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Hmmm, yes, maybe. It's never, ever been a thing up to now in the U.K and has a near non-existent following in non-Anglophone communities I'm accustomed to, so I wouldn't know if it was new or not and I made an assumption. I was too lazy to wiki. It's still an existent and continuing series, and I don't reckon you can aptly judge the long-term fanbase potential when an author is still putting stuff out and thus naturally feeding his fan-base, if that makes any sense at all. It sounds nasty, but the real proof is if it continues after the series has ended or the author suffered an existence failure - if old fans still reread and new fans are continuously attracted to the series, a la Tolkein, then it speaks for itself, but many such series truly do fizzle out. I mean, look at Terry Goodkind for one. He did kind of shoot himself in the foot by using his series as a soapbox and relentlessly pursuing weird black and white biased morality (just... weird) and weird jingoistic support for the Iraq/Afghan wars, in poorly veiled parallels, but it was a pretty long-lived series and support for the first books was pretty lively... and now I think it's ended or might as well have done and nobody talks them about them, ever, and if they do it's all blasé and passed tense. Then again, his weird shouty politics has made the whole thing awkward, and he probably killed it with the evil chicken bit, but I still think that's kinda the pattern of fantasy and sci-fi.

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Philip K. Dick? He wrote Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?, the book which Blade Runner was very loosely based on (obv). Both the film and the book were huuuuuuuuge (again, obv), the former more than the latter but it must have fed people picking up the book. That still has some pretty hefty impact and pop culture references, but you have to admit it's aged and diminished a bit in itself (book and film), and that was, what, late sixties and early eighties respectively?

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I never said Martin fans couldn't like Tolkein. If they don't, I'll thump them with The Silmarillion‎ but I still have a problem with him and some of... it. It might be offensive and ill-informed, but I don't know... yes, my weird rant was inappropriate, but I'm a person of frequently inappropriate opinions. Eugh.

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My main point was that all of these things have a certain shelf-life, and I'd be very, very cautious. Very few works of any genre have any trans-generational quality, and so few works can be considered long-lived and 'timeless'. This means names taken from them, particularly if they're identifiable or 'made up' age badly too. Fantasy in particular is victim to this. I also feel fantasy names age badly on a person - my heart sinks when I see Legolas or Galadriel and I love Tolkein. There are some Tolkein names which work well and are elegant, but Legolas the neurosurgeon? Legolas the investment banker? Legolas the human rights lawyer? This was ultimately my point, with a rant in the middle.