Check out Fevre Dream, I quite enjoyed his take on Vampires and it's steamboats on the motherfucking Mississippi River. Though if you want stuff he actually put his heart into, The Thousand Worlds is where it's at. He was a starving artist then, and I always find that's when any artist does their best work
Manufacturing and distribution of meth. Selling to kids as well. Now he spends his time doing Nerd Crew level videos but unironically.
It's really more like one of the Silk Road waypoints if they also had access to the ocean, at least culturally.
So Constantinople?
Put Timur-era Samarkand where Constantinople is and you've basically got Qarth. Swap out the Mullahs for Warlocks.
Call me a Preston Jacobs ball washer, but I do agree with him that Qarth is strange. They call themselves the oldest city (which both Yi-Ti and Asshai call themselves that too) but in a red desert you have people who are inexplicably pale. Very weird, but I like it. Eerie, gives a mystery to the East I've always liked
I misread that as Prester John initially, which is ironically appropriate and part of why Qarth doesn't work for me. It works as a weird legend of the East, like Prester John was in real history. A red desert city full of pale people moving goods from even further places abroad. But we went there. It's actually like that, not a legend inflated through a game of telephone along trade lines.
Being fair of skin has always been associated with beauty and richness, so while slaves get burnt by the sun, their masters don't tan because they cover and stay indoors.
Martin’s worldbuilding is little more than a backdrop for his fantasy war of the Roses, as it should have been. The problem arose when, as the series dragged on, the perception of story writing shifted toward lionizing a detailed world over the actually more important goal of telling a good story. Essos is flat and poorly developed because it was never intended to be a focus to his audience until they autistically demanded he make it so.
Well, that and as he increasingly struggled to tie his characters together post-ASOS for the final act of the story, writing meandering sidequest material in regions tangential to the overall plot became his favorite way to invent a page count to placate the suits at Random House. Until the success of the show hit a tipping point where he no longer really needed to placate them anymore, which is part of my theory for why we haven't seen anything published in the main series since.
And yet African people who owned slaves were not. Nor were the Arabs who I think more closely inspired the Qartheen peoples since Slaver's Bay is so clearly Egyptian. Lived in a paradise in the desert, halfway between worlds, heavy emphasis on slavery, a tinge of magic to them with the Warlocks, ect.
Look at Lord of the Rings (seethe, Gurm). The worldbuilding is important and given plenty of pages, but is still firmly secondary to the story. Hell the worldbuilding is 95% in another book that only saw the light of day because autists demanded it and Christopher Tolkien wanted to placate them/make. moar. money. Yet Tolkien's worldbuilding, even absent the Silmarillion or the appendices of Return of the King, is held up as peak worldbuilding. JRR doesn't make you slog through worldbuilding except maybe in The Shadow of the Past and The Council of Elrond chapters in Fellowship. If you don't want to read the prologue to Fellowship, or the appendices to Return, or the Silmarillion, you don't have to
Most of the world being built in LOTR centers around discussion or explanations of the plot. Why is the ring so dangerous? Where did it come from? How did it get to the Shire? Who is coming for it? Where does it need to go? Who is going to take it? Once you start to get answers to those you see the rest of the world. The members of the Fellowship all have their own distinct backgrounds. The origin of the ring reveals histories of Middle Earth. And reveals the history of characters like Gollum and Bilbo (if you didn't read The Hobbit first).
But weren't you surprised? Were your expectations not subverted?
But what was their tax policy? HMMMMMM?
That could be show only though, we don't know if that is George's plan. He does intend for the Others to be an apocalyptic threat. I've seen multiple interpretations of them from climate change to nuclear war to the Vietcong. His failure to get Winds out and the horrendous season 8 unfortunately undermine our perception of George's work which is a shame but at this point it's his own fault.
