George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview
The novelist goes deep on the future of his books and the TV series they begat
By
Mikal Gilmore
April 23, 2014
George R.R. Martin/Peter Yang
On a cold night in January, George R.R. Martin sits inside the Jean Cocteau Cinema, a revival theater that he owns in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has lived since 1979. The Cinema had been showing the first three seasons of HBO's megahit series
Game of Thrones, which is based on Martin's still-in-the-works saga
A Song of Ice and Fire. After viewing the ninth episode, "Baelor," in which the story's apparent hero, Ned Stark, is unexpectedly beheaded, with the screen falling to black, Martin sits quietly for several moments, then says, "As many times as I've watched this, it still has great effect. Of course for me, there's so much more to the books."
And much more to come:
The Song of Ice and Fire cycle – first published in 1996 – currently stands at five volumes, with two more books ahead. Those final works, though, won't be anytime soon. Because Martin is a meticulous and slow writer, it is likely that years will pass before we learn the fates of Daenerys and her dragons, the recriminatory Lannister siblings and the shellshocked progeny in the Stark family. There is even the chance that the HBO series might arrive at key plot points before the books do, and though Martin once dismissed that possibility, he's now mindful of it. "I better get these books done," he tells me, on a drive through the streets of Santa Fe.
Later on, Martin takes me to a small house with a book tower that serves as his office and writing space. (The home where he lives with his second wife, Parris, is nearby.) Martin has been writing since childhood, and started publishing science-fiction short stories just out of college in the early 1970s. They quickly established him as a serious and imaginative writer, telling tales of tragedy and, sometimes, of uncommon and hard-won redemption. He spent much of the Eighties and early Nineties working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Then in 1991 he began
A Game of Thrones, primarily a story about power and family, about the disastrous nature of both war and the human heart, and so far it has shown nobody – including the audience – any mercies. As is apparent in the fourth season, there are no guarantees that anybody in this story is safe.
At his office, Martin escorts me to the den where we would talk. The room's walls hold glass cases, full of hundreds of beautiful miniatures of medieval figures and fantasy characters and scenes from Martin's books. Near a staircase that leads to Martin's library – at 65, he remains a voracious reader – stands a full-size and operational model of the famous Robby the Robot, from the 1956 film
Forbidden Planet. "Robby the Robot," he tells me, "it was a great kick to buy him and to show him off. A bunch of money sitting in a pile – what do I get out of that?"
Martin is an affable, candid, terrifically smart man, and he is loquacious. We talked for 10 hours that day, breaking only for dinner. His way of discussing
Game of Thrones surprised me: He often spun questions into larger dissertations about history, war and society. Because Martin is a big man, with an infectious laugh and white hair, there might seem something of a Santa Claus aspect about him, except for his eyes, which are constantly flickering with thought – some of it quite dark – conveying a mind as shrewd as that belonging to any of his characters.
One of the more dominant themes in Game of Thrones is family. It's what gives the characters purpose, but it also ruins them. What was your own sense of family and home like?
I was born in 1948, and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, which is a peninsula just south of Jersey City. By bus, it was 45 minutes to the heart of Manhattan, but Bayonne really was a world in and of itself. New York was very close, but we didn't go there very often. From the age of four I lived down on First Street, in the public-housing projects, facing the waters of Kill Van Kull, with Staten Island on the other side.
My father was a Martin, but he was of Italian and German descent. My mother was a Brady – Irish. I heard a lot from my mother about the heritage of the Bradys, who had been a pretty important family at certain points in Bayonne history. I knew at a very early age that we were poor. But I also knew that my family hadn't always been poor. To get to my school, I had to walk past the house where my mother had been born, this house that had been our house once. I've looked back on that, of course, and in some of my stories there's this sense of a lost golden age, where there were wonders and marvels undreamed of. Somehow what my mother told me set all that stuff into my imagination.
Was your relationship with your parents close?
My father was a distant figure. I don't think that he ever understood me, and I don't know that I ever understood him. We didn't use the term then, but you could probably say he was a functioning alcoholic. I saw him every day, but we hardly talked. The only thing that we really bonded over was sports.
Did you get out of Bayonne much before college?
We never had a car. My father always said that drinking and driving was very bad, and he was not going to give up drinking [
laughs]. My world was a very small world. For many years I stared out of our living-room window at the lights of Staten Island. To me, those lights of Staten Island were like Shangri-La, and Singapore, and Shanghai, or whatever. I read books, and I dreamed of Mars, and the planets in those books, and of the Hyborian Age of Robert E. Howard's Conan books, and later of Middle-earth – all these colorful places. I would dream of those places just as I dreamed of Staten Island, and Shanghai.
In 1966, you entered Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois. I know that in the years that followed you underwent some serious moral and political changes due to your opposition to the Vietnam War.
I was, like many kids of my generation, a hawk. I accepted that America was the good guys, we had to be there. When I got into college, the more I learned about our involvement in Vietnam, the more it seemed wrong to me. Of course, the draft was happening, and I decided to ask for the conscientious-objector status. I wasn't a complete pacifist; I couldn't claim to be that. I was what they called an objector to a particular war. I would have been glad to fight in World War II. But Vietnam was the only war on the menu.
So I applied for conscientious-objector status in full belief that I would be rejected, and that I would have a further decision to make: Army, jail or Canada. I don't know what I would've done. Those were desperately hard decisions, and every kid had to make them for himself. To my surprise, they gave me the status. I was later told – I have no way to prove this – that I was granted the status because our conservative draft board felt that anyone who applied for CO status should be granted it, because that would be punishment enough: Then it would be part of their permanent record, and everybody would know that they were a Commie sympathizer, and it would ruin their lives.
I don't think America has ever quite recovered from Vietnam. The divisions in our society still linger to this day. For my generation it was a deeply disillusioning experience, and it had a definite effect on me. The idealistic kid who graduated high school, a big believer in truth, justice and the American way, all these great values of superheroes of his youth, was certainly less idealistic by the time I got out of college.
Where does your imagination come from?
Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important. I'm proud of my work, but I don't know if I'd ever claim it's enormously original. You look at Shakespeare, who borrowed all of his plots. In
A Song of Ice and Fire, I take stuff from the Wars of the Roses and other fantasy things, and all these things work around in my head and somehow they jell into what I hope is uniquely my own. But I don't know where it comes from, yet it comes – it's always come. If I was a religious guy, I'd say it's a gift from God, but I'm not, so I can't say that.
Your earliest novels, Dying of the Light and Fevre Dream, did well. But The Armageddon Rag temporarily stopped your literary career. Then you spent years in Hollywood, writing for TV series. Do you think your subsequent writing – which, of course, would be A Song of Ice and Fire – benefited from mastering screenplays?
I do. The big secret about writing screenplays and teleplays is that it's much easier than writing a novel or any kind of prose. William Goldman said everything that needed to be said about it in
Adventures in the Screen Trade: It's all structure, structure and dialogue. Being there improved my sense of structure and dialogue. I'd spent so many years sitting alone in a room, facing a computer or typewriter before that. It was almost exhilarating to go into an office where there were other people – and to have a cup of coffee, and to talk about stories or developments in writers' meetings. But there were
constant limitations.
It wore me down. There were battles over censorship, how sexual things could be, whether a scene was too "politically charged," how violent things could be. Don't want to disturb anyone. We got into that fight on
Beauty and the Beast. The Beast killed people. That was the point of the character. He was a
beast. But CBS didn't want blood, or for the beast to kill people. They wanted us to show him picking up someone and throwing them across the room, and then they would get up and run away. Oh, my God, horrible monster! [
Laughs] It was ludicrous. The character had to remain likable.
You've talked before about the original glimpse of the story you had for what became A Song of Ice and Fire: a spontaneous vision in your mind of a boy witnessing a beheading, then finding direwolves in the snow.
That's an interesting genesis.It was the summer of 1991. I was still involved in Hollywood. My agent was trying to get me meetings to pitch my ideas, but I didn't have anything to do in May and June. It had been years since I wrote a novel. I had an idea for a science-fiction novel called
Avalon. I started work on it and it was going pretty good, when suddenly it just came to me, this scene, from what would ultimately be the first chapter of
A Game of Thrones. It's from Bran's viewpoint; they see a man beheaded and they find some direwolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly that I knew I had to write it. I sat down to write, and in, like, three days it just came right out of me, almost in the form you've read.
How long did it take to do the world-building work?
Basically, I wrote about a hundred pages that summer. It all occurs at the same time with me. I don't build the world first, then write in it. I just write the story, and then put it together. Drawing a map took me, I don't know, a half-hour. You fill in a few things, then as you write more it becomes more and more alive. In the meantime, I still pitched shows in Hollywood, but this
Ice and Fire thing wouldn't leave my head. I kept thinking about it and scenes for these characters. It was just never far from me. I realized I really want to tell that story.
By then I knew it was going to be a trilogy. Everybody was doing trilogies back then – J.R.R. Tolkien had sort of set the mold with
The Lord of the Rings. Around 1994, I gave the hundred pages to my agent with a little two-page summary of where I saw the book series going. My agent got interest all over town – about four publishers bid on it. Suddenly I had an advance and I had a deadline, so I was able to say to my Hollywood agents: no more screenplays until I finish this novel.
By deciding to write a trilogy – and now it's projected as seven books – were you worried you'd have to measure up to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings?
Not particularly. From the 1970s, Tolkien imitators had retreaded what he'd done, with no originality and none of Tolkien's deep abiding love of myth and history. But I'd always been regarded, at least in the genre, as a serious writer. Also, this story had such a grip on me. I thought these books could have the gritty feel of historical fiction as well as some of the magic and awe of epic fantasy.
With the exception of the fantasy elements, Game of Thrones might well have been a reimagination of the Wars of the Roses.
I did consider at a very early stage – going all the way back to 1991 – whether to include overt fantasy elements, and at one point thought of writing a Wars of the Roses novel. But the problem with straight historical fiction is you know what's going to happen. If you know anything about the Wars of the Roses, you know that the princes in the tower aren't going to escape. I wanted to make it more unexpected, bring in some more twists and turns. The main question was the dragons: Do I include dragons?
I knew I wanted to have the Targaryens have their symbol be the dragons; the Lannisters have the lions, the Starks have the wolves. Should these things be literal here? Should the Targaryens actually have dragons? I was discussing this with a friend, writer Phyllis Eisenstein – I dedicated the third book to her – and she said, "George, it's a fantasy – you've got to put in the dragons." She convinced me, and it was the right decision. Now that I'm deep into it, I can't imagine the book without the dragons.
How did you come up with the Wall?
The Wall predates anything else. I can trace back the inspiration for that to 1981. I was in England visiting a friend, and as we approached the border of England and Scotland, we stopped to see Hadrian's Wall. I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling.
For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn't know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces – it planted something in me. But when you write fantasy, everything is bigger and more colorful, so I took the Wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high, and made it out of ice.
Given the complexity of A Song of Ice and Fire, did you have concerns over how faithfully it could work onscreen?
About the time of the third book I started getting calls from people in Hollywood. That interest accelerated when the
Lord of the Rings movies started coming out, and suddenly studios wanted to do their own
Lord of the Rings. Every fantasy in the world got optioned. Those films showed that an audience would respond seriously to dragons, and things like that. But I never thought, from the moment I started this, that it could be filmed. I said it's impossible. Tolkien's trilogy is about the size of
A Storm of Swords. I have far more characters, far more settings, far more of everything, so it can't be filmed.
Some people I met thought we have to find the story's through line. Who's the important character? Somebody thought that Dany's the important character – cut away everybody else, tell the story of Dany. Or Jon Snow. Those were the two most popular characters to build everything around, except you're losing 90 percent of the story. Somebody else suggested, "We'll just tell the beginning in one movie, and when it succeeds we'll do more movies."
But if the film doesn't do well you never see the second movie; you get a broken fragment of an epic. I was in a fortunate position of not having to worry about paying my mortgage. So I said no to all these offers, but it did get me thinking: The only way it can be done is for television – but not for CBS or NBC, because it's too sexual, too violent, too complicated. The only way it could be done is by somebody like HBO.
The show has given you millions of new fans, who, judging from online debate, are extremely passionate about your work. . . .
It's a terrific feeling, knowing you have not only a lot of readers or viewers, but that they're so intense, and bringing so much thought and interest to bear. But maybe that's part of what's slowed me down – the knowledge that so many people are looking at every line, and waiting on every turn and scene. We have the untold-history book coming out later this year, where I've written a fake history. I find it amusing, and secretly pleasing, that I have so many fans who are interested in the history. I'm not sure if they would so eagerly study real history, you know? In school perhaps they're bored with all the Henrys in English history, but they'll gladly follow the Targaryen dynasty.
History was my minor in college. I don't pretend to be a historian. Modern historians are interested in sociopolitical trends. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the stories. History is written in blood, a gold mine – the kings, the princes, the generals and the whores, and all the betrayals and wars and confidences. It's better than 90 percent of what the fantasists do make up.
It's a shockingly brutal story that you tell. The first major jolt comes when the knight Jaime Lannister pushes a child, Bran Stark, through a window because the child witnessed Jaime and Jaime's sister, Cersei – the wife of Westeros' King Robert – having sex. That moment grabs you by the throat.
I've had a million people tell me that was the moment that hooked them, where they said, "Well, this is just not the same story I read a million times before." Bran is the first viewpoint character. In the back of their heads, people are thinking Bran is the hero of the story. He's young King Arthur. We're going to follow this young boy – and then, boom: You don't expect something like that to happen to him. So that was successful [
laughs].
Both Jaime and Cersei are clearly despicable in those moments. Later, though, we see a more humane side of Jaime when he rescues a woman, who had been an enemy, from rape. All of a sudden we don't know what to feel about Jaime.
One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don't have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates. Should we forgive Michael Vick? I have friends who are dog-lovers who will never forgive Michael Vick. Michael Vick has served years in prison; he's apologized. Has he apologized sufficiently? Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen someone that we should laud, or someone that we should despise? Or Roman Polanski, Paula Deen.
Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you're a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don't know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because
we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what's the answer then? [
Martin pauses for a moment.] You've read the books?
Yes.
Who kills Joffrey?
That killing happens early in this fourth season. The books, of course, are well past the poisoning of King Joffrey.
In the books – and I make no promises, because I have two more books to write, and I may have more surprises to reveal – the conclusion that the careful reader draws is that Joffrey was killed by the Queen of Thorns, using poison from Sansa's hairnet, so that if anyone did think it was poison, then Sansa would be blamed for it. Sansa had certainly good reason for it.
The reason I bring this up is because that's an interesting question of redemption. That's more like killing Hitler. Does the Queen of Thorns need redemption? Did the Queen of Thorns kill Hitler, or did she murder a 13-year-old boy? Or both? She had good reasons to remove Joffrey. Is it a case where the end justifies the means? I don't know. That's what I want the reader or viewer to wrestle with, and to debate.
I don't know if somebody like Jaime or Cersei can be redeemed. Cersei's a great character – she's like Lady Macbeth.
Well, redeemed in whose eyes? She'll never be redeemed in the eyes of some. She's a character who's very protective of her children. You can argue, well, does she genuinely love her children, or does she just love them because they're her children? There's certainly a great level of narcissism in Cersei. She has an almost sociopathic view of the world and civilization. At the same time, what Jaime did is interesting. I don't have any kids myself, but I've talked with other people who have.
Remember, Jaime isn't just trying to kill Bran because he's an annoying little kid. Bran has
seen something that is basically a death sentence for Jaime, for Cersei, and their children – their three actual children. So I've asked people who do have children, "Well, what would you do in Jaime's situation?" They say, "Well, I'm not a bad guy – I wouldn't kill." Are you sure? Never? If Bran tells King Robert he's going to kill you and your sister-lover, and your three children. . . .
Then many of them hesitate. Probably more people than not would say, "Yeah, I would kill someone else's child to save my own child, even if that other child was innocent." These are the difficult decisions people make, and they're worth examining.
By contrast, when Ned Stark beheads the Night Watchman, and later, when Ned's son Robb beheads another man, those killings take a toll on the two Starks. It's not easy for them to do it. It weighs on them.
As it should, I think. Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There's something very close up about the Middle Ages. You're taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone's head, and you're getting spattered with his blood, and you're hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it's more brutal that we've insulated ourselves from that. We're setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you're sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us. I don't know if that's necessarily such a good thing.
You see this same moral struggle all through history. It's always the question, when you're at war, do you do whatever it takes to win, or do you actually maintain your own moral standard and ideals? Should we be waterboarding people? What if we get valuable information that saves our lives? Well, even so, aren't we compromising ourselves? But if it prevents another 9/11, is torture worth it? I don't know, but it's a question worth asking. Do you commit horrible crimes to stay alive so your side should win?
A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with.
Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.
Sometimes people read what happens in these books and they wonder how these fates befall your characters – such as when Ned Stark is beheaded. He's the moral compass, and then he's gone.
Well, that was my intent. I knew right from the beginning that Ned wasn't going to survive. Both as a writer and as a reader I like stories that surprise me. Hitchcock's
Psycho has tremendous impact because Janet Leigh is the movie's star: She's stealing, traveling across country – are the cops going to get her? – and all that. The next thing is, she's being knifed in the shower – you're only 40 minutes into the movie. What the hell is happening? The star just died! After that, you really don't know what the hell is going to happen. It's great; I loved that. That's what I was going for with Ned: The protector who was keeping it all together is swept off the board. So that makes it much more suspenseful. Jeopardy is really there.
That jeopardy prevails more than ever now, after the ending of the third season and the slaughter of Ned's wife, Catelyn, and his eldest son, Robb, the King of the North.
The more I write about a character, the more affection I feel . . . even for the worst of them. Which doesn't mean I won't kill them. Whoever it was who said "Kill your darlings" was referring to his favorite lines in a story, but it's just as true for characters. The moment the reader begins to believe that a character is protected by the magical cloak of authorial immunity, tension goes out the window.
The Red Wedding was tremendously hard to write. I skipped over it until I finished the entirety of
A Storm of Swords, then I went back and forced myself to write that chapter. I loved those characters too much. But I knew it had to be done. The TV Red Wedding is even worse than the book, of course, because [
GoT creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] turned it up to 11 by bringing in Talisa, pregnant with Robb's child, none of which happened in the book. So we get a pregnant woman stabbed repeatedly in the belly.
We talked earlier about your unwillingness to fight in Vietnam. The Ice and Fire books are shot through with the horrors of war. As Ygritte says to Jon Snow, "We're just soldiers in their armies, and there's plenty more to carry on if we go down."
It's true in virtually all wars through history. Shakespeare refers to it, in those great scenes in
Henry V, where King Hal is walking among the men, before the Battle of Agincourt, and he hears the men complaining. "Well, I hope his cause is just, because a lot of us are going to die to make him king of France." One of the central questions in the book is Varys' riddle: The rich man, the priest and the king give an order to a common sellsword. Each one says kill the other two. So who has the power? Is it the priest, who supposedly speaks for God? The king, who has the power of state? The rich man, who has the gold? Of course, doesn't the swordsman have the power? He's the one with the sword – he could kill all three if he wanted.
Or he could listen to anyone. But he's just the average grunt. If he doesn't do what they say, then they each call other swordsmen who will do what they say. But why does anybody do what they say? This is the fundamental mystery of power and leadership and war through all history. Going back to Vietnam, for me the cognitive dissonance came in when I realized that Ho Chi Minh actually wasn't Sauron. Do you remember the poster during that time? WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY CAME? That's one of the fundamental questions here.
Why did anybody go to Vietnam? Were the people who went more patriotic? Were they braver? Were they stupider? Why does anybody go? What's all this based on? It's all based on an illusion: You go because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't go, even if you don't believe in it. But where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It's all this strange illusion, isn't it?
You're a congenial man, yet these books are incredibly violent. Does that ever feel at odds with these views about power and war?
The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that's become the template. I'm not sure that it's a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that. World War I is much more typical of the wars of history than World War II – the kind of war you look back afterward and say, "What the hell were we fighting for? Why did all these millions of people have to die? Was it really worth it to get rid of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that we wiped out an entire generation, and tore up half the continent? Was the War of 1812 worth fighting? The Spanish-American War? What the hell were these people fighting for?"
There's only a few wars that are really worth what they cost. I was born three years after the end of World War II. You want to be the hero. You want to stand up, whether you're Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin, or the American saving the world from the Nazis. It's sad to say, but I do think there are things worth fighting for. Men are still capable of great heroism. But I don't necessarily think there are heroes. That's something that's very much in my books: I believe in great characters.
We're all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and the demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices. Look at a figure like Woodrow Wilson, one of the most fascinating presidents in American history. He was despicable on racial issues. He was a Southern segregationist of the worst stripe, praising D.W. Griffith and
The Birth of a Nation. He effectively was a Ku Klux Klan supporter. But in terms of foreign affairs, and the League of Nations, he had one of the great dreams of our time.
The war to end all wars – we make fun of it now, but God, it was an idealistic dream. If he'd been able to achieve it, we'd be building statues of him a hundred feet high, and saying, "This was the greatest man in human history: This was the man who ended war." He was a racist who tried to end war. Now, does one cancel out the other? Well, they don't cancel out the other. You can't make him a hero or a villain. He was both. And we're all both.
The Red Wedding, upon broadcast, became the most infamously shocking scene in TV history. It angered a lot of the people who watched it.
It did so in the books too. In 2000, when the book came out, I got tons of letters from people: "I'm so angry with you – I'm never going to read your work again. I threw the book into the fire, then a week later I had to know what happens, so I went out and bought another copy." Some people were so horrified that they said they will not read any more of my work. I understand that.
Those characters mattered – the readers took them seriously, couldn't bear those fates.
One letter I got was from a woman, a waitress. She wrote me: "I work hard all day, I'm divorced, I have a couple of children. My life is very hard, and my one pleasure is I come home and I read fantasy, and I escape to other worlds. Then I read your book, and God, it was fucking horrifying. I don't read for this. This is a nightmare. Why would you do this to me?" That letter actually reached me. I wrote her back and basically said, "I'm sorry; I do understand where you're coming from." Some people do read . . . I don't like to use the word
escape, because escapism has such a pejorative aspect, but it takes you to another world. Maybe it is escape.
Reading fiction has helped me through some bad times in my own life. The night my father died, I was in Michigan and I got word from my mother. I couldn't get to a plane until the next day, so I sat around thinking about my father, the good and the bad in our relationship. I remember I opened whatever book I was reading, and for a few hours, I was able to stop thinking about my father's death. It was a relief. There are some people who read and want to believe in a world where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and at the end they live happily ever after. That's not the kind of fiction that I write. Tolkien was not that.
The scouring of the Shire proved that. Frodo's sadness – that was a bittersweet ending, which to my mind was far more powerful than the ending of
Star Wars, where all the happy Ewoks are jumping around, and the ghosts of all the dead people appear, waving happily [
laughs]. But I understand where the other people are coming from. There are a lot of books out there. Let everyone find the kind of book that speaks to them, and speaks to what they need emotionally.
Early on, one critic described the TV series as bleak and embodying a nihilistic worldview, another bemoaned its "lack of moral signposts." Have you ever worried that there's some validity to that criticism?
No. That particular criticism is completely invalid. Actually, I think it's moronic. My worldview is anything but nihilistic.
Some of your most contemptible characters are also among the story's greatest truth-tellers. One of the most riveting moments in the TV series took place in the Battle of Blackwater episode, which you wrote the script for, when Sandor says to Sansa, "The world was built by killers, so you'd better get used to looking at them."
Truth is sometimes hard to hear. Two of the central phrases are true, but they are not truths that most human beings like to contemplate. Winter
is coming and
Valar morghulis – all men must die. Mortality is the inescapable truth of all life . . . and of all stories, too.
This story is from the May 8th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
Ive been reading the books since they first came out (the 90's? memory is slippin...) and I watch the show with my wife, who did NOT read them...but she makes me tell her what's coming, most of the time, lol. It has been interesting to see how the story has been altered to fit a TV format, with minor changes in timelines (Jaime, in the books, doesn't get to Kings Landing until AFTER Joffrey's death, for example) and the winnowing of some interesting characters (Strong Belwas, Vargo Hoat, to name 2). All in all, they have done a great job the show has been fantastic. I've been telling people for YEARS to read these books, now they're getting em served up on a silver platter. Oh well.
