The Great Unfinished Generational Epic
George R.R. Martin, the Strauss-Howe theory of history, and the failure of the Baby Boomers.
I.
In 1996, George R.R. Martin—then an obscure television screenwriter and mostly retired author of science-fiction short stories—published A Game of Thrones, the first book in what was intended to be an epic fantasy trilogy, A Song of Ice and Fire. The story, which takes place in a fantasy world where seasons vary unpredictably, centres on the noble House Stark, whose motto is Winter Is Coming. The following year, author and theatre director William Strauss and historian Neil Howe published The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, in which they argue that history is defined by an eighty-year cycle known as a saeculum. “History is seasonal,” they write on page six, “and winter is coming.”
It is highly unlikely that Strauss and Howe cribbed that particular formulation from George R.R. Martin, whose book was published only months before theirs, and whose work remained largely unknown to the general public at the time, outside of speculative-fiction circles. What is likelier, and somewhat eerier, is that Strauss and Howe came up with the phrase independently of Martin, the historians reaching the same conclusion as the novelist, in the same words, after arriving at it by different routes, a confluence perhaps revelatory of something bubbling within the collective unconscious of 1990s American society.
A Song of Ice and Fire did not remain obscure for long. Martin published two additional books in the series over the next four years, each one to growing public acclaim. By this point, the series had grown in the telling: Martin was no longer planning a trilogy, but five books, then six, then seven. And after 2000, his pace slowed drastically. It took him five years to finish the fourth book, and six years after that to finish the fifth, which was published in 2011.
That same year saw the debut of Game of Thrones, an HBO series directed by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss based on Martin’s books. Eight seasons were released over the course of the next nine years, and Game of Thrones grew into one of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of the 2010s. Martin was skyrocketed to global fame, and quickly became a creative juggernaut, spoken about in the same breath as George Lucas or J.K. Rowling. In a review for Time, he was described as “the American Tolkien.”
Then the problems began to mount. Halfway through its run, Game of Thrones ran out of material to adapt from the still-unfinished book series, and the show-runners were forced to produce their own material, partly based on Martin’s outline. There was an immediate and precipitous drop in quality, and the final season of the show, which aired in 2019, was almost universally loathed by critics and fans alike.
The novels, meanwhile, remain unfinished. George R.R. Martin has not published a new instalment of the series since 2011. For the past 14 years, he has been plugging away on the promised sixth book, The Winds of Winter, but updates on his progress are sporadic and cranky, and he is juggling several other projects, including spinoffs of the main series. It seems increasingly likely that Martin, now 76 years old, will never finish The Winds of Winter, let alone his planned seventh and final book, A Dream of Spring.
All this has caused some consternation. In 2009, when fans had been waiting for a measly four years for Martin to finish the fifth book in the series, fellow fantasy author Neil Gaiman scolded impatient fans by telling them that “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.” To be sure, no one has the prerogative to tell content creators what to do with their intellectual property—although it is somewhat ironic that Gaiman and Martin, both men of the political Left, start to sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to their work. Martin would be well within his rights to retire his keyboard and never write another word. Those disappointed by the likely non-ending to A Song of Ice and Fire can sate themselves on the countless other great books published over the centuries, with which one could occupy oneself for more than a lifetime.
Yet the lack of a satisfactory conclusion to the series is a keenly felt loss at this fraught moment in our social evolution, in large part because Martin’s series tapped into something of great relevance to the current zeitgeist. This is what gave his series broad appeal beyond the typical core fanbase of speculative fiction, and made it so perfectly suited to the cultural moment of the 2010s. History is cyclical, and winter is coming, and George R.R. Martin had a powerful and immensely valuable message to deliver—one which, at this point, will likely remain forever undelivered, or which will arrive too late to make a difference.
II.
In the Strauss-Howe framework, the eighty-year saeculum is divided into four Turnings, each of roughly two decades. The first Turning is a High, the second is an Awakening, the third is an Unravelling, and the fourth is a Crisis. Each corresponds to a season of the year: the High is spring, the Awakening is summer, the Unravelling is autumn, and the Crisis is winter. In each of these seasons, a different generational archetype comes of age: Artists during the High, Prophets during the Awakening, Nomads during the Unravelling, and Heroes during the Crisis.
This might sound a bit complicated, but looking back at the past saeculum, it is relatively easy to trace this cycle. The last Fourth Turning, the Crisis, began during the Great Depression and culminated in World War II. The Hero generation that came of age during it were the young people who fought and won the war, the so-called Greatest Generation. Then came the First Turning, the High, a period of relative postwar order and consensus, in which the Artists of the Silent Generation—the children of World War II—came of age. The Second Turning, the Awakening, was the period of social and spiritual upheaval that began in the 1960s and continued through the following decade, in which the Prophet generation, the Baby Boomers, came of age. The Third Turning, the Unravelling, was the period of growing alienation and decay that began in the 1980s and lasted until the turn of the century, in which Generation X, the Nomad generation, came of age.
But this pattern did not start in the 20th century. Strauss and Howe trace the cycle back several centuries, all the way to the late Middle Ages, and identify a Crisis roughly every eight or nine decades in Anglo-American history. Before World War II came the Civil War, before that the American Revolution, before that the Glorious Revolution, before that the attack of the Spanish Armada, before that the Wars of the Roses. In between these crises, counting eight or nine decades at a time back from the 1960s, came various Awakenings, or periods of spiritual flourishing, dating back to the Protestant Reformation.
There is nothing magical or supernatural about any of this; no divine intervention is required to ensure this pattern. The eighty-year saeculum is roughly the length of a human lifespan (and while average life expectancy has increased greatly over the past few centuries in the West, the lifespan of those who reach old age has changed far less). When one generation dies off, so does the direct memory of the lessons they learned by painful experience (as opposed to by reading history), and those lessons must be relearned by their successors. We now live in an age in which most of the World War II veterans and their peers are gone, and the Silent Generation who grew up during the war are rapidly disappearing. Already, we are being forced to relearn their lessons.
This sort of historical pattern-drawing risks overgeneralisation, and Strauss and Howe’s theory has been criticised for its unfalsifiability. After all, historical periods are not easily quantifiable, and every age, looked at through a certain lens, could show some symptoms of a High, an Awakening, an Unravelling, or a Crisis. Yet the Strauss-Howe framework is compelling enough to deserve serious consideration, not least because their predictions to date have been surprisingly accurate.
Writing in 1997, Strauss and Howe predicted: “Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter the Fourth Turning.” Precisely what form this Crisis would take, Strauss and Howe could not say, but they did offer a few hypothetical scenarios, some of which make for chilling reading in 2025:
A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons. The United States and its allies launch a preemptive strike. The terrorists threaten to retaliate against an American city. Congress declares war and authorizes unlimited house-to-house searches. Opponents charge that the president concocted the emergency for political purposes. A nationwide strike is declared. Foreign capital flees the U.S.
An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown. The president declares emergency powers. Congress rescinds his authority. Dollar and bond prices plummet. The president threatens to stop Social Security checks. Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Default looms. Wall Street panics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the president to declare martial law.
Growing anarchy throughout the former Soviet republics prompts Russia to conduct training exercises around its borders. Lithuania erupts in civil war. Negotiations break down. U.S. diplomats are captured and publicly taunted. The president airlifts troops to rescue them and orders ships into the Black Sea. Iran declares its alliance with Russia. Gold and oil prices soar. Congress debates restoring the draft.
Tweak a few details and this speculative list reads like a history of the past two and a half decades: 9/11 and the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise in political polarisation that culminated in the ascent and re-ascent of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic and the second once-in-a-generation financial crisis, the Black Lives Matter and 6 January riots, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. If we are not living through a Fourth Turning, then we are certainly living through a period that is doing a very good job of masquerading as one.
While it may be tempting to hope that we have paid our dues with these catastrophes, and the Crisis period is now over, it is just as likely that we are not out of the woods yet, and that all of these crises are merely previews of the main event, just as the misery of the Great Depression was surpassed by the mayhem of World War II. After all, previous Crises had a definite and unmistakable ending, usually involving the end of a major war, and we have not yet reached such a point. Political polarisation, particularly in the United States, remains strong. And while two geopolitical hotspots have recently exploded, the third and largest one in East Asia continues to simmer. Even if those other wars wind down, it seems unlikely that this Crisis era, if indeed we are in one, will pass without some resolutions to the rising tensions between the West and Xi Jinping’s China.
III.
What does any of this have to do with Game of Thrones? Well, in Martin’s fantasy universe, the seasons tend to last for years, and vary wildly with no set pattern. Inhabitants of his world might be forced to suffer through three years of summer, then five years of winter, or even a year of false spring which gets their hopes up for nothing. No explanation has yet been given in the story for why the seasons are out of whack, but it is hinted to be the result of some magic that went awry millennia earlier. Nor is it ever fully explained how the entire population does not die during the years-long winters, or how people would even have a concept of a “year.” Nevertheless, the uneven seasons are of great thematic importance: in Martin’s universe, people are small and exist at the mercy of an unpredictable and unforgiving natural world.
A Game of Thrones begins near the end of a ten-year summer, with a winter of equivalent length expected to come soon. The summer has been a period of relative stability and prosperity, ruled over by King Robert Baratheon, who overthrew the old order in a prior civil war. It is, in Strauss-Howe terms, a High. But the new order is starting to decay: Robert, the Hero of the last Crisis, is now a drunken oaf who relies on smarter advisors to run the kingdom for him. His wife, Queen Cersei, has been carrying on an incestuous affair with her twin brother, and her three children, including the psychopathic crown prince of the realm, are secret bastards. Here, incest serves a thematic purpose: to highlight that the old order is (literally and metaphorically) inbred, and that it is destined to collapse under the weight of its own shortsightedness and insularity.
The series begins when Lord Eddard Stark, the central protagonist of the first book, goes south to manage King Robert’s affairs. House Stark, which rules the icy North, is keenly attuned to the dangers of the unpredictable seasons, hence their motto—and a byword for the series, which was the subject of numerous online memes during the show’s early seasons—Winter Is Coming. Ned Stark is a temperamentally conservative character, a strictly honourable man who heads a mostly happy nuclear family with a wife and several children. In the Stark family, one sees a nod of respect by Martin to the traditionalist order of 1950s America in which he grew up—the era of the last High—even if that era did feature a certain navel-gazing incestuousness.
But winter is coming, and Martin is fond of subverting typical storytelling tropes. Ned Stark’s adherence to traditional values is not enough to save him in a world of dangerous political intrigue. His stubborn tendency to do the honourable thing in all circumstances, no matter how foolhardy, ends with him beheaded in front of a jeering crowd and his family torn asunder, each of his children set on a different path of adversity. By the second book, the ten-year-long summer is over and fall has begun: magic is coming back into the world (an Awakening, in the Strauss-Howe paradigm) and the old social order is tearing itself apart (an Unravelling). The Others, a race of ice demons who have not been seen for thousands of years, are reappearing, setting the stage for an apocalyptic Crisis.
In Martin’s world, virtue is not sufficient for success. He contrasts his worldview with that of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and progenitor of modern fantasy fiction. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Martin said:
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone—they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
Josh Allan
Over the next few books of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin earns his reputation for subverting readers’ expectations. Again and again, characters set up to be the heroes fall short, while characters introduced as villains unexpectedly redeem themselves. Martin is a master of misdirection, and once an expectation is subverted, half of the fun is rereading and seeing just how obvious the hints were in retrospect. Game of Thrones failed in later seasons partly because the show-runners lacked Martin’s talent for this sort of thing, and their attempts at subverting viewers’ expectations were contrived and awkward.
To be sure, Martin is not the only author in recent years who has made a point of subverting genre tropes. Lev Grossman, the same reviewer who dubbed Martin “the American Tolkien,” wrote a trilogy of fantasy novels titled The Magicians, intended to be a deconstructive adult take on Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. But while Grossman’s work is mean-spirited and nihilistic, Martin writes with great respect for the genre in which he works. To quote A Song of Ice and Fire megafan Emmett Booth, “I think [the series is] more reconstructive than deconstructive, not tearing the genre apart so much as reminding readers of why it was worth falling in love with in the first place. It’s not that being the hero is stupid, it’s that being the hero is hard, and you might fail at it. But that doesn’t mean the attempt is worthless.”
Even at its darkest, A Song of Ice and Fire retains the Romanticism of high fantasy. Integrity and nobility still exist, just not in the places where you’d expect to find them. Jaime Lannister, a handsome golden-haired knight, is rotten on the inside (or at least he starts out that way), while Brienne of Tarth, an ugly woman shunned for wanting to fight like a man, comports herself with knightly honour. In each book, Martin grapples with difficult questions about the value of virtue in a world where it is often punished.
And yet it is becoming increasingly clear that Martin does not have answers to the questions he has posed. This is why the series has ballooned in size and scope. Eight point-of-view characters in the first book has become 22 by the fifth, and the original protagonists are buried beneath the new storylines. The newer books in the series, although beautifully written, lack the symmetry and rhythmic properties of first few volumes. Martin—who boasts of being a “gardener” rather than an “architect” as a writer, of letting his stories grow naturally rather than planning them out—seems to have written himself into a corner, and this is partly due to the absence of a coherent worldview.
IV.
George R.R. Martin was born in 1948, which makes him a member of the Baby Boomer generation. In the Strauss-Howe framework, the Boomers were born into the High of the First Turning, and came of age during the Awakening of the Second Turning. They are a Prophet generation, which in its final iteration “emerges as wise elders guiding the next Crisis.” In relation to the current Hero generation of Millennials, Martin and his fellow Boomer Prophets are situated to take on the archetypal role of mentor. Strauss and Howe cite the fictional examples of Merlin, Gandalf, and Obi-Wan Kenobi as old Prophets guiding young Heroes, and it is easy to see Martin, the eccentric white-bearded fantasy author, as just such a loveable wizard figure.
If so, then A Song of Ice and Fire is his message to the younger generation, told in the form of a story, but suffused with themes relevant to real life (as were many parables of great Prophets before him). The job of the Millennial Heroes is to embrace his wisdom in the same open spirit with which Luke Skywalker or King Arthur embraced their respective tutors’ arcane lessons, and to translate that wisdom into words and deeds. Yet an inescapable feature of such stories is that the mentor dies, often with his training of the hero incomplete, and while George R.R. Martin remains alive, it is more likely than not that he has reached the effective end of his literary career.
The interesting thing about such stories, though, is that the mentor need not always stay dead. Obi-Wan’s ghost reappears to guide Luke through the remainder of the trilogy, and in various versions of the Arthurian myth there are promises of Merlin returning. In Harry Potter, Dumbledore has one last pivotal conversation with Harry from beyond the grave. In The Lord of the Rings, written by the devout Catholic Tolkien, Gandalf falls to his death fighting an ancient evil spirit called the Balrog, but he is resurrected by the god of Tolkien’s universe, and returns to save his young charges when all seems lost.
The atheistic Martin, in whose books religion is mostly myth and charlatanry, has no room for a Christlike rebirth narrative. As he once remarked, “Gandalf should have stayed dead.” Indeed, in A Song of Ice and Fire, the dead father figure Ned Stark has no chance of returning to life. This seems to mirror Martin’s fate as a writer. Having been dragged down to the depths of procrastination by his own personal Balrogs, he has remained creatively lifeless. Unless he rapidly picks up the pace on The Winds of Winter, there will be no Gandalf-like literary rebirth for him.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the stolid Oxford professor from whose febrile mind Gandalf would spring, and whose work would go on to inspire Martin and so many others, was not born a Hero or a Prophet. Born in 1892, he was a member of the Lost Generation, a peer of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and a Nomad in the Strauss-Howe framework. The beneficiaries of Tolkien’s epic trilogy, which was published in the 1950s and gained popularity a decade later, were not the Hero generation of World War II but the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers who came after them. Yet he was a prophet if not a Prophet. If all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, then all of modern fantasy consists of footnotes to Tolkien. He was a Gandalf to Martin’s generation, just as Martin could have been a Gandalf to ours. But there the similarities end.
One can agree or disagree with Tolkien’s Catholic, agrarian worldview, but one cannot say that it lacked internal coherence. That is why he was able to finish his epic fantasy series, and to do so in a satisfying manner, while Martin has been unable to do the same. Unlike Tolkien, Martin is a man of confused and conflicted premises, a great artist but a muddled thinker. And this, tragically, is all too typical of the Boomer generation—the Prophets needed at this moment to bestow wisdom upon the modern Heroes are all too often devoid of it.
Charlotte Allen
Some generations get a lot of power; others get little. Seven presidents in a row, from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush, were members of the Greatest Generation, and their collective administrations spanned 32 years. Since then, every president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, with one exception, has been a Boomer. Assuming Trump completes his second term, their collective administrations will also span 32 years. The exception, Joe Biden, was the sole member of the Silent Generation to ever win the presidency. Yet for their decades-long oligopoly on governance, their stubborn refusal to cede the levers of society to their successors, the Boomers have produced a bitter societal crop.
V.
George R.R. Martin was born in the working-class suburb of Bayonne, New Jersey, and appears to have had a fairly strait-laced upbringing. In a 2021 commencement speech, Martin said that he “came to Northwestern [University] in 1966 as a patriotic crew-cut high school kid out of New Jersey, convinced that we had to stop communist aggression, that if we did not fight the Viet Cong in Vietnam, in a few years we would surely be fighting them in the streets of Bayonne or Evanston.” Like the Stark children, who were “born in the long summer,” Martin lived his early years in a bubble of relative innocence, but like the Stark children, Martin did not remain innocent for long. His views on the Vietnam War changed after he arrived at college, and he became entangled with the ’60s youth counterculture—the culture of the Awakening.
The key to understanding Martin’s worldview at this stage can be found in his 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag, which is a fictional look back at the 1960s counterculture. The Armageddon Rag was intended by Martin to be an ambitious and deeply personal novel. Instead, it turned out to be a massive commercial failure which he later described as “the greatest setback I ever faced,” one so devastating that he considered giving up writing altogether. He moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, and did not attempt another novel for nearly a decade, until he started A Game of Thrones.
The Armageddon Rag takes place in the 1980s, and it is told from the perspective of a former hippie, now a middle-aged writer, who one need not take great liberties to speculate is an author insert. Standing at the end of the Awakening, Martin’s character is melancholic about the lasting impact of the 1960s. Society has moved on, and his hippie friends have dispersed. One sold out and became a corporate executive, another became a professor, another joined a commune. The story revolves around the revival of an old rock band, but they are also shadows of their former selves. Politically, the Left is in abeyance. Their protests against the Vietnam War only managed to help get Richard Nixon elected twice, the second time in a historic landslide, and then, after a brief Carter interlude, came the Reagan Revolution.
But despite losing the political battle, the hippies did win—at least partially—the cultural war. The counterculture has become the culture. As one of Martin’s characters reflects, “We stopped the war. We changed the colleges and we changed the government, and we changed all the rules about men and women and love and sex. We even got rid of Tricky Dick, finally. So it’s not the Age of Aquarius. It’s still different than it would have been without us. And better.”
Whether the changes in cultural mores since the pre-1960s have been positive or negative remains debatable, but there is no denying that they have been vast and consequential. Before the counterculture, sex outside of marriage was strictly proscribed, and men and women wore suits and dresses, respectively. Now everything is informal and insolent, we all wear T-shirts and swear casually, and even cultural conservatives have largely given up on the battle for abstinence until marriage. (Not that this necessarily leads to more sex; on the contrary, a growing body of research shows that people are having less sex than they were a few decades ago.) Men like Richard Nixon are gone from the halls of power—and given the quality of his successors, he could have been forgiven for asking, “Miss me yet?”
The vulgar vapidity of the 1960s youth counterculture is perhaps best displayed by the student riots of May 1968 in France. Unlike the Americans, the French students did not even have a semi-legitimate grievance like Vietnam to complain about. Their concerns were somewhat pettier. In the lead-up to the protests of that year, student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit confronted François Missoffe, the minister for youth and sport, at the opening of a swimming pool at the University of Nanterre. Cohn-Bendit’s gripe? That male students were not allowed to enter the female dormitories. Cohn-Bendit repeatedly interrupted Missoffe’s speech, heckling him and demanding that he address the “sexual problems of the young,” until Missoffe became fed up and told Cohn-Bendit to cool his ardour by jumping in the pool. The audience laughed. Displeased at having been bettered in a bout of verbal jousting, Cohn-Bendit yelled that Missoffe was a “fascist.” Later, Missoffe—who had in fact fought under Charles de Gaulle in the Free French Forces—intervened on Cohn-Bendit’s behalf when French authorities wanted to deport him from the country. One can make up one’s own mind about who was the more honourable man.
Martin’s characters in The Armageddon Rag are of similar temperament and disposition. They name pets after Ho Chi Minh, go down to harvest sugarcane in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and write “FUCK LBJ” on the hoods of their cars. They smoke a lot of pot and have a lot of sex, which was surely more pleasurable than going to Vietnam. One of them challenges a corporate recruiter to a debate, and then shows up to mock him dressed as a frog. (Several decades later, this sort of trolling, including the adoption of the frog as the symbol of chaos, would be used by alt-right subversives, who are perhaps in some ways truer heirs to the legacy of the hippie generation than their direct descendants, the modern scions of political correctness.) None of the characters, or their motivations, are particularly likeable. As one Amazon reviewer observed, “Yes, I am also against the Vietnam war on moral grounds, but this volume fails to refute the suspicion that the counterculture movement was mainly about self-indulgent cowards trying to get laid.”
And yet The Armageddon Rag does not blindly celebrate the hippie generation. After beginning as a straightforward murder mystery, it slides into an ambiguous magical realism in which a group of ex-radicals seem to be performing some sort of dark ritual to bring the spirit of the Sixties back to life and complete the unfinished revolution. The story ends on a bizarre and inconclusive note, best understood as an attempt, however flawed and halting, by Martin to grapple with the legacy of his generation and deliver a final verdict. The fact that the ending does not quite make sense, and the novel proved an unsatisfying commercial failure, illustrates Martin’s inability to fully answer his own questions. This provides some preview of what the ending to A Song of Ice and Fire might look like, if we ever get it.
VI.
If the Millennials of today do not share much in common with the last Hero generation of young men who stormed Omaha Beach and raised the flag over Iwo Jima, it is partly because the Prophet generation set to guide them has gone so wildly off-course and provided such poor guidance. The young have been left without a mentor. There are no Merlins or Obi-Wans, because the Boomers who should have filled that role were sidetracked by their own selfishness, and George R.R. Martin’s inability to finish his series is exemplary of that tendency.
Martin remains politically left-wing, and his blog posts in recent years have increasingly been given over to political soapbox rants, none of which is particularly edifying. Joe Biden, although “not the orator that Obama and JFK were,” is “experienced, intelligent, and above all compassionate.” Donald Trump is the “traitor in chief” who “should be arrested, removed from office, tried for treason, convicted, and imprisoned.” He is “the worst president this country has ever had,” “offensive, obnoxious, and rude,” and “has no regard for democracy, for our traditions, for the rule of law, for anything beyond his own power, his own ego.” There is little valuable insight in these pronouncements, which can be found in any number of columns by less talented writers. If he is a Prophet, he is one who gets his wisdom from CNN, not from a burning bush.
Authors and content creators are obviously entitled to their political views, and these views will not always accord with those of their fans. Martin’s political commentaries are tiresome not because they are liberal, but because they are thoughtless and empty of the moral nuance he displays so well in A Song of Ice and Fire. His series is filled with moral complexity, but his real-life political commentary is simpleminded, even more so than Tolkien’s elves and orcs were. For all his talk about Aragorn’s tax policy, Martin’s criticisms of Trump have little to do with his tax policy, or anything of the kind, and far more to do with his poor personal character. Perhaps this should prompt him to reevaluate his priorities in a leader; one cannot advance pragmatism over morality and then complain, when an amoral pragmatist seizes power, that there are no noble leaders like Aragorn to be found anywhere.
If Strauss and Howe are at all correct, the progression of the saeculum cannot be forestalled. But we can determine how it unfolds, whether we come out of the Crisis stronger or are destroyed by it, as so many other civilisations before ours have been. So, what is to be done when the pattern has gone awry, and one generation is unable or unwilling to fill the role for the next?
Well, according to Strauss and Howe, the saeculum already went awry once in American history. The Civil War, they contend, was a Crisis without a Hero generation. Instead, the generational cycle skipped straight from Nomads to Artists. This happened because, for various reasons, “The three adult generations alive at the time … let their worst instincts prevail. … Together, these three generations comprised a very dangerous constellation. They accelerated the Crisis, brought it to a swift climax, and produced the most apocalyptic result that politicians, preachers, generals, and engineers were jointly capable of achieving. … Afterward, no successor generation filled the usual Hero role of building public institutions to realize the Transcendentals’ visions.”
The United States survived the Civil War, and even emerged stronger, but it paid a heavy price: “For any other Fourth Turning in American history, a historian would be hard-pressed to imagine a more uplifting finale than that which actually occurred. For the Civil War, a better outcome can easily be imagined.” The tragic consequences of the Civil War, including the subsequent century of Jim Crow and the ensuing bitter tensions between North and South, reverberate even today.
If this pattern is repeating itself, then there is no Hero generation to cope with our current Crisis. “Millennials” are a myth, more properly divided into younger Gen Xers (Nomads) and older Zoomers (Artists). Psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have set 1995 as an approximate cutoff year for Generation Z, or “iGen.” This is an earlier generational shift than Strauss and Howe would have anticipated; by their framework, in which each generation lasts roughly 20 years, the Millennial generation would have lasted until the early 2000s. It is admittedly something of a stretch to group everyone born before 1995 into Generation X, which would then span over three decades, but it would be no sloppier than to allow a tiny decade-long window for Millennials—the supposed Hero generation.
In the United States, at least, the current Fourth Turning has produced few Heroes. There were some attempts to lionise healthcare providers during the early days of the pandemic, but it would be absurd to give overworked nurses the mantle of warriors. The undeniably valorous troops who fought the War on Terror might qualify, but that was a sketchier war, and their role was arguably closer to that of the Nomads of the Lost Generation that fought World War I than that of the Heroes. The troops fighting on the front lines of the West in Ukraine and Israel may be the closest thing we have today, but they are not American or even Anglospherian.
This may be because no worthy Boomer leaders have emerged. The four presidents of that generation—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—have yet to show the greatness of a Abraham Lincoln or a Winston Churchill, and young people simply cannot be expected to die for a leader who exemplifies anything other than indisputable greatness. Strauss and Howe write, “The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth.” The first three of these adjectives could be applied to our returning president, but the wisdom is lacking.
Instead, youth movements, where they exist, spring up either in pale imitation of the Boomers, or in opposition to them. The campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza were deliberately meant to echo the antiwar movement of the Sixties, by modern students yearning for a vicarious taste of the free-love era in the form of a safe, adult-sanctioned rebellion. Even bona fide historical artefacts like the chant “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” were dusted off and awkwardly repurposed to be used against Joe Biden and other modern politicians. Meanwhile, nihilistic right-wing trolls like the Groypers contemptuously spit on the legacy of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, mocking women’s liberation and civil rights and all the great cultural inheritances of that era. No, this is not the saeculum playing out as it should, but some grotesque mockery of it. As with the Civil War, all the generations share some fault, but the Boomers must shoulder most of it.
VII.
The Fourth Turning bills itself as “An American Prophecy.” And A Song of Ice and Fire, as is to be expected from a fantasy series, has plenty of prophecies, many of them surrounding a hero called Azor Ahai or “The Prince Who Was Promised.” Several characters consider themselves, or are considered by others, to be the prophesied hero, and with the series unfinished, it is impossible to know for sure which direction Martin is going with all this. But he is sceptical of prophecy. “Why would the gods send a warning,” one character wonders, “if we can’t heed it and change what’s to come?” A prophecy, if it has any value at all, should provide a roadmap for proactive steps to be taken by those whom it affects. If the Strauss-Howe prophecy is true, then our Azor Ahais will be found among the Millennials. It is therefore a bit of a problem if Millennials do not exist.
As Strauss and Howe make clear in the final chapter of The Fourth Turning, there are no guarantees of success in the current Crisis. It could mark the end of modernity or of American preeminence; at worst, it could culminate in an “omnicidal Armageddon.” No civilisation lasts forever: “This nation has endured for three saecula: Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one.” Conversely, the new saeculum might be a “prelude to a higher plane of civilization.” What lies past the current winter is up for dreamers to envision. (A Dream of Spring, some might call it.)
A Dance with Dragons, the last published book of A Song of Ice and Fire, ends on an unsatisfying note, with a set of cliffhangers including the apparent death of a central character. Fans have had nearly a decade and a half to speculate about how these cliffhangers may be resolved, if they ever are. Some of their theories are highly creative, and in some cases, probably more interesting than whatever Martin is planning. No one, however talented, is irreplaceable, and if Martin will not deliver us the final chapter in his prophecy, we will have to piece it together, clumsily, on our own, or else forget it entirely and busy ourselves with other books. But what a huge loss. Had he finished it, he might have woven together a tale of sublime majesty that would have provided a framework for Millennials to face the current Crisis. It might have been our generational epic.
Last year, George R.R. Martin visited Tolkien’s grave in Britain; according to some reports, he was made despondent by seeing the memorials and tributes from Tolkien’s fans, and he expressed doubts that he would leave a similar legacy. Since most of us die forgotten to history, our graves visited only by the handful of loved ones whose lives we managed to touch, it may seem rather imperious of Martin to be disappointed that he might not be afforded posthumous glory. Such, perhaps, is the final chapter of the Baby Boomers, a generation so hubristic that it never truly believed it would die, and thus failed to do its part to leave a better world for future generations. But if we are to navigate the remainder of the acute phase of the Crisis in which we find ourselves, there must be some sort of reconciliation; for George R.R. Martin, and the rest of us living, there is still time.
