, it being a rather dry chronicle of the history of Middle Earth with an overload of characters, geography and events.  But that's typically what a chronicle is, and Martin's Fire and Blood reads similarly, foregoing the very interesting personal perspectives of his compelling characters presented in the regular series and instead laying out in dry form the history of the Targaryen conquest and reign over the continent of Westeros.  In it you see the same old alliances and betrayals between the various noble houses of the land, and in the first half of their 300-year rule, with the indispensable aid of their dragons, a whole lot of cataclysmic war and brutal slaughter being played out with vast numbers of innocent people victimized, culminating in the "Dying of the Dragons" war between two rival Targaryen factions...who cares who won it.  This chronicle is only the first of two parts, the final one to be published God knows when.  HBO is going to have a series on Fire and Blood...let's see if they don't do like Game of Thrones and get far ahead of the actual author.  If you're a major fan of Martin's fantasy world and it's "history", then this book's for you...although lamentably it reads nothing like the five books published so far in A Song of Ice and Fire.  Still waiting on Book #6, George...George, are you there, George? Now where did that rascal go...