-
[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]