[applause]
EVE EWING: For those of you who don't know
my name is Eve Louise Ewing.
I'm the person on the stage who is not George R. R. Martin.
[applause]
George R. R. Martin: The winner of the 21st century award.
EVE: Yes, very recent winner of the 21st
century award. Thank you.
[applause]
GEORGE: I think I could be a contender for
the 13th century award.
[laughs]
EVE: Well this stage, this is a very beautiful
setup, that also gives me a strangely ominous feeling that something terrible
is about to happen.
[laughs]
Hopefully that's not the case.
It is such a tremendous honor to sit down with you, I"m really grateful
that you're here.
I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions, for about an hour.
They'll mostly be about writing, generally.
GEORGE: Very good.
EVE: Then I'll ask you some fan
submitted questions.
We won't have an open audience Q&A this evening but many people were
gracious enough to submit their questions through the Chicago Humanities Festival.
GEROGE: Sounds good to me.
EVE: Okay great let's get into it.
'A Song of Ice and Fire' has emerged as the work for which you are
most widely known, and you've made an indelible mark on popular culture
but you have had a capacious career.
Beginning as a professional writer in 1970,
and since then you've produced a wildly diverse body of work,
I could take all night listing your
projects,
but I'm going to throw a few out there for folks that are not familiar.
You're early novels 'Dying of the Light', 'Fever Dream', you wrote for a
1980's reboot of 'The Twilight Zone',
wrote for the TV adaptation of 'Beauty and the Beast' .
The landmark, somewhat bizarre, surrealist show 'Max Headroom',
short story collections like 'Sand Kings', 'Portraits of His Children', I could go
on and on.
Does it ever bother you that so many people want to talk to you primarily
about 'A Song of Ice and Fire'?
GEORGE: It's a little surreal sometimes,
I understand of course that 'A Song of Ice and Fire'
and 'Game of Thrones' are vastly more popular than anything else
I've ever done.
But it does startle me sometimes that some people think it's the only thing
I've ever done.
I sometimes even read in articles online, how I began in 1996 with 'Game of Thrones'.
As I said, my first story appeared in 1971.
So I had 25 years of publishing 50 short stories, and novels,
and short story collections, editing anthologies,
winning various Hugo and Nebula awards,
and losing a lot more Hugo and Nebula awards.
[laughter]
There was a lot there, and it's not like it's secret or anything or it was written
under a pseudonym, it's all perfectly accessible if you google my name.
[laughter]
None the less, an amazing number of people seem ignorant to it.
I should mention, on the things you listed there, that I did do two projects for
'Max Headroom' but neither one was ever filmed, sadly.
I wrote the 'Max Headroom' Christmas show, which was actually in pre-production
when the show was cancelled.
We were not able to film that, which broke my heart,
because it was a really fun episode.
We recently did a 'Max Headroom' reunion at my little theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
We did a staged reading of it, Matt Frewer actually came in for it.
He performed with some local actors.
It was great to finally see that after like 30 years, it being acted out.
Even if only, by voices.
EVE: Did you film it?
GEORGE: Did we? I don't know.
We might have taped it.
EVE: No one here seems to know either.
[laughter]
GEORGE: We might have taped it, ya.
Max was an amazing show, advanced for its time.
EVE: Oh, absolutely.
GEORGE: The young people here probably
don't even know what 'Max Headroom' was.
EVE: Only old people like me know.
GEORGE: It was based on a TV movie that had
been done in England.
It takes place 23 minutes into the future, something like that.
It was a show about television, and artificial computer host Max Headroom
who was the host of his own show.
He was actually a personality that lived in a computer.
Of course we didn't actually have any computers capable of doing that,
in the early 90's when the show was on so Max Headroom was acted by
Matt Frewer in extensive make up.
A lot of people thought that he was a real computer host.
It would be great to revive it, but the shows are still a lot of fun.
EVE: It's a classic, I think it's a little bit
in the uncanny valley of creepiness, the kind of make up look that is
supposed to look like a computer.
GEORGE: Yes, yes definitely.
EVE: I'm sure that the success of
'A Song of Ice and Fire' has probably contributed, for some people who know
how to use the google machine, to access your back list.
Are there particular earlier works of yours that you really want to
shout out, that you wish people would read more?
GEORGE: Like anybody else I have favorite stories
and less favorite stories.
When I broke in I wrote mostly short stories.
I published my first story in 1971, in Galaxy magazine, "The Hero".
Over the next few years I published thirty, forty, fifty short stories,
in the science fiction magazines of the day.
I didn't attempt my first novel until 1976, I wrote it and it
came out in 1977.
So I had six years of just publishing short stories.
Probably my best known work before 'A Song of Ice and Fire' was
a short story called 'Sand Kings'.
It appeared in Omni, it won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards.
That one is soon to be a major motion picture I hope,
or possibly a minor motion picture.
I don't know, but it will be a motion picture we think, anyways,
so that's cool.
We have 'Fever Dream', my historical horror novels
set on the Mississippi river in 1857.
EVE: And there are vampires.
GEORGE: Ya, vampires and steam boats.
That was a novel that I was particularly fond of.
And my 'Wild Card' series, which is actually the series I've been working on
longer than anything else.
I'm mostly the editor on that, though I write for it too.
It's a super hero world, not really super heroes.
People with super powers, they don't necessarily become heroes.
It's unconventional in that it's a realistic look at an alternate
world in which an alien virus gives some people super powers.
When pitching 'Wild Cards' I have to say why it is not a conventional
super hero template.
I say what would happen in a real world if all of you who are here tonight,
suddenly had a super power?
Some of you could run really fast, some of you could throw lighting bolts,
some of you were really strong, some of you could walk through walls.
Entirely arbitrarily, 'Wild Cards'.
How would it change your life, how would it change the world,
what would you do?
I ask people that.
You know, all the years I've been asking people that no one has ever answered,
I would buy a spandex costume and fight crime.
[laughter]
Which means that there is something wrong with the conventional comic book
trouple.
'Wild Cards' is an examination of that, but it's also a lot of fun.
EVE: Speaking of comics,
you've said that as you became a reader in your early life,
comics were a really important escape for you, from the stiffling
1950's literary world of Dick and Jane, who are very boring people.
You've said that Stan Lee was one of your greatest literary influences.
As a Marvel Comics writer I'm contractually obligated to ask
you about that.
Are there lessons from comics as a medium that you take into
your other writing?
GEORGE: Yes, I think.
It would be very nice to say that my great literary influences were
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens and other respected literary figures,
and Tolkien of course.
I admire those three writers all enormously, but,
Stan Lee was probably more influential than any of them.
The first published words of mine ever to appear were my letter
in Fantastic Four #20.
Which was critiquing, if you could call it a critique, Fantastic Four #17.
My critique consisted of saying, move over Shakespeare,
Stan Lee has arrived.
[laughter[
You've gotta wonder why Stan chose to publish that letter.
I'd read comic books since I was a little kid,
the funny animal comics, Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck,
Archie, all of that stuff.
Super heroes, especially the DC super heroes,
Super Man, Bat Man, The Flash, all of that.
I had read all of those.
The minute Marvel came on the scene, I think my interest in comics had
actually been waning, the DC comics of the time were stiffling,
they were perfectly circular.
Super Man, he was Clark Kent he worked for the Daily Planet.
Perry White was the editor, Jimmy Olson was his best friend.
Lois Lane was his girlfriend.
Something would happen, aliens would invade or there would be
a villain or something, and Super Man would have an adventure.
It would go circular, it would end right where it began.
Everything would be back in place, nothing really ever happened in
a Super Man comic.
Which I realized after reading about 100 or so of them.
You could read them in any order, they had their template and
nothing was ever gonna happen.
Jimmy Olson might become a giant turtle man in the course of the adventure
but by the end of the adventure he would be back to being Jimmy Olson.
There was no permanent changes.
Then Stan Lee came along with Marvel, and the characters were fighting in the
Fantastic Four, the Thing didn't like being the Thing.
He was constantly fighting with Johnny Storm.
They didn't have secret identities, their identities were out there.
Then Spider-Man came along.
Spider-Man, he didn't have his Lois Lane, he had a series of girlfriends.
Liz Allen at first, who he had the hots for but she preferred to
bully Flash Thompson.
He couldn't get anywhere with her.
Then he took up with an older woman, Betty Brandt, who was
J. Jonah's secretary.
He had that relationship for a while.
Then he took up with Gwen Stacy.
EVE: That didn't work out.
[laughter]
GEORGE: She died, ya.
That was traumatic, be she actually died!
DC never killed Lois Lane, or even Jimmy Olson.
Although you might have wanted to.
Nothing ever happened in the DC comics.
A lot was happening in Marvel.
You didn't know who was safe, you didn't know what would actually happen.
Time actually passed.
Believe it or not, looking at the old dotard you see in hat
before you, I went to high school with Peter Parker.
We were both in high school when I started reading Spider-Man comics.
Just about the same time we both graduated high school and
went to college.
I went to North Western, I'm in a different city, I'm making new friends,
I've got a room mate that I didn't know before, taking new classes.
It's adjusting to a new whole new world.
Peter Parker went through the same stuff.
He went to college, he didn't go as far away from home,
but he did have to move out of the house with Aunt May.
Things happened and that was amazing.
Another one of my comic books letters, I published a number of letters
was a letter to the Avengers.
Which again, was published, it was about Avengers #9,
which is when they introduced Wonder Man.
I'm not sure any of you remember that issue, you were probably
a little too young.
You probably don't even remember Wonder Man.
Wonder Man came in and he joined the Avengers, he was a brand new hero,
he really wasn't a hero, he was a spy who was set to join the Avengers
to destroy them from within.
He was only playing a hero, he was actually gonna destroy
them from within.
Then he became friendly with them and he couldn't bring himself
to destroy them from within.
He betrayed his masters and they killed him,
So he died in the same issue he was introduced in.
I loved this of course, so I wrote a long letter about how great this was.
I look back now and my whole career was based on Avengers #9.
[laughter]
Introducing these grey characters who have divided loyalties who are
not what they seem.
EVE: And were a little traumatized.
GEORGE: and then killing them unexpectedly.
Now of course it was comics so they brought Wonder Man back eventually.
That's the big flaw with comics, and I try never to bring anyone back.
Or if I do, they're really screwed up.
EVE: What I'm really hearing you
talk about here is the idea of stakes.
Your readers have to believe that the stakes are really high,
that somebody really might get murdered.
I read this interview with you where you talk about reading Lord of the Rings,
and of course people frequently compare you to Tolkien,
and feeling betrayed,
OK if you haven't read Lord of the Rings you've had many decades so this is your
spoiler alert, OK.
That after they throw the ring in to the fires of Mordor and it's destroyed
that they come back to the shire and the shire is getting sacked,
the scouring of the shire,
and you talk about feeling betrayed, that the story didn't have a happy ending.
Now you've gone on where basically all your writing, you've become famous for
writing iterations of the scouring of the shire.
It seems like part of what you're taking on is keeping the stakes high.
GEORGE: Yes, I do believe that.
I read Lord of the Rings when it was first published in the United States.
Actually, the illegal pirated edition.
They were amazing books, I couldn't get enough of them.
I was only like 13 years old, or something like that.
When the ring went into the volcano, I said, well this is the end of the story,
why is there so much more?
Then I hit the scouring of the shire and I realized it wasn't the unequivocal
happy ending, yay, the heroes have won, that I thought it would be.
I really didn't understand it as a 13 year old.
Of course, I reread Lord of the Rings every few years.
I've come to not only understand it but I have a deep appreciation of it.
Peter Jackson's movies are brilliant I think.
They're as good an adaptation of Lord of the Rings that you could possibly get.
But I do miss the scouring of the shire, which he doesn't include.
It's an important part of the book, it says something important.
I took that to heart.
The other thing about reading Tolkien, of course is, like Wonder Man,
it had a similar effect,
In Fellowship when Gandalf dies, what the hell?
Gandalf died? you can't kill Gandalf.
He's the head guy, he knows everything that's going on.
The other characters seemed like kids compared to Gandalf.
The four hobbits and the squire guys, and I don't trust Boromir.
Now Tolkien later brought him back.
EVE: He brought him back as like Gandalf 2.0.
GEORGE: I know, I didn't like Gandalf the White,
I prefer Gandalf the Grey, I've always preferred grey characters to
white characters.
If Professor Tolkien was here we could argue about whether Gandalf
should have come back or not.
It had an enormous effect on me, killing Gandalf.
Killing Gandalf also sets up, in the second book when he kills Frodo.
Oh my god, he killed Frodo, Frodo was supposed to be the hero
he was the ring bearer, now Sam is the ring bearer?
How is this gonna work out?
All of these things had an enormous effect on a young me and,
they did raise the stakes.
The minute you kill Gandalf, anybody can die.
Then you're looking at the members of the fellowship and saying,
who are you going to kill next?
We got several extra hobbits, they could go.
[laughter]
EVE: Mary and Pippen, they get a little
indistinguishable after a while.
GEORGE: He didn't kill them,
but I was afraid he would, so, that's the whole point
To have the reader on the each of their seat.
To not know what's going to happen.
That's something I try to do in my books.
Especially in the scary parts, or the battles,
If you're really going into a battle, you would be afraid before hand.
You would have this deep visceral fear, are you going to survive the battle?
Nobody knows.
I want that experience for the reader, I want the reader to not just
read the book but to live the book.
To almost be afraid to turn the next page,
when suddenly the hero is surrounded by six big guys with axes.
You shouldn't fee, oh, it's Conan, he's gonna get out of it.
Six guys with axes, nothing.
You should be terrified that these six guys with axes are going to
hack you apart.
I guarantee you if you leave this wonderful place tonight and are
confronted with six guys with axes you'll be scared.
We'll read about you in the Tribune tomorrow.
How your hacked up body was found.
[laughter]
EVE: Alright, OK.
So, you mention the Wild Card series which you have been editing for basically
as long as I have been alive.
It's a really cool concept, not only for the reasons you mentioned
about really engaging with whatever the real stakes of super powers are,
but also because it's a shared universe, and you've collaborated on these
edited stories written by over 50 authors, working collaboratively.
You've also edited multiple anthologies.
My personal opinion which you may agree or disagree with,
is that a good editor is actually a much rarer thing than a good writer.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your identity as an editor,
and how it may differ from your identity as a writer.
GEORGE: I don't know if ts a rarer thing,
but in the anthologies that I have done, anthologies like Dangerous Women,
Warriors, Rouges, I had the great pleasure of working with Gardener,
who unfortunately passed away last year.
Gardener was one of the greatest editors in the entire history of science fiction.
He won the Hugo award for best editor sixteen times.
Which is pretty amazing.
Working with him was on those books was increidble.
I have edited other things, Wild Cards is a unique challenge because it is
a shared world.
When you're editing an ordinary anthology, not that any anthology is ordinary,
when you're editing a more conventional anthology you're just buying good stories
and they may have a theme, the theme is unicorns,
so you invite people to send you unicorn stories.
But all you're looking at is if its a good story, is it a bad story,
can it be improved, if it has flaws, how do you fix it?
With a shared world you still have that, but also your stories have to fit together.
They are all essentially parts of a whole.
They can't have contradictions, they can't have duplications.
So a lot more rewriting is required, a lot more working together and
a lot more editing.
The Wild Cards are a very challenging series to edit, but I enjoyed doing that.
I actually sort of got into editing almost by accident.
My first published book was actually a book I edited not a book I wrote.
At beginning of my career in 1973, I was nominated for the John W. Campbell
award for the best new writer in Science Fiction.
That was a brand new award given for the first time in 1973.
Campbell had just died in 1971.
I lost that award, it was the first of many awards that I've lost over the years
in the field.
I was nominated, and it is a great honor to be nominated, the nominators
picked me as one of the six best new writers that entered Science Fiction
in the last two years.
At the time there was an anthology called the Hugo Winners,
and there was an anthology called the Nebula Award's Book,
but I wasn't nominated for them yet.
There was no anthology for the Campbell award nominees.
I thought there should be because it would a guaranteed sale for me.
After I lost that very same convention, I went to some of the editors and said,
why don't you have a Campbell award anthology just like you have the
Hugo and Nebula anthologies?
I thought somebody famous would do it and I could sell them a story,
it would be a guaranteed sale for me.
Instead they said, oh good idea you do it.
So suddenly I found myself editing a book, I didn't know anything about editing books
I learned on the fly, and I did six volumes of the series that would be
called the New Voices, ultimately.
That was my introduction to editing, entirely by circumstance.
Watch out if you suggest anything to someone they might say, hey you do it.
Suddenly you'll find yourself working with some people.
EVE: Speaking of editing, we live in a world
that sort of fetishizes brevity, and short things,
what do you see as the virtue of continuing to write very long works
in that world, and how do you negotiate that editorially?
GEORGE: I do not share fetishation of brevity.
I am in the anti brevity camp.
[laughter]
My stories throughout my career have been getting longer and longer,
like I said when I began in the 70's I wrote mostly short stories.
At a certain point my short stories were getting longer, they were
now novelettes.
When I won my first Hugo it was for a novella.
So each of these is a longer category, than the other,
then eventually six seven years into my career I started writing novels.
They were relatively short novels, at some point for sanity I found myself
writing Game of Thrones and it just kept getting longer and longer and longer
I like it I think the length gives it a richness, gives it a texture.
You can create world building, you can create an immersive world,
and immersive universe, the readers will lose themselves in.
For the length of the novel and perhaps for many novels beyond that, many works.
I like that.
Yesterday when we attended the award ceremony, they were flashing
quotations about writing on the walls of the site where the awards were being
presented.
One of them was a quote that I wrote for a book called On Fantasy,
it was about when I die they can keep their heaven I'd rather go to Middle Earth.
Tolkien was the first really great world builder.
He created Middle Earth in such detail, that it seems like a real place to me.
I know Middle Earth much more than I know many real places.
What do I know about Uruguay?
I know a lot more about middle earth than I do about Uruguay.
I can describe it's scenic wonders and the customs of its people.
The roads that go from there to there.
The Kings who ruled in past ages.
EVE: And the languages and the geography
GEORGE: It's an amazing place, I've tried to do
the same with Westeros.
That's one of the things that I think is important about writing Fantasy,
Epic Fantasy.
There are many different types of fantasy of course.
If any of you are aspiring writers, or ever took fiction courses
or studied fiction in high school or college or something like that
they used to at least in my day, talk about the elements of fiction.
Plot, theme, character, etc. etc.
One of the elements of fiction was setting.
In most mainstream fiction, contemporary fiction,
setting gets short shrift.
OK, it's in Chicago, OK it's in New York City,
or even, it's in Victorian England, we know all about that,
but the greatest fantasy to my mind is distinguished by its settings.
The setting almost becomes a character, Middle Earth becomes a real place,
it becomes a character, the Shire, Rivendale, Ministereth,
Mordor, each of these is very vivid and real, and I've tried
to do the same with my own Westeros.
Create a setting that was almost a character in it's own right.
EVE: Did you notice that one of those
quotations on the wall was said by you, but was attributed to me?
GEORGE: I did notice that.
[laughter]
Hey!
EVE: I thought that was very strange.
GEORGE: What a coincidence, Eve said exactly
the same thing.
EVE: I did not say that.
I complained to someone but no change was made,
so I want you to know that I'm glad you noticed that, I thought
it was very bizarre.
GEORGE: There was also a typo in one of
my other ones.
There was one where I said that because I'm a reader I have lived a thousand lives,
loved a thousand loves.
They changes the loves to lives.
So it was I've lived a thousand lives and loved a thousand lives.
Which is sort of repetitious.
EVE: We had a lovely time
we're very grateful, it was a wonderful event.
GEORGE: The awards were handsome, and we got to
meet the mayor and there were 82 authors on stage.
Amazing authors I wish all their books had been on sale.
I would have gone home with a big stack of them.
EVE: So yesterday you were interviewed
by Scott Simon from NPR.
I thought you were very game in talking about what its like to have so many people
waiting for your books.
I have an ongoing fascination with the rhetoric people use,
because sometimes it seems to veer out of the realm of fandom
and into the realm of entitlement.
In a way that seems to forget that you are a human person who is trying to
make art which is a very difficult and unpleasant thing.
What are your thoughts on that, do you think that people fundamentally
misunderstand something about what writing is or about what this whole
business is?
GEORGE: Well, yes, I think that some of them do.
Certainly.
Some of them don't seem to understand that writers are different from eachother.
They will point out to me some other writer and say, in the time you've been
working on Winds of Winter he's published seven novels.
Indeed there are writers who do that.
There are writers you can practically set your watch by.
They publish a novel a year, boom, boom, boom.
That's great, I wish I could do that, but I can't, I never could.
There are a couple of novels I wrote throughout my career that took me
a year to write but they were like a fifth the size of the novels
I'm writing now.
So that's not going to happen.
I can't help but think, I don't want all the wonderful young
people I see in the audience to start taking aim at me and throw things here
EVE: Well we have all these apples.
[laughter[
GEORGE: I do think there is an aspect of
generational change about this, I think the older readers
baby boomers like me, or maybe even generation X'ers are used to
waiting for things.
The internet has created a generation that is used to instant gratification.
Instead of answers, they want what they want and they want it now.
I think the internet kind of creates that mindset.
The old days when I needed to learn something I would have to go to the
library and find a book on it, find another book on it just to
double check that it was right.
Now if I want to know anything I wip up google and boom,
there's the answer in two minutes, 20 seconds actually.
Depending how fast your internet speed is.
It creates a different set of expectations
There are many things the internet does, but it hasn't helped me write faster.
So there it is.
I try to keep it into proportion, it is sometimes annoying to me that
there is so many voices that just want Winds of Winter, and choose to remind
me every opportunity.
I know perfectly well that if any of you go home tonight and go on Twitter
"I was just at the Chicago Symphony Listening to George R. R. Martin"
within the first three responses to your tweet someone will say well,
"where's Winds of Winter?".
Why isn't he writing it?
I mean go home try it, see if it doesn't work that way.
On the other hand, I think for the vast majority of writers
including some really good writers, like I said we had 80 writers on the
stage yesterday at the Carl Sandberg awards
Many distinguished writers who have written novels and
works of non-fiction, terrific stuff.
You probably would never have heard of many of them,
their books probably sell relatively few copies.
For the vast majority of writers including me, for much of my career,
the big question is obscurity, how do you get yourself noticed amongst
all the books out there.
I try not to be ungrateful about the fact that I have millions of people
eagerly awaiting my next book.
It certainly beats having no one give a damn about when my next book
is coming out.
Which is the fate of most writers, that's what they struggle with.
You have to keep all of these things into proportion.
With Game of Thrones achieving best seller status, the books actually not
Games of Thrones, Game of Thrones was not a best seller when it first came out.
EVE: Was it 'Song of Swords'?
GEORGE: It was the second book 'Clash of Kings'
hit the New York Times list for one week at 13 then it vanished.
The third book 'Storm of Swords' debuted a little higher and lasted
a little longer, it wasn't until the fourth book 'Feast for Crows' that
I hit number one on the Times list.
Then the show hit, and the books were already number one New York Times
best sellers but the show made everyone crazy about them.
It also made me famous to a degree that I had never anticipated in my life
being famous.
This happened to me when I was in my 60's.
It's changed my life in ways that I don't necessarily love, but there
are things about it that are great.
Probably more good things than bad things.
It certainly was a change.
I'm glad it happened to me, strange as it seems,
when I was in my 60's.
It's given me an understanding of why people like Lindsay Lohan and
Justin Bieber go crazy.
[laughter]
To be a sixteen year old kid and suddenly have that level of fame and attention
and loss of privacy and thousands of people commenting on every shirt that
you wear or every word that you say, I don't know how any sixteen year old
could possibly handle that.
I at least have had many long years of life on earth before I
descended into the strange world of celebrity.
EVE: And a lot of opportunity to make your
make your work on your own terms and not kind of be accessing your success.
So there is a cultural critique Doreen St. Felix
who referred to Gwendolyn Brooks work, you may remember from your time in Chicago
as being a citizen poet.
I think that in Santa Fe where you have lived for many many years, you could
be seen as a really active citizen author, you own the Jean Cocteau Cinema,
which you bought and had restored as an eclectic movie house after it had
been shut down.
You've been a huge supporter of the Wild Spirits wolf sanctuary.
Of course you are a co-conspirator in MeowWolf and their many installations
and incredible works.
Do you see this kind of community work as part of who you are as a writer
or is it that you're a writer and you do this other stuff?
Do you see part of your job as building community in this way?
GEORGE: I think i'll go with I'm a writer
and I do all this other stuff.
I do believe in the concept of giving back, I've been very fortunate.
There are a lot of things that go into being successful in any chosen career.
But that's certainly true of a writer, you have to have talent,
you have to persist, and you have to have luck.
There are some great great books out there and great writers who
have never achieved a large audience who have never made that much money,
who have faced a lot of struggles.
I've been very lucky and I'm cognizant of that.
Not to say I haven't worked hard, I have.
Luck is part of it.
Robert A. Heinlen, the first Science Fiction book that I ever read was
'Have Space Suit--Will Travel' by Robert A. Heinlen,
and he was my favorite author for many years.
He was probably the greatest Science Fiction author of his day.
They called him the dean of Science Fiction at one point.
Heinlen famously said "you can never pay back the people who helped you
when you were starting out, so you have to pay forward."
I've always taken that principal to mind, I've tried to pay forward both inside
and outside of the genre.
Doing things like supporting Wild Spirit, reviving the Jean Cocteau, and within
the field trying to blurp good books by young writers who are just starting out
to get their books a little attention.
Helping writers workshops like Clarien and Clarien West and Odyssey.
Sponsoring scholarships and all that, that's a method of giving back and I think
there is an obligation on people to do that, to engage in their communities.
I have two communities that I live in, Santa Fe, New Mexico community,
where I make my home and also the world Science Fiction and Fantasy
which I have been apart of since 1971 when I attended my fist convention.
I still go to world World Con every year and attend the Hugo Awards, those are
my people and it almost feels like family to me so I try to give in both of those
communities.
EVE: You travel exstensively,
you just came back from Ireland, you're not going home for
a couple more weeks after being here, but you also have said you really struggle
to write on planes, hotels, basically anywhere that is not your home office.
That you need several uninterrupted days to get into your groove.
How do you balance the part of being a writer that is the writing,
with the part that is the profession, coming to events like this,
knowing that it's gonna drain some of the actual production.
GEORGE: Well, that's a good question.
How do I balance them? Badly I think.
My relationship with travel is an interesting one, that I should probably
talk about with a therapist rather than you people.
EVE: No on'es listening we are just here
with our freinds.
GEORGE: I was born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Which is a blue collar industrial city right across the bay from New York City.
My father was a long shore man, although he went through long periods
where he was unemployed.
My mother was a house wife when I was young and later got a factory job
when factories were in Bayonne.
We never had much money, we lived in a federal housing project.
We did not own a car, we never went anywhere.
I lived on 1st street, my school was on 5th street, five blocks that was my world.
Bayonne was a peninsula and living on 1st street was the Kilvon Cull
which is a deep water channel that connected Newark bay and New York bay.
I would see these great ships, oil tankers and freighters, things like that going by
day and night with all the flags of the world on them.
Sweden, Liberia, China, so forth.
I had an encyclopedia where I could look up every flag I saw.
There was this urge in me to get away from the five blocks where my life was lived.
Occasionally we would go to New York City to eat.
We never really traveled even like some of the other people in the neighborhood did.
They would go to the Jersey Shore during summer.
They would rent a cabin in the mountains, we never did any of that we just stayed
home and worked.
So Travel has always been enticing to me.
As I became more and more successful.
First of all I went to North Western, that was the first time
I ever left New Jersey.
The Midwest and Chicago and Evanston that was a whole new world to me.
Later when I became successful I started going to Science Fiction magazines,
in far flung places like Boston and Washington DC and all that.
Every city was an adventure for me, eventually in 1981 I traveled to England.
I left the country for the first time.
As I became more successful, first within Science Fiction and later
in the larger world when the books became best sellers and a hit
I started getting more and more invitations to travel to places,
all expenses paid invitations.
Oh, they want to fly me to Vancouver, that's cool, I'll say yes.
Oh look here's one where I can go to Scotland, I can go to France,
I can go to Italy.
Honestly, I said yes too much.
I had a great time it was wonderful, it enriched my life I learned a lot,
I made friends from all over the world, but I said yes too much.
Now I have a staff that I've instructed to try to say no as much as possible,
I have one of my assistants I call the Vice President in charge of saying no.
[laughter]
Sometimes I over rule her, I have my publicist here sitting in the second row
trying hide who tells me to say no to everything because I should be staying
home and writing.
If I listened to him I wouldn't be here.
[luaghter]
I can't help it, I wanted to be here, I wanted to come back to Chicago,
I wanted to, you know the Carl Sandberg award was an amazing honor.
I wanted to be with you guys tonight.
It's true I've got to, and I'm really trying, I'm saying no more and more,
I've said no to three things this week.
The invitations just keep pouring in.
Travel doesn't have quite the allure it previously did when I never went anywhere
so now they offer me money instead.
I'm saying no to that too, I'm being good people.
[applause]
[laughter]
The one thing I never say no to is the World Science Fiction convention, World Con.
Which I went to for the first time in 1971, I go to that every year.
So that's why I was in Ireland last month, for the World Con.
There is a lot of conventions on the Science Fiction calendar, some of them
are better than others, all of them are fun to some degree.
But World Con is the oldest of them, it's where the Hugo awards are given.
It's where I see friends that I only see once a year.
The Science Fiction fandom is like forever, you go in there an meet people
who will be part of your life for the next fifty years.
You may only see them once a year at World Con but it's still great and
important to see them.
So that one I'll probably never say no to, but I try to say no to a lot of the others.
At lest until 'Winds of Winter' is finished, then you'll see me popping
around and popping up places.
EVE: We're really grateful you said yes to us.
I know it's also cause you wanted to go to Greek town and have some gyros,
which we talked about earlier.
GEORGE: OPA!
EVE: A lot of writers who have their work
adapted to film or television are not really involved, they kind of hand it over,
sometimes that can create a distant or adversarial relationship with the adaptation.
You are not like that, you've been a producer on Game of Thrones and you've
also written scripts for some of the most iconic episodes, and I want to shout out
a few of them
You wrote "The Pointy End" which has this amazing scene where Syrio Forel protects
Arya as she escapes and her life is never the same.
Again this is a spoiler heavy zone, so exits behind you if you need to leave.
You wrote that episode, that I love.
"Black Water" and incredibly epic battle, that I think rivals Ministereth for
great on screen battles.
Where Tyrion proves himself to be a capable military strategist.
We get lots of sweet dragon fire exploding.
"The Lion and the Rose" where we bid, for some of us, a very gleeful farewell
to Jofrey.
We realize that we can see a minor die on TV and we're somehow still happy about it.
[laughter]
At the same time, you're heavily involved in the show, but you're still writing
this series and you reserve the right to do what you want there autonomously
not based on peoples responses to the TV series.
This is a long way of asking, how do you see the relationship between
TV Westeros and fiction Westeros, and how are you operating in both of
these worlds?
GEORGE: Well, how many children did
Scarlet O'hara have?
EVE: I'm the wrong one to ask that.
GEORGE: She had three in Margaret Mitchell's novel.
She had one in the movie.
So how many children did she have?
I mean which is "right"?
The actual answer to that is a trick question of course.
It is that Scarlet O'hara had no children because she is a fictional character
and never existed.
[laughter]
It's two different mediums and two different ways of telling the same story,
or at least a similar story.
That's true whenever you adapt any work from books to television or movies,
or even a radio play for that matter.
You have to make choices as to what you leave in what you take out,
there are issues that a television producer or screen writer has that
a novelist does not have.
You have to worry about the budget, you have to worry about the running time,
you have actors who have contracts that have to be serviced.
I could have a character like Theon Greyjoy or Varis, disappear for entire books
and not be mentioned at all, or perhaps be presumed dead,
they're off and you don't know what they're doing.
You can't do that with a TV show, the actors are under contract,
you're not gonna pay an actor for an entire season and not have them
appear on screen.
Television and film have things at their disposal that the novelist does not have.
They can have a score like the wonderful music we were hearing by Ramin Djawadi.
Our Emmy winning composer, that reinforces the show.
We've got marvelous special effects and all that.
The novelist also has tools that the screen writer and the director don't have.
You can use an unreliable narrator, he has the wonderful strength which I use very
heavily in 'A Song of Ice and Fire' of point of view.
The camera is completely objective, it has no point of view.
The camera is showing you what happened.
When I write a scene from the view point of Sansa I'm filtering everything through
Sansa's perceptions.
Sansa is only seeing what she is looking at, if there is something behind her
she doesn't see it.
It's more difficult to write when you're doing it with a camera.
So all of these things necessitate making changes, making a different approach
That's what the process of adaptation is about.
Then its up to the readers and the viewers to decide which they like better.
They're both works of art.
Margaret Mitchell's novel is there, it can be read, you can go see the 1939 movie,
if you take into account inflation and all that it's still the highest grossing movie
of all time.
You can determine which you like better and argue about how many children
she should have had.
There it is, its two different works of art, related but not identical.
EVE: Almost like alternate universe versions
of eachother.
Initially when people started showing interest in the series for television
you felt that the scale of it might be beyond what could be represented on film.
Especially because of part of what you just mentioned, the scope of your many
characters, the world, the complexity of the plot.
What do you think was the X factor?
Is there something that changed or something that made it work
despite those challenges of the medium?
GEORGE: I think HBO was of the X factor,
HBO was willing to let us make an adult fantasy.
Fantasy books had been dominating the best seller list for decades but,
whenever fantasy was done for TV for Game of Thrones, they put it on at 8 o'clock
7 central.
It was in the family hour because the people running television thought Fantasy
dragons and swords and stuff was something silly, that it was for children.
HBO had enough faith to redefine at least in terms of television, redefine the
fantasy genre.
That doesn't surprise me because you look at what they did previously,
Deadwood, whole new take on westerns, Sopranos, completely different take on
the gangster story.
HBO was in the business of redefining genres and inverting troupes and
turning them on their heads, and they did it with Fantasy.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss the show runners did an amazing job
and they assembled a great team.
Game of Thrones has won, at this point, more Emmy's than any other show in the
history of television, prime time show anway.
What's interesting about it is many many many of those Emmy's are what they call
in Hollywood below the line, they're for things like music, costuming,
casting, stunt work, all of these things, special effects.
All of these things are necessary to do a good thing.
A novelist doesn't have to worry about that, I can just write what the
costumes are, I don't have to worry about that.
The show runner has to put together a team of people who can do it.
In the case of Game of Thrones with extraordinary passion and skill to
produce something that is really memorable and oustanding.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss did that, they put together one of the greatest
production teams and casts and crews in the entire history of television, I think.
EVE: There are so many of those things that you
just mentioned that I could shout out but the costuming in particular,
I'm thinking of Daenerys obviously in the kind of progression of costuming
of the course of their personal development as a character.
GEORGE: Everything plays a role, all it takes is
one person to screw up and you know you're watching the first episode of some
new fantasy show and it seems to be promising and the dialogue is good,
and maybe the special effects are good, and then you spot a zipper,
and suddenly your suspension of disbelief is out the window.
And you say "What the hell?" ya know?
They've lost you.
You have to get everything right.
Being a show runner of a major television show is really a difficult achievement.
EVE: You've mentioned in other interviews that
and early TV influence for your was of course Star Trek and in that time
Gene Roddenberry's universe was more diverse than some of the universes we see
on contemporary television.
I know you're also producing an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor's "Who Fears Death?"
which is exciting for many many reasons but one of them I think is that people
seem to have an increasing hunger for sci-fi and fantasy and speculative fiction
that reflects the diversity of our world.
Is that something that's important to you or something you're thinking about?
GEORGE: I think we have to move in that direction.
I also think science fiction has always done better the society in general,
not that its perfect by any means.
The science fiction I like best is, there's a lot of kinds of science fiction,
and fantasy.
Besides epic fantasy there is urban fantasy, there's dark fantasy, there's
fairy tales, there's cyber punk in science fiction, there's space opera.
There are many many kinds of things.
The sort of science fiction that I grew up on, that I love most of all,
was the stuff that was set out among the stars.
Where we go to alien planets 100 years in the future, 500 years in the future,
and meet aliens, strange life forms, distant suns, it just appealed to me.
Maybe it was cause of that travel thing, I liked the exotic flavors and to see
sights never seen before, to go places no one had ever gone before.
What I didn't realize though when I was reading, and I realized it as an adult
many decades later, is that the we that was going out in those star ships in the
science fiction that I read in the 50's and 60's, they weren't Americans.
They weren't Chinese or Brazilian or French.
They were earth men, or earthlings, or Terrans.
Those were the terms that were made.
If we were gonna meet the Octopus people of the third planet of Vega it would be
Terrans meeting them and we would be part of the solar alliance or the united
planets or something like that.
Some of the authors of the time made a deliberate effort at diversity, maybe they
didn't entirely succeed but you look at someone like Paul Anderson and he would
have Scotsman and Irishmen but also Polynesians and Brazilians.
Elspreg D'camp wrote a whole series in which Brazil was the dominate power of
23rd century Earth.
So that message was always there, it was there in the pulp magazines and the early
science fiction.
Gene Roddenberry brought it to television.
The original Star Trek had some good episodes, and it had some really bad
episodes but it was very exciting to see it at the time.
Roddenberry was immensely courageous if nothing else, maybe he wasn't the greatest
writer to come down the pike or the greatest show runner but you look back
at the show that came out in 1767, he put a black woman on the bridge
as communications engineer, he put an Asian as helms man.
He put a Russian, at the height of the cold war, on the bridge.
He was selling the idea that his federation, Earth has put aside all of its
differences and we'd all come together as a single people.
Maybe, most shocking of all was Spock.
You think of Spock as a Vulcan, he wasn't a Vulcan, he was a half-breed,
he was half Vulcan and he was half human.
He had green blood and two hearts, a Vulcan father and a human mother,
if you're a hard science fiction writer this makes no fucking sense, we're not
going to actually be able to interbreed with the Octopus people of Vega,
it doesn't work that way, any more than we can impregnate wombats here on earth.
[laughter]
None the less, whats striking about Spock when this came out in 1967 is the fact
that at the time he was doing this miscegenation was still against the law
in half the states of the United States.
This was before Loving vs. Virginia which was the famous case recently dramatized
in a movie, that established that a white man could actually marry a black woman.
That was against the law, interracial marriage, having children with people of
another race, and he's having half breed Vulcans.
It was enormously progressive at the time.
I didn't really noticed it because I had been reading about that stuff for
a long time but looking back on it now and realizing books that sell 3,000 copies
are one thing but a television show that reaches 20 30 million people
really influences us.
They really reflect us.
Now, in science fiction and fantasy we are seeing a great up swell of diverse voices.
By many different sorts of people, different skin colors, different religions,
different sexual orientations, they're producing their own takes on this.
As with any other groups some of them are good some of them are not so good,
but I think it's a healthy sign for the genre.
I do hope that there's still room for some old white guys like me.
EVE: You can stay there is room at the table.
GEORGE: Good.
EVE: There's only two seats here so we'll
see how it goes.
[laughter]
EVE: I'm going to ask you one or two more
questions and then I'll go to these fan questions.
GEORGE: Great.
EVE: I think my final question will be this,
you are a very frequently and many times interviewed person,
you've been interviewed a lot.
What is the interview question that wish people would ask, and what is
the one that you do not like, or that you loath the most with
apologies to those who have previously asked this question including me if
I'm one of the people, it's not personal it's just that I'm asking.
So a question you wish people would ask, and a question you hate the most.
GEORGE: Obviously these days the question I hate
the most is when will 'Winds of Winter' be out.
[laughter]
Because I have no good answer for that.
When the day comes that 'Winds of Winter' is done and I can say, and I can when
asked that question, October.
That will a happier time for me.
It's no fun to be asked repeatedly the same question over and over again,
and you don't have a good answer for it.
There are a lot of questions, I won't say I hate them but I've been asked them so
often that it gets a little tiresome.
It also shows that however much the person may be a huge fan of mine they've
never actually gone online and looked at any of the 137 other interviews of me
that you can find on youtube.
Which is your favorite character, which character do you like to write the most,
which character do you like to write the least?
Ya know I've been answering that question since 1996.
There are a number of questions that fall in that category.
As to a question that I want to be asked, that's harder,
I don't think I have one question.
I do like the fact that in your questions you've discussed some things other than
Game of Thrones, I love Game of Thrones, I love 'Song of Ice and Fire' but I do
have a long history of writing other things and I'm very happy and proud
of those things too.
It's fun to discuss things that I haven't been asked about before.
To talk about Fever Dream or Armageddon Rag or the Wild Card series,
or Dying of the Light, or any of my short stories that I've written
over the years.
EVE: Good, I'm glad that if you hated one of
my questions you're keeping it to yourself for the time being.
[laughter]
It's very polite of you.
OK so I'm gonna ask you some fan questions, for which I can only moderately vouch
for the quality, after having had asked you that last question.
GEORGE: Should I be afraid?
EVE: No I think these are all fine,
I'm going to take my glasses off.
OK so, Brendan B. Fish, I presume not his real name on Twitter asks,
"Speaking personally, do you believe that Robert, Ned, and Jon Aron were justified
in their rebellion against the Mad King, if it were you would you have stayed loyal
to the Targaryens?"
People in the audience are freaked out by this question for some reason.
[laughter]
GEORGE: I don't think I would have stayed loyal to
the mad king.
Do I think I would justify it?
Ya, yes and no.
I don't like to provide easy answers to that, I like to make the reader wrestle
with the question and think about it.
Because some of these questions never are easy when we encounter them in real life.
It's been interesting coming back here to Chicago,
because I spent ten years in Chicago and the Chicago area,
I was at North Western from 1966 to 1971, up in Evanston.
Then I was in Chicago from 71 to 76.
If you look at that era, particularly the early part of that era, the 60's.
It was sometimes known in the history books, for you young people who have read
about it in history as the turbulent 60's.
There was an altercation going down in Vietnam that some of us didn't like,
there were a lot of protests and demonstrations, people in the streets
by the tens of thousands by the hundreds of thousands in some cases.
I look back on that era now and ya know, I ask myself that question,
were the protests justified, did we do the right thing, did we do the wrong thing,
should we have gone further?
I was very much a clean for Gene guy, I still believed in the American system
and elections and let's elect Gene McCarthy
and put an end to the Vietnam war,
and there were more radical people who wanted to destroy the state
and tear it all down and rebuild it.
When I look at all the things that happened, I don't know,
it was a confused time and its still a confusing time when you
look back at history.
Maybe 100 years from now when everybody who participated are dead,
we'll be able to sort it out and find the answers.
Is violence ever justified to oppose evil in the world, if so,
to what extent is violence justified?
These are the questions that Ned and Robert had to deal with.
There was no doubt that the mad king was mad.
He was paranoid and violent and he was abusing his power.
Westeros has no magna carta or anything like that.
There was no way to handle this within the rule of law.
Was what they did justified?
Especially when you consider that it was triggered by a personal grievance.
The execution of Ned's father and brother, was really a thing that radicalized,
as we would have said in the 60's, Ned and put him in opposition to it.
Robert was just broiling for a fight, and didn't like the fact that he lost
his girlfriend.
The personal informs the political.
As a reader I like the writers who ask questions and get you to think.
I try to do that as a writer.
I don't necessarily like the writers who give answers.
Often I don't agree with the answers they seem wrong to me in some cases,
or they seem overly simplistic.
Questioning is important.
Theodore Sturgeon, who was one of the great great science fiction writers
of the golden age, a real individualist, and free thinker, I think.
He had a slogan which was called "Ask the next question",
and he wore it, he had a medallion that he wore with a big Q with
an arrow through it that stood for "Ask the next question.",
I always admired Sturgeon and his views on that.
EVE: Your answer about not giving answers
was a very good answer.
[laughter]
GEORGE: Thank you!
EVE: Leah Rachel Von Essen writes to the
humanities festival,
"I'm inspired by Sansa's character," She wrote books only, in parenthesis.
"I'm inspired by Sansa's character and the way she her soft skills
aren't denigrated even as Arya is the more classic strength warrior,
do you think they parallel each other and how does their relationship
mirror the dynamics of real life sibling relationships?"
GEORGE: Well I hope that they are both realistic
characters in some sense.
I've known people who are like both of them
and in some sense I'm like both of them.
We're talking about two of my women characters, girls in that case.
I've been asked about writing the girls, and women in my books.
I have the advantage in 'A Song of Ice and Fire',
is that I have a lot of women.
Therefore, I can do a lot of different women characters.
In an interview that I did in Canada a number of years ago,
the host asked me how do I write women characters and I said well,
I had this revolutionary idea, I act as if women were people.
[laughter]
[applause]
That's my feeling.
If you have a book and you only have one woman character,
sometimes there is not room for any more because you're writing a short story.
Or a novel that only has three or four main characters.
People sometimes take it as oh that's his opinion of women or something,
because this character has these flaws.
But you have an advantage when you have twenty women characters
that you can show the variety of people, some of them are noble, some of them
are selfish, some of them are smart, some of them are stupid,
I think that's true of all groups, men, women, straight people, gay people,
whatever color.
They come in all varieties and even the individuals have good and evil
within them.
I think that's realistic, and I think we're all grey.
We all have good and bad in us, we've all done good things
and we've all done bad things.
Real history is full of stories about people who did something wonderful on
Tuesday and something horrible on Thursday, same person.
There is a wonderful writer who passed away a few years ago,
not a science fiction writer but, Pat Conroy,
have any of you ever read Pat Conroy?
[applause]
Terrific writer, one of the great writers I think of the 20th century.
A lot of his books were made into movies, "The Great Santini", "The Water is Wide"
which was made into the movie "Conrack", based on his own experiences teaching
the words of discipline.
Probably the best known books of his is "The Prince of Tides",
I remember that book, that book has a character in it who is an absolutely
abusive father, he terrorized his children he abuses them both verbally
and physically.
He's horrible to his wife, he's really a despicable, horrible person.
But there are flashbacks within that to World War II,
about an American aviator flying a mission over Nazi Germany who was shot down
he parachutes out to safety but now he's in the middle of Nazi Germany
and he has to get all the way back to the lines.
He makes his way through the German lines, hiding in haystacks, and
occasionally meeting Germans who try to turn him in, and then other Germans who
are kind to him and hide him.
It's an interesting secondary story line.
It's the same character, and you realize as you read this,
you're reading this story about this brave American aviator trying make his way
through the Nazi's and to get back to the lines and you're really rooting for him
and you're identifying with him and you think he's great,
and then you get to the present day and he's this horrible wretched person,
based on Conrad's own father, who was mistreating his family.
I loved that, I loved that depth of character there.
It was amazing, the fact that Conrad did it so greatly.
That's some of my views on characters.
Arya and Sansa, indeed many of my characters, are complicated people.
I try to show all of the complexities.
I don't want it to be just one note.
Arya is certainly more popular than Sansa.
Sansa has her people who love her too, of course we'll have to see when I
write the book, the end that I have in mind for both of them.
EVE: Wow, yes, it takes me back to the point
that you made earlier about length, and one benefit is we can actually see
that character transformation, even over the course of a single novel,
we can see this character begin in one condition and end somewhere else.
Another question, this is from Lucifer means light bringer,
which I also assume is not this persons government name.
[laughter]
"You've created several notable in world, mythical figures which seem to serve
as archetypes that other main characters echo at times,
can you say a few words about your use of myth and internal folk lore and
the way those things interact with the main story and characters?"
GEORGE: Ya I've had a lot of fun, it's part of the
world building process.
Every world, every culture has its myths, has its legends, has its heroes.
I suspect everybody in this room, even if you haven't read the books,
knows who Robin Hood was or a little about him, or King Arthur.
Or maybe some of the American myths, Paul Bunion.
EVE: Or Spider-Man or Super Man.
GEORGE: Right, right.
We refer to them occasionally, we make references to them.
It's sometimes amazing to think of the extent to which some of these
ancient myths and ancient characters permeate our culture.
We watch football as somebody blows out his Achilles tendon,
we're referring to a character from Homer.
If he existed at all he existed 3,000 years ago.
Ya know, and his only vulnerability was his heel.
And because of that we're talking about an injury to a football player.
It's amazing.
So, a mythical world, obviously I can't reference Achilles,
or Paul Bunion or Spider-Man, but has to have its own heroes,
and its own legends.
I try to put them in to give that flavor.
I had a lot of, I don't know how many of you have read my latest Westeros book,
'Fire and Blood'.
[applause]
'Fire and Blood' was a little different because it's not part of 'A Song of Ice and Fire'
It's a fake history book, imaginary history.
About the first 150 years of the Targaryen dynasty.
It's written in world, it's written by archmaester Gyldyan at the citadel,
three hundred years after many of the events which he is chronicaling.
So like a real historian, like someone writing now about the American revolution,
well he wasn't there for the American revolution he has to go back and look
at primary sources.
So did archmaester Gyldayn, and what you find out when you do that
is that primary sources disagree.
They have different versions of events, one person said it happened this way
another person says no that never happened it happened this way.
Archmaester Gyldayn trying to be a good historian is replicating all
of the different versions.
That was a lot of fun for me because I could play with
the whole concept of history.
History being told by the winners, history being cleaned up and
made politically correct, or religiously correct,
and I could present different versions of the various stories.
I enjoyed that and I think some of my readers enjoyed that too.
Particularly the version of history told by Mushroom the court fool.
Who always told everything in the most sexual lascivious and shocking
way possible.
Usually with himself as the hero.
EVE: And you have a history degree,
so that's helpful.
GEORGE: Well not a history degree,
but a history minor.
I love history, I read a lot of it.
I'm not a historian by any means, I'm just a history nerd.
EVE: So I'm going to give our final question
to someone named Adam Prestigicomo, who wants to know,
oh what up you're here, did I say your last name kind of right?
Oh great, nailed it.
Our good friend Adam wants to know, "what is something that makes you happy?"
[applause]
[laughter]
GEORGE: There are a lot of things
that make me happy.
I love books, reading a good book makes me happy.
I've been reading since I was a small kid I still read veraciously.
I read a chapter or two from a book almost every night.
Every once and a while I pick up a book where I read that chapter or two
and then I have to read another chapter and another chapter and another chapter.
I wind up staying up all night, I love it when that happens.
I love good movies, I love good television.
The kinds that get their hooks into me and I have to binge all on Netflix.
I actually kind of hate the concept of binging but I find myself doing it anyway.
[laughter]
As my waste line will testify I love good food.
Especially Greek food in Chicago, Opa Opa!
Great barbecue when I'm in Texas.
In New Mexico where I live, I moved to New Mexico in 1979 and I can
never leave because I became addicted to green chille.
Which you can really on get in New Mexico.
Someone there knows the truth of what I speak.
You'll probably all boo me for this but of course pizza in New York.
EVE: It is what it is.
GEORGE: So I love all that.
And I love writing my own stories, particularly I love finishing them.
[laughter]
I actually don't love, I mean people say do I enjoy writing,
EVE: No one likes writing.
GEORGE: Writing is hard.
EVE: Writing sucks.
[laughter]
GEORGE: I'm constantly questioning myself every
sentence I put down I wonder whether its good enough.
I reread what I wrote yesterday and I hate it.
But when I actually finish a book, the rush that comes through me,
it was easier to write short stories cause then I would get that rush
every few weeks but now I get that rush every eight years or something like that.
[laughter]
It's a great rush, and I'm hoping to have it again in the relatively near future.
When I finish 'Winds of Winter', I do know that the day after
'Winds of Winter' comes out I'll get the first text saying,
when is 'Dream of Spring' coming out?
[laughter]
So, ya know, these pleasures are temporary.
There's a lot of things I love, I love the people in my life.
I've been very fortunate.
I have my wonderful wife Paris who unfortunately couldn't be with me
on this trip.
I have an amazing staff of minions who serve me.
One of them, Sid is here with me tonight.
Four or five others are at home, they try to keep my working,
and try to keep the distractions at bay.
I love my publishers David Munch, who didn't want me to come here.
[laughter]
And my editor Anne Groll, and my wonderful publishers.
There's a lot of things that make me happy, thank you.
[applause]
EVE: Well, George R. R. Martin,
it has made me very happy to have the chance to speak with you
and I think I speak for a lot of people in the audience who share that sentiment.
Please give one more round of applause to George R. R. Martin.
[applause]