Fantasy Award. And so on. If there really is somebody here you have not heard of, I hope it doesn’t seem too haughty of me to say that’s why God made Wikipedia. That is another sign of the modern age, right along with the fact that many of these interviews were first published on the Internet and have never actually been in physical print before. A book like this doesn’t need quite as much introductory apparatus as it used to.
So let’s get on with it. I always think of these collections as a compilation from my talk show. Here are some of my best recent episodes.
Darrell Schweitzer
January 19, 2011
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
Q: You’ve made quite a transition from being an Analog writer to the writer of a multi-volume epic fantasy? Is this something you planned or even expected? I am sure there are some guys in the hard-science camp who are grumbling that George Martin is this traitor to the cause.... Have you given this much thought?
Martin: I’ve had an occasional review which says that I’ve changed from one thing to another, but it’s really a misperception. Oddly enough, I’ve been through it before, because when I wrote Fevre Dream in 1982 I got a lot of stuff about how I’d changed from being a science fiction writer to a horror writer at that time. Now it’s a high fantasy writer.
The truth is that if you go back and look at my career, you’ll see that I have written in all these genres and sub-genres since the very beginning. My first story was a science fiction story in Galaxy, my first professional sale. But my second professional sale was a ghost story in Fantastic. I published a couple epic fantasy short stories in Fantastic during the 1970s as well, back when Ted White was the editor, as well as the stories in Analog. The stories in Analog got more attention, but the other stuff was there from the beginning.
I read all this stuff growing up and I read it pretty much interchangeably. I never made these distinctions between genre. I read H. P. Lovecraft. I read Robert E. Howard and I read Tolkien, and of course I read Robert A. Heinlein and Eric Frank Russell and Andre Norton; so I have always loved all three genres of science fiction and horror and fantasy, and have moved between them pretty freely. I don’t think I’ve gone anywhere. I am in the middle of this very large project right now, which is epic fantasy, but when I am done with it, the next book, whenever that comes, could be science fiction or horror or even something else entirely. A mystery novel. Who knows? I just tell the stories that I want to tell.
Q: Do you find that the writing or the conception different if it’s going to be science fiction, or not? Is the imaginative process any different?
Martin: No, it’s not different at all for me. I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there is an element of the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. I have talked about that in some of my guest of honor speeches. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real differences, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.
Q: There was a Heinlein argument that science fiction is a form of realism. Did he know what he was talking about?
Martin: I don’t think so. [Laughs.] And Heinlein wrote fantasy himself, for that matter, from time to time, not very much of it; but he was perfectly capable of doing something like “Magic Incorporated,” or even Glory Road, which has many of the trappings of a fantasy within a science fiction framework.
Q: This raises a point which others have raised before, that science fiction is a kind of language. You can have a fantasy novel within a science-fiction framework, as oposed to a fantasy novel not within a science-fiction framework. This implies a science-fiction discourse which can handle fantasy material. Wasn’t that the whole point of the Unknown Worlds school, fantasy written as if it were science fiction?
Martin: Yes, and Unknown Worlds was a particular subset of fantasy, driven, I think, by Campbell’s very deep rationalism, his desire to make magic obey the laws that engineering might obey. So you could discover the seven principles of magic and apply them. To my mind the ultimate Unknown Worlds stories were always the Incomplete Enchanter stories—the Harold Shea stories—by Pratt and de Camp. Harold Shea is always going into these worlds, and there is magic at work, but it’s not mysterious. It is strange to him at first, but when he works out the underlying principles, he can easily become a magician, because he is basically an engineer. That was an amusing and, I think, an original take on it all at the time, in the ’30s and ’40s, but it’s certainly not my take. I find myself more in sympathy with the way Tolkien handles magic. I think if you’re going to do magic, it loses its magical qualities if it becomes nothing more than an alternate kind of science. It is more effective if it is something profoundly unknowable and wondrous, and something that can take your breath away.
Q: It’s a matter of control. If you can retro-engineer Sauron’s ring, it isn’t as magical anymore. It’s a matter of the characters getting control of the material, as opposed to being in a situation or universe where this is not really possible.
Martin: Yes. That’s certainly part of it. Understanding is part of it. Of course you can go to the horror slant, too, with Lovecraft and his suggestion that if we understood some of these things, they would drive us mad, because the truths are too profoundly disturbing in what they tell us about the hostile or inimical nature of the universe or the strange and arcane forces that surround us.
Q: Do you find yourself more drawn to the magical approach, even with science fiction?
Martin: Yes. I think that if you look at my science fiction, even my so-called Analog stories, they were never comfortably Analog stories. I do think it’s significant that my association with Analog that was very strong, and most of my early work that really established my career was published in Analog, all came during Ben Bova’s editorship, which I think was Analog’s golden summer. If John W. Campbell had lived another decade, I don’t know that I would ever have sold a story to Analog, or if when Campbell died, Stan Schmidt came in and became his immediate successor. Bova had a much more liberal approach as to what he would accept than either his predecessor or his successor.
Q: Let me guess that you are a writer who draws the story out of emotion and image rather than idea.
Martin: Yes, I think that’s true. And if you believe in all this left-brain/right-brain stuff...but certainly the power of my fiction comes from the emotional side of things and not the rationalist side of things. I prefer, for example, not to outline. I did outline during my Hollywood decade, because it’s required of you there, but on my own stories I have usually a general idea of where the story is going, but I do not break it all down and design it ahead of time. I just sort of fill in the blanks during the writing. The characters come alive and they take me to that destination, if the story is working.
Q: When you started A Game of Thrones, did you know you were going to write a multi-volume epic? I am thinking of Gene Wolfe’s remark that The Book of the New Sun, which ultimately ran five volumes, began as a novella for Orbit. Did you have some broad plan of creating this whole epic, or did it just sort of grow?
Martin: A bit of both. To tell the truth, I read that novella. It was called “The Feast of St. Catherine.” Gene presented it to the Windy City Writers Group when I was a member of it. In my case, when I wrote the first chapter of A Game of Thrones, I didn’t really know what I had. In fact I was writing quite a different book, a science-fiction book, and this chapter just came to me so vividly that I put the science fiction aside and wrote it. At this point I didn’t know if it was a short story or a piece of something bigger, but by the time I’d finished it, which only took two or three days, I was fairly certain that it was a piece of something bigger. It led to a second chapter and a third. I think that by the time I was four or five chapters in, I had some idea that, yes, I was working on a fantasy. I thought it was a trilogy. It was initially sold as a trilogy. Three books, three quite large books, mind you,