century

Wish I could enjoy the book but I know basically zero science. The movie was digestible.

I think Martin is the great modern genius of the fantasy genre. He has taken it in new mature directions that while true to fantasy tropes, also remain true to history in their own way, and offer a new platform on which to study the human condition. That said, I've moved off the books and onto the TV series because I'm tired of waiting and I need a fix. I also find NF books tend to hold my attention longer than fiction.

The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur by Bernard Cornwell. He does a more historical fiction take - no castles and fairies - that's true to pre-Saxon Britain,. Of course it's still fiction, and has some fantasy elements, but like his Saxon stories (The Last kingdom, etc) it's a brutal early medieval world.

Finally cracking and going for the Malazan series by Stephen Erikson: I love the idea of a fantasy world that's got some real world problems: inept dictatorship, domestic oppression, wasteful foreign wars. I like a world that's got a lot of parallels to the real one we live in. Plus the buzz around these is getting hard to ignore. Hope it works out for me.