George R. R. Martin

The four time Hugo award winning author of the best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire was kind enough to answer some of our questions. Listen to the interview or check out the transcript below!

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Afterburn SF: You were a professional writer for twenty years before you started on A Song of Fire and Ice. (Editor's note - The series is actually called A Song of Ice and Fire - nervous about interviewing one of my personal heroes? Who, me? Nah!) Is it a coincidence that you waited until later in your career to tackle something that epic in scope?

George R. R. Martin: Well, I think my work has been getting longer and more ambitious as I get older and more experienced. Of course, when I started back in the early seventies, I was writing predominantly short stories. In fact, I was selling professionally for six years before I attempted my first novel, which came out in 1977. And then, you know, for a number of years after that I continued to do a lot of short work, but more and more novels. The novels got longer and more ambitious.

Then I went to Hollywood for ten years, and that, I think, had something to do with the scale of Ice and Fire, because, when you're working in television and film, you're working under very strict parameters, in terms of length and, of course, the cost of it. You always have a budget to keep in mind. On some of our shows like Twilight Zone, or Beauty and the Beast, the budget would be a million one, or a million three, and that's pretty tight. Very frequently I would submit scripts that were too long and too expensive, then I would have to go through the process of cutting them. They would say 'Well, the budget for that script is three million dollars. You have to cut ten characters, and this big battle scene, can we make that a skirmish? You have twelve matte paintings here, can we make it one?"

So, after a decade, of that, I mean, I did that. I was a professional, and I did what was required to get the scripts down to being manageable in terms of length and being something that we could actually afford to shoot, but it was never a pleasant prospect when I had to remove what I thought was some good stuff, from some of those scripts.

So, after a decade of that I was ready to do something where I didn't have to worry about the budget and I didn't have to worry about the length, where I could have as many characters, locations and battles as I wanted, and they could be as big as I wanted. I really wanted to spread out a little. And, I think, the scale of Ice and Fire is at least partially a result of that.

Afterburn SF: If you had written the novels earlier in your career do you think they would have been as detailed and as awesome as they are?

George R. R. Martin: Well, I like to think I'm better now than I was then, so, you know. I suspect they would still be pretty detailed. I've always had that kind of obsessive attention to detail. But I think they are better now than they would have been if I'd written them ten years ago or twenty years ago, simply because I think I'm a better writer than I was then.

Afterburn SF: Your characters are all very fully developed. You have a genius for making characters seem monstrous at first, and then turning the tables and making them seem sympathetic to the reader. How do you accomplish that?

George R. R. Martin: Well, you know, people fascinate me, and I think characters are the heart of fiction. You hear science fiction frequently talked about as a literature of ideas, but, actually, there is no sort of fiction that is an ideal vehicle for presenting abstract ideas. If you want to do that, non-fiction is the best vehicle to use. I think, the purpose of fiction, as far as I'm concerned, anyway, is, I tend to agree with Faulkner, what he said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech - "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself." For my mind that means characters, that means you have to get inside the characters as much as you can.

We're all fascinating in our own ways. We're all complex. I mean, the one-dimensional characters, where one side is all good, and the other side is all evil, doesn't interest me half so much as real people. You read biographies of great figures of history, and what strikes you is that there are very few totally black villains or totally white heroes among them. Even the blackest of villains has a few redeeming qualities, and even the most gallant of heroes has times where he did something that was questionable, or where he made an error. Maybe his courage or decision-making ability failed him. These are the things that interest me, the ambiguity, the complexity, the contradictions. To my mind those are the things that make characters real.

Afterburn SF: Speaking of characters, you have six or seven point of view characters in those novels, as well as scores of minor characters. How do you keep track of the subplots and each character's development? Do you have a process in place to do that?

George R. R. Martin: With increasing difficulty. (laughs) The cast has grown. You know, there's no special system there, it's just something that I do. I've been working on this series since 1991, really, off and on, with time off to do other things, occasionally. So, I'm pretty familiar with these characters, and with Westeros, and it's just something that I know. They're my children, and my grandchildren, in a sense, and yeah, sometimes I have to look up their birthdays, or what color their eyes are, but most of it is in my head. I just know them very well.

Afterburn SF: Speaking of characters, you obviously do care a great deal about your characters. One of the things your famous for, that I really love about your works, is that you're never afraid to kill off one of your significant characters to advance the plotline. This has led to some public outcry in the past. I remember everybody, at least all of my friends, were pretty upset after the Red Wedding. Why do you do that, and what do you say to fans who get upset about it?

George R. R. Martin: To fans who get upset about it, I say that there are a lot of other books out there, in which no one is ever in danger. They can be perfectly happy reading about the protagonist safely defeating any number of orcs or Nazis, you know, however many, but that doesn't interest me.

I think, what I'm aiming for, is to give my readers a vicarious experience, so that they don't just read a book, but they almost live the book. I mean, if I could, I would shove them through the page, make them experience everything the characters experience. So I strive, to the best of my ability, to make the sex scenes sexy and at the feast I want them to smell the food, I want their mouth to water. I want them to smell the smoke in the air. I want to make these scenes come alive and I want to engage their emotions.

What that means, of course, is in battle scenes, of any kind of fight scene, there should be a certain amount of jeopardy attached to it. If you, when you next left the house, were suddenly attacked by three guys in the street, you'd be pretty scared, particularly if they had swords. I don't care how big you are, or strong, or heroic, you'd be scared, and you'd wonder whether you were going to survive that, especially if you got wounded a few times, and things like that.

But you read so much fiction where that doesn't seem to be the case. The hero goes out, and here's three bravos attacking him outside the tavern, here's three orcs jumping him. There's no fear, there's no tension in that scene, because he's the hero. He's safe. It doesn't matter if it's three of them, or five of them, of twelve of them, somehow he is going to get away, or he is going to kill them all. He's going to have the magic doohickey in his sock, of he's going to be such a great swordsman that even twelve guys can't slow him down. That, for me, is just so phony. It's not true to the human experience. It doesn't interest me.

I want you to be afraid. I want the scenes of tension to have real tension to them. To my mind, the only way to do that is to make it very clear, right from the first, that you're playing for keeps, that this is as real a world as I can make it. If you're stabbed with a sword you might not survive it. And being a hero, or a good guy, or being on the right side isn't going to give you some imaginary, ethereal protection where nothing bad can happen to you. The truth is, if we look through history, at wars, you know, people die in wars. You can't write about wars and have nobody die. It's dishonest.

Afterburn SF: And that is something you succeed brilliantly at, by the way, is bringing the story to life, and giving a real sense of jeopardy.

George R. R. Martin: Thank you.

Afterburn SF: Another interesting aspect of your works are the religions that you have in there. They're all so detailed and contrasting, the Seven, the Drowned God, the Old Gods, R'hllor, the Faceless God. How do you create such detailed, believable religions, and do any of them reflect aspects of real world religions?

George R. R. Martin: Well, most of them do reflect aspects of real world religions, but the key word there is aspects. I try not to do just a one for one transplant, where, you know, I take Christianity, but, instead of being named Jesus he's named Joseph. I mean that's...you know, you can do that, it's perfectly legitimate, but, I'd like to make it a little more interesting, to take a bit of this and a bit of that, and mix them up, and add an imagined development or a fantasy element, to make it something uniquely my own.

All of the religions in Ice and Fire have their roots in certain aspects of real world religions. Certainly, the Faith, in some ways, is based on the medieval Catholic Church, but in some ways it's not. Their theology is somewhat similar. They don't really have seven gods, as I make it clear, they have one god with seven aspects, which is not so different from the Catholic Church, which has one God with three aspects, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So there's influence there, but there's also differences. Having seven instead of three, and what are the seven? How would the religion develop if it had, not just seven aspects, but these particular seven aspects. What would that mean in terms of how they worshipped, and what the churches looked like, and things like that. You have to take the basic idea, and you develop it, and you work out the ramifications as best you can.

Similarly, the faith of the Lord of Light, R'hllor, is a dualistic faith. It draws some of its roots from Zoroastroism and some from the heresy of the Cathars, which was the root of the Albigensian crusade, one of the more fascinating aspects of French medieval history.

So, yes, there are always aspects of real world religions in there, but it's always flavored with a certain amount of imagination and extrapolation, as well.

Afterburn SF: Moving on, discerning readers have already noticed that you inserted the ultimate fate of Sir Duncan the Tall and Egg into the White Book in A Storm of Swords.

George R. R. Martin: Well, yes and no (laughs).

Afterburn SF: Uh oh! How many steps are there going to be along the way? Can we expect more novellas and short stories?

George R. R. Martin: Oh yeah, definitely. I don't know exactly how many, probably at least nine, maybe as many as twelve. Probably more rather than less. These stories tend to grow more complicated as I write them. I have a third Dunk and Egg novella three quarters written. It's just a matter of finding time to deal with it, and my plate's been rather full lately. I would think that I would something else at least in the pipeline in the next year or so. After that I will fit them in as best I can.

Afterburn SF: Well I will certainly look forward to reading them. Is there any chance that any of those will grow into a full-length novel?

George R. R. Martin: You mean the novellas?

Afterburn SF: Yes.

George R. R. Martin: No, I don't believe in padding out something that's already been written. I mean, The Hedge Knight and its sequels will eventually be collected into books, but it'll pretty much still be form that they're written in. I'll just collect two or three or four or five of them together under one set of covers, so that you can read all the adventures of Dunk and Egg in one place.

Afterburn SF: Who is your absolute favorite character, getting back to the characters?

George R. R. Martin: Tyrion is my favorite character.

Afterburn SF: Mine too! I have to ask this. Without giving anything away, can we expect him to meet up with Daenerys at some point?

George R. R. Martin: Yeah, I think you could probably count on that.

Afterburn SF: You've done a great deal of collaborating throughout your career, of course, you've edited the Wild Cards series, and working on T. V. and other projects.

George R. R. Martin: We're still going on with Wild Cards, we hope to be announcing three more books in the relatively near future.

Afterburn SF: Great, awesome! And you've also done Shadow Twin, which was a collaboration.

George R. R. Martin: Right.

Afterburn SF: And I think I saw that that's being reworked as a novel as well?

George R. R. Martin: Right.

Afterburn SF: How do you find it working alone vice collaborating with others? Which is easier for you?

George R. R. Martin: I'm balanced, but I think I prefer working alone. Collaboration is fun. Many of my collaborations took place when I was younger. Back in the seventies, I did a lot of collaboration with Howard Waldrop, Lisa Tuttle, and various other people. When you're a young writer just starting out, it's sometimes very useful to collaborate with other young writers. You get stuck on something and a friend of your sees a way to handle it, but also you learn from each other. You may have different strengths. One of you may be good at structure, another one good at dialogue, etc. Or, you're trying to write in a style to be similar to your collaborator's style, that teaches you a certain amount of control over your style. So, it's a good learning experience when you're a young writer starting out to attempt collaborations with other people, and gain some new skills that way.

However, at a certain point, I think you develop your own voice, and then it becomes harder and harder to collaborate with people. You gain a certain amount of experience, and you're no longer quite so willing to compromise, and then collaborations sometimes turn into head-butting contests, where you're arguing with your partner about what should happen, instead. So, you tend to do it less and less.

I'm at the stage in my career now, where, you know, Wildcards is one thing, and that's a very different sort of project. But on Ice and Fire, I could never collaborate with anyone, or with any major thing like that. That's my world, and I don't want anyone else playing in it. I certainly don't want anyone telling me what a character would do, or putting words in his mouth that aren't my words.

Afterburn SF: You were forced, for reasons of length, to split A Feast for Crows into A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons . Do you feel that worked out okay?

George R. R. Martin: Yeah. Well, we won't know for sure until I finish Dance, but yes, I do think it worked pretty well. Part of me regrets having to do that. It would have been something to say for having it all in one book, but it would have been a very long book, and it wouldn't be out yet. I mean, you'd be looking at waiting another year or something until I finished it. So, I think this way worked pretty well. Of the realistic alternatives I had, I thought it was the best choice. Not only the split, but the nature of the split, which was dividing it by character rather than simply chopping it in the middle.

Afterburn SF: Now, is A Dance of Dragons will feature the characters' stories that weren't in A Feast for Crows?

George R. R. Martin: That's correct, yes.

Afterburn SF: Exclusively, or will it continue characters' storylines from A Feast for Crows as well?

George R. R. Martin: It depends on length. Come back and ask me again in a few months.

Afterburn SF: An of course, I have to ask, do you have a projected time when it might be done?

George R. R. Martin: You know, I hate to say that, because I always get proved wrong. All I can say is I'm working on it as fast as I can here. I'm a little bit behind where I hoped to be, because there was so much promotion and traveling on Feast. I was on the road as much as I've been home for the last six months.

Afterburn SF: That, and people keep calling you for interviews.

George R. R. Martin: There's that too.

Afterburn SF: Are you still projecting A Song of Ice and Fire to wrap up in seven volumes?

George R. R. Martin: That's my hope, yes.

Afterburn SF: Thank you very much for answering our questions today. You've been very generous with your time, and we very definitely appreciate it.