Yeah, can't cherry-pick this one, can you?
sleigh briefly delineates what a good year GRRM is having.
Five years ago when A Feast for Crows came out, I was still working for a large NY Publisher (but not the publisher of the series). I happened to be at a big meeting with the VPs of sales and marketing where they talked about what was going on in the market. They had looked at the NYTimes bestseller list, and everyone at the table--mundanes* all--said things on the theme of "Who the hell is George RR Martin and how is his book a #1 hardcover bestseller on the day of its release?" They clearly could not conceive of a world where there were enough geeks to make this book a bestseller, but they equally couldn't believe anyone but geeks would read it.
I confess I couldn't quite hide my contempt for their cluelessness when I said, "Every fantasy reader in creation has been waiting five years for this book. It's the most anticipated book of the year after the new Harry Potter."
So yesterday I was talking to douglascohen and he pointed out, as sleigh has, that GRRM is pretty much all over the mainstream media, that A Song of Ice and Fire is clearly being read, watched, and otherwise appreciated by people who are not genre-genre fans.
I noted that Peter Jackson probably had a lot to do with creating a population of people who might be generally mainstream readers/viewers, but who are also willing to read/watch fantasy.
Then we talked about the phenomenon of Genre Exceptionalism--which is to say that anything SF/F that breaks into the mainstream gets reclassified as not being in the genre--the whole "Margaret Atwood doesn't write SF" bullshit. Magic Realism is not fantasy because translated books cannot possibly be anything but mainstream. Tolkein got the "well, he's really a distinguished academic and this is classic literature" pass. Terry Pratchett gets excused under the Jonathan Swift Satire Clause. They've even managed to pry Neil Gaiman loose as someone who writes mainstream fiction with fantastical elements--obviously a good looking, charismatic, British guy can't possibly be writing that kiddy crap (oh, yes, when he was young and foolish he had something to do with comic books--quick, I must distract you before you think about that too hard).**
So, yeah. If it appeals to people over the age of eighteen who don't dress up as elves and own funny-shaped dice, it must not really be fantasy.
Except, hey, George has shattered that.
There is no clause, rationale, or excuse to pluck A Song of Ice and Fire out of the Fantasy-fantasy category. It's a quasi-medieval, secondary world with magic and dragons and all those D&Dish trappings. It's written by a guy with many decades of writing in the genre, who embraces his geekiness, and encourages people to go to SF/F conventions.
The series may arguably be the best of its kind--the Platonic ideal of contemporary Epic Fantasy--but its kind is not debatable. It is Fantasy.
And it is appealing to a huge number of people who don't consider themselves specifically "fantasy readers."
I wonder what the marketing guys at my old company are thinking now.
*Yes, I know some people think "mundane" is a bad word. I think my little tale here demonstrates it's exactly the right word for those folks, people who think they're the "cool kids" and have not the slightest clue that the rest of us, in fact, do not want to be just like them.
**Note: Neither Pratchett nor Gaiman deny their genre (as Atwood does). They get reclassified by non-genre people who are trying to claim them.