Some of Phillip K Dick's best work is his stories; less room for him to go off on one. (I think this is also true of horror; a good horror novel is just more difficult to write the longer it gets.)

WRT horror, he's a terrible example to cite now, but Neil Gaiman has always been a master of shortform horror who got lost whenever he wrote something longer than 30 pages. The strength of Sandman was that it gave him space to write shortform horror and pretend it was a series.

Though Martin's shortform horror also has a few great ones. The monkey on the back (don't remember the name of the story), Meathouse Man...

There's that sf story of his about the guys stranded on a remote world trying to get home that I've always liked to read as a kind of cosmic horror.

Never much liked it.

It's funny how I'm mentally going "Is it too much of a basic bitch opinion to say I really like A Song for Lya" when even knowing that GRRM had a whole career pre-ASOIAF is semi-rare.

That story definitely shows GRRM at his best.

GRRM himself would rather write more Dunk and Egg novellas and edit more Wild Cards anthologies than have to struggle with those novels still (which I really do believe he’s trying to, but his heart is not in it anymore)

Burnt out poor guy! With action across and a couple of dozen pov characters he's created a world that's way too large for one person to handle.

*Action across two continents, I meant to write.

I personally knew a major Polish fantasy writer (Feliks W. Kres) who had a major burn out, abandoned writing for 17 years, then came back to finish his novel series, finished 2 new books but died while writing the very final one at just 56

As someone who is perpetually burned out and hopelessly behind on projects I can relate to him tbh

I was at a Patrick Rothfuss event while waiting for a response about my thesis, and I related so hard to the man on the stage going "*please* don't ask me about the thing you all want to ask me about". I wanted to give him a hug.

I think if he felt like he had the choice we'd see Twice as Tuf. He's been joking about it for years.

Miaow!

mindflayers and githyanki being a thing in D&D at all are because GRRM wrote something similar in a book in the 70s and a teenaged Charles Stross got inspired by that to write up statblocks and other information about them and submit it to Dragon magazine

... Is this what I missed because I couldn't get through the misogyny in Dying of the Light, or is there another story of his I don't remember?

"The Stone City" (had the big collection of his stories to hand so I could check, happily)

It's in Dreamsongs so I definitely read it but I have no memory of it. Wow.

Oh wait, got confused. This is the one with the cosmic horror implications, not the githyanki

That’s the one that has the githyanki which name Stross borrowed for his D&D monster (but tbh not a lot more than the name)

I mean, it’s good too, Sandkings just made the biggest impression on me as kid

It was more as a teenager, but Meathouse Man was what hit me as a way too angsty seventeen year old, and A Second Kind Of Loneliness was just soo deep.