The Top Five Differences Between HBO’s Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones
It’s rare a show comes along that leaves readers wondering whether the book or screen version is better.
Generally speaking, film and television adaptations rarely live up to the complexity and depth of novels. In an effort to condense plot and keep things moving relatively quickly, and understandably, shows and films often act as the tip of the iceberg.
The original works, however, are more likely to reveal the underlying complexities (the rest of the iceberg, you might say) and true personalities of most of the characters. And, as expected, whole scenes are generally chopped from the film version due to lack of time.
So, of course, when a show like Game of Thrones comes along (the fourth season of which will be starting next week), that has some fans claiming the show is as good, perhaps even better, than George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, then we have no choice but to examine the merits of each.
In my opinion, the show lacks in several major areas. First: relationships.
Two years ago, veteran author Mary Gentle’s most recent novel The Black Opera was published to mixed reviews. Some liked the book’s mix of alternate-history fantasy and comic-opera theatricality — as the sub-title has it, “a novel of Opera, Volcanoes, and the Mind of God.” Others, 
Somewhere in Europe, probably around the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century, someone put together a book of tales. Likely this someone was a cleric who wanted to compile a manual to use in sermons and preaching. The texts were written in Latin and featured stories of all sorts: romances, travellers’ tales, fragments of Pliny and Herodotus and Aesop. A number were brief and didactic, if not prosaic, describing some uninteresting event or propounding a riddle a nearby wise man quickly answered with too pat an explanation — but others of the tales were filled with miracles and adventure and magic, with angels and saints and knights and dragons. Each was given a detailed moral, with every incident and character shown to have allegorical significance. Whether because it boasted wonder-stories, because it made those wonder-stories Christian parables, or both, the book quickly became immensely popular. This being well before the age of print, manuscripts proliferated, gaining and losing stories along the way.
