The fantasy shelves at Barnes and Noble in 2026 look nothing like they did in 2010. The dominant properties are romantasy titles with sprayed edges and foil covers, designed for BookTok discovery and enemies-to-lovers arcs. Epic fantasy occupies a fraction of the space it once did. Baen Books author Larry Correia posted a thread on X this week explaining exactly how that happened, and who is responsible.
He said:
I’ve been telling people this for years. GRRM pissed off millions of customers but he don’t give a shit. He got his bag. But his legacy is being such an epic bum ass bum that he crippled an entire genre, ruined consumer sentiment, and killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.
Romantasy and LitRPG grew as a direct result of filling the smoking crater George left in the industry. New writers could no longer get deals to write epic fantasy unless the entire series was in the bag, and nobody can afford to gamble that much time to write that many books they may never sell.
Publishers no longer took chances on new series because customers had got burned by lazy shirkers like George and Pat. Agents wouldn’t represent new epic fantasy unless the whole thing was done. It hurt Indy because dudes had to convince customers that they weren’t bums too. Except when book one makes $50 total, because customers said Im not starting a new series until it’s done! they sure as shit ain’t writing book two. So it’s a self fulfilling prophesy of suck.
In the comments Dunning-Krugerands are saying this isn’t true. Look at guys like Brandon Sanderson. Wrong. Guys like him, or me, who already had established names, reputations, and fan bases were fine. We had enough customers who trusted us we could still do new things and people would come along to make it economically viable.
For example, the only reason my epic fantasy series got picked up is because I was already successful and could guarantee a viable level of sales off my existing fans. Newbs don’t have that. And over the ten years it took for me to write the six books to finish it, the entire time I heard from potential customers, nope, not gonna start a new series until it’s done because of George.
I am fine during this because I’m still gonna make a couple hundred grand off each of those just off my existing fans. Newbs make two bucks an hour, say to hell with being a writer I’m going back to my day job, and you all missed out on the next great author and his absolutely brilliant series, because you were too mad at billionaire George shoving twinkies in his mouth instead of writing.
Nope. Guys like me and Brandon are fine. George’s profound laziness screwed over the new guys. Customers and the industry quit taking chances on new guys. We will never know how many excellent fantasy series we missed out on, robbed by George’s laziness burning so many customers.
Some writers gave up, but others moved into different genres. Which is good. But it sure does suck if epic fantasy is your jam. LitRPG is close but different enough it blew up during this time frame because that’s where the talented went.
Being such a pretentious, bloviating bum that you damage an entire industry and strangle a generation of aspiring artists is quite the legacy.
Kal (who is a good writer btw, check out his books) asks what can we do about this? For me personally I’m just gonna continue mocking George’s work ethic in the hopes more normies realize what an outlier he is, and how they should expand their horizons to read other authors who aren’t stuck up, know it all, dickheads.
And before anybody starts barking at me that I’m such a hypocrite because I’ve not finished all my series, sorry I’ve only finished three of eight so far, and have only written THIRTY books since George’s last one, the next MHI comes out in December, and the last two books are next year, and I’m not planning on retiring anytime soon (if ever).
Correia has skin in this argument. He dedicated the final book of his Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series, Heart of the Mountain, to George R.R. Martin. The dedication read: “To George R.R. Martin. See? It’s not that hard.” When Martin’s fans complained, Correia explained exactly why he took the shot: “He was a giant ahole to a bunch of my friends, and since then his lazy hubris screwed an entire generation of new authors because burned readers wouldn’t try unfinished series, so f* him.” Martin’s 2024 blog post, for context, blamed “toxic fandom” for his inability to write. Thirty books ago, Correia started his Monster Hunter International series. Martin’s last novel came out the year Correia was getting started.
The market data validates every word of Correia’s argument, but the specific numbers point toward a conclusion that should concern anyone who actually loves fantasy as a literary tradition.
Romantasy, the BookTok-driven fusion of romance and fantasy best represented by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, generated $610 million in U.S. sales in 2024, up 34% from $454 million the year before. Yarros’s Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, the fastest-selling adult fiction title in two decades. Five of the top-ten bestselling novels of 2024 were written by Maas or Yarros. One out of every four books on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List that year was a romantasy title. Fantasy as a category grew 41.3% in value between 2023 and 2024. The publishing industry looks at those numbers and sees salvation.
What it actually sees is replacement.
Romantasy is not epic fantasy. It does not share epic fantasy’s literary ambitions, its moral architecture, its investment in worldbuilding as a vehicle for ideas. It is romance with fantasy set dressing — enemies-to-lovers arcs, fated mates, power systems designed to create attractive male characters with supernatural abilities, and plots engineered to generate emotional peaks that translate directly to TikTok recommendation clips. The audience for it is primarily women aged 13-34. The discovery mechanism is BookTok, which rewards emotional reaction and visual presentation of physical books over literary merit. The books are designed to be photographed. They come in special editions with sprayed edges and foil covers and alternative chapter art. They are collector objects that also happen to have text inside them.
LitRPG, the other genre Correia identifies as filling the crater, serves a different audience but shares the same replacement logic. Its readers are primarily male, primarily young, and primarily interested in power-fantasy progression through explicit game mechanics. He Who Fights with Monsters and The Primal Hunter are the genre’s dominant properties. Dungeon Crawler Carl earned a television deal. The genre generates enormous reader loyalty — 42% higher retention than traditional fantasy per market analysis — and drives massive volume in digital subscription models through Kindle Unlimited. It is economically successful. It is also, as Correia notes, “close but different enough” from epic fantasy that readers who want the actual thing are still not being served.
The tragedy in Correia’s post is not Martin’s laziness, though that is real and documented. It is the structural damage done by one man’s failure to a market that was trying to develop the authors who would come after him. The reader who got burned waiting fifteen years for Winds of Winter is the same reader who told Correia, over and over across a decade, that they were not starting his six-book Saga of the Forgotten Warrior until the whole thing was done. Correia finished the series. He has thirty books and an established fan base and can absorb the skepticism. The new author without any of those assets cannot. That author went and wrote romantasy or LitRPG instead, or went back to their day job, and the reader who wanted the kind of epic fantasy that shaped the genre’s golden era lost both the author and the series they never got to read.
Martin turns 78 this September. The Winds of Winter has been in progress since 2011. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024: “I don’t know, it happens a day at a time. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m alive right now! I seem pretty vital!” He got his bag. Correia’s argument is that everyone else paid for it.
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
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Also, we can thank Gurrm, and to a high degree HBO as well, for the cultural explosion of incest porn/smut.
Yes, that particular degeneracy has always existed, but it escaped containment in the early 2010s when the television series became popular. I don't ever recall it being so casually present before then as it is now
Gurrm can finish his series or not, I stopped caring almost two decades ago.
The first book, a Game of Thrones, was 4/5ths of an excellent book. The problem then, which only ever got worse, is that the "muh motha ah dragoons" side plot, and it is a side plot, was completely, utterly, and shamelessly without purpose or weight.
You could cut every single word of her chapters out of the first book and it wouldn't change the rest of the story. Sure, Ned gets mad at the King for like an afternoon because he wants to have her offed, but then Ned and the King kiss and make up anyway. Gurrm had to manufacture an argument, that was soon resolved, to even have the appearance of her story mattering to the overall plot. If Ned and the King arguing for an afternoon was important enough to happen, it could have just as easily been for one of a hundred other reasons.
Dane-Air-Ees (not wasting my time looking up the spelling) was pointless. As the series went on, she became more pointless, with Gurrm having to continuously send characters from the main plot over to her plot in an attempt to make her relevant.
And then, her whole purpose, a pending invasion, was fulfilled by a completely different character out of left field using about as many words to establish as Gurrm likes to use for his average feast/f---ing scenes.
And the books only ever got worse after the first one. There are many reasons more than Dane-Air-Ees, like how he killed his own narrative momentum by offing load-bearing elements (plot important characters). But for the sake of brevity, a word Gurrm could never hope to understand, I'll move along.
The series was awful, author-indulgent, meandering, dragging, over-written, pornographic, food and fashion obsessed slop entirely up its own theory-crafted, self-prophesizing butthole by the time it reached book 4.
I should have stopped then, but I gave book 5 a chance. It took two months to finish and is the worst book I have ever read cover to cover.
I wouldn't even buy book 6, if it ever releases, to line a birdcage.