The Fantastic Ambition of <em>Game of Thrones</em>

The HBO show’s second season, which premieres this weekend, has an even wider scope than the first.

Among the fondest memories of my 1970s childhood is that of my father reading Tolkien to me: first and, later, . I followed up with what was, at the time, a fairly common male-nerd-adolescent diet of science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, and the occasional foray back into sword-and-sorcery lit. I’d read the Narnia books, of course, and tried my hand at the Sword of Shannara series, Michael Moorcock’s Elrics and Hawkmoons and Corums, and various other shadows cast by Tolkien’s sun. But by my mid-teens, I’d pretty much concluded that the, etc.) did little to alter this assessment.