Only 2 good stories in the whole collection. Enormous waste of time ( )

I loved almost all the stories except for the last one. This book is definitely worth reading, and I enjoyed discovering so many exciting characters. I did not care for the way he would jump in to explain or set up some of the stories, but those parts are easy enough to breeze past. All in all, a very good read. ( )

Some of the stories were great, but definitely not all. I have also skipped quite a few because of the genres (I am not a super hero fiction fan). ( )

Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective is a career-spanning collection of George R. R. Martin's short fiction. It was first published in 2003 as a single volume hardcover from Subterranean Press under the title GRRM: A RRetrospective and debuted in Toronto at Torcon 3, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention, where Martin was the Writer Guest Of Honor. The collection features 34 pieces of fiction (including two TV scripts), an introduction by Gardner Dozois, commentary by Martin on each stage of his career, a Martin bibliography, and original art for each story.
It is a great selection of stories which demonstrate the diversity of Martin's writing. Some I loved and some I skipped over - those mainly the scripts for Hollywood stuff. The Tuf, Hedge Knight, and Wild Cards were great. ( )

GRRM shows some good writing range with this compilation. In this book he talks about the old views that people used to have on what makes "Science Fiction" and GRRM has talked before about putting fiction in Genres, making distinctions between SCI-FI and FANTASY, etc. His view on it is that they are all just stories and the difference is whether they happen in a mideival setting, in space, or the modern world. His collection here proved that to me. I enjoyed virtually all of these stories, some more than others to be sure, but he surprised me by making me really enjoy a Werewolf story which is something I've never been into and also my favorite story in here, besides the Hedge Knight, Portraits of his Children. If you don't want to read through this entire collection, I can't judge you because it is quite long, but you must read The Hedge Knight, Portraits of his Children, and The Skin Trade at minimum. I'm not generally a fan of short fiction, but GRRM has opened my mind with this book and I will now be looking for more compilations and anthologies than I ever would have previously thought. One last thought, not necessarily good or bad, but you can see some of the trends in GRRM's writing here compared to his other works, some similar characters, and even, you guessed it, sex and incest. ( )