Food For Thought

So, I was reading while waiting for lunch at a take out place the other day. I managed to get in about five pages in the fifteen minutes it took for my fish and chips to come up. And, although it's something that I came up with a little later in the day, reading during that wait shook something loose.

The epic fantasy series that I read before "A Song of Ice and Fire" - "The Sword of Truth" - was really big on dialogue.

I mean, all epic fantasy stories are big on dialogue, but unless I'm remembering those books in an off way (watching Legend of the Seeker perhaps has thrown me), much of the character, plot, and thematic exposition was had in dialogue. In "A Song of Ice and Fire," these things are treated much differently. 

Rather than using dialogue, much of Martin's exposition is done through characters' reflection and the narrative bits and bites that expand upon characters' dialogue. This might just be a small thing to notice, and something quite inconsequential, but let's see what such a difference could mean.

"The Sword of Truth" series was super popular in the around the turn of the millennium.

It topped the charts, it (eventually) got its own TV series, it was the fantasy series that everyone was reading.

Now the same can be said about "A Song of Ice and Fire."

Setting aside these series' other differences, I wonder if the different ways in which these two series tell their stories and build their worlds is reflective of a shift in tastes or in world view in general.

Are readers today more interested in people as their connections to others in their own lives become more and more shallow? Are we just not interested in talking as much as we once were, and now prefer to think? Or has "A Song of Ice and Fire" only taken off in recent years (despite having started in the 1990s) because its TV show has much higher production values than The Legend of the Seeker did?

Of course, the simple answer to all this could be that "A Song of Ice and Fire" is just a better series, but that's the easy way out. What do you think accounts for this difference in what's popular in fantasy lit? Leave your thoughts in the comments!