We had a dramatic Westeros death pool at my work for the last season of Game of Thrones, where we bet on who’d survive, and counted out each week to see who was ahead. I don’t watch the show, but I read all the books, so I wanted in. Although the TV series has gotten ahead of the books, and I’m waiting for Winds of Winter to come out and wrap up the story arcs for the characters I care about. (Apparently Brienne of Tarth gets knighted?)
I’ve really loved how this story pulls people together, like my coworkers at Epic Games or in Yangzhou or now in Boston, and guessing what will happen next is the best part. I don’t know what other stories have the same mass appeal combined with the same reversals of fortune. I’ve never seen anything like the way the internet exploded over the Red Wedding, and it almost makes me sad that I read that alone instead of with dozens hundreds thousands of friends feeling the same way.
Anyway, I’ll need a new series to read, and since someone refuses to be hurried on Winds of Winter, I’ll have to check the best books about dragons for more fantasy recommendations Of this list, I liked the Cinder and Bone series best, for the blend of scifi and fantasy. In this world, dragons are basically dinosaurs, intriguing but extinct animals, and just like in Jurassic Park, science just can’t leave them alone…
Right now, I’m currently 2 books in to the Limited Wish trilogy, and anxiously awaiting the third book. These scifi novels focus on time-travel and tabletop gaming. Fantastic things happen, over and over in these novels, but they’re explained with time travel and split universes, not dragons and magic.
Shortly after Game of Thrones ended, and our work death pool ended, WorkBro told me he got drunk and ran some stats on our guesses and success rate (This is why we are friends.) and asked if I knew how often we, as a group, correctly predicted the character’s end. I guessed 51%, because the reversals and betrayals of Game of Thrones are a lot of the appeal, but you don’t want fiction to feel completely random. It would be too frustrating. I was just slightly off, it was actually 58% or 59%, but it holds true. Just a little bit better than randomly guessing.
I’ve enjoyed the reversals in Ruth Ware novels, like The Death of Mrs. Westaway and The Lying Game. Both of them have stunning reveals and twists, just like in GoT, although with more modest death counts. (I know The Woman In Cabin 10 is the one getting the most buzz, but it just didn’t pull me in the way her other novels did. Rich people using endless wealth and connections to be over-the-top evil isn’t nearly as compelling as ordinary people doing whatever they can to keep their dark secrets.) Lucy Foley’s new novel The Hunting Party is another one with twists and turns to take the reader completely by surprise.
What about you? What’s replacing Game of Thrones for you?
