Game of Thrones fans get good news from creator George R.R. Martin on new instalment

Game of Thrones Creator George R.R. Martin has broken his silence, from a remote mountain hideaway, about the fate of the series.

Jon Snow. Picture: HBO

George R.R. Martin is in hiding. He’s talking to me from a remote mountain hideaway whose location he refuses to disclose. It’s a cabin he visits when he wants to hunker down to finish a book — and he’s hard at work on “The Winds of Winter,” the long-awaited sixth instalment in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the fantasy series that spawned HBO’s hugely popular “Game of Thrones.”

He has a different book coming out this month — not yet that highly anticipated sixth volume, to many fans’ dismay. Instead, he’s going back in time in his fantasy world with a prequel called “Fire & Blood,” occurring 300 years before the events seen in “Game of Thrones.” Written in the style of a history book rather than a novel, “Fire & Blood” chronicles the rise of the Targaryens, a royal family in Mr Martin’s fantasy landscape, called Westeros.

Since publishing the first novel in his series in 1996, Mr Martin has become a best-selling author and cultural fixture, known for his trademark fisherman hats, rabid fan clubs and the wildly popular HBO show, which debuted in 2011. Mr Martin is an executive producer on the show and has written some episodes.

The world that he created has become so well known that Mr Martin says he often comes across children who know more about Westeros than real history. “It astonishes me that today there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of kids all over the world who know more about the Starks and the Lannisters” — rival royal families in his series — “than they know about the Yorks and Lancasters,” he says, referring to the rival clans in England’s 15th-century Wars of the Roses.

George R.R. Martin. Picture: Getty

Growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman and a homemaker, Mr Martin, now 70, spent much of his childhood conjuring up fictional realms. Watching the ships come and go in the harbour near where he lived, he imagined they were arriving from exotic foreign lands. As a teenager, he immersed himself in comic books.

He went on to earn a degree in journalism from Northwestern and then taught English and journalism at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Iowa. On the side, he wrote science fiction, horror stories and Hollywood screenplays. In the late 1970s, he decided to focus on writing full-time, encouraged by the publication of a novel and two short story collections, and in the 1980s, he penned scripts for TV shows including “The Twilight Zone.”

In 1991, the world of Westeros came to him. He was working on another science-fiction novel when he suddenly imagined an early scene of “A Game of Thrones,” in which the Stark family comes across a couple of direwolf pups who later turn out to have a special connection with the Stark children. He never finished that other novel. Five years later, “A Game of Thrones” debuted.

Since then, the world of “A Song of Ice and Fire” has expanded to such proportions that Mr Martin now surrounds himself with detailed maps of the lands and dynasties when he writes. Still, he says, “The master depository is my fevered brains.”

Mr Martin says that actual historical events inspired his books. “A Song of Ice and Fire” draws on the Wars of the Roses, a conflict in the reigns of England’s Plantagenet kings that informs his “Fire & Blood” prequel. He thinks that history books, like his novels, should focus more on the textured personalities of powerful, dramatic characters.

“The way history is taught today,” he says, is “more socioeconomic trends and things like that, which … I don’t know if it’s more valid or less valid, but it’s certainly more boring.” He reads history for “the wars and the betrayals, who stabbed who in the back, who was having an affair with whom, and to me that’s the juicy stuff of history. That’s what makes history fun.” Mr Martin sees the sex and violence in his own books as a toned-down version of real events.

Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.

He tries to give his heroes and his villains both virtues and vices, believing that most people are motivated by the same things: love and glory. “They’ve motivated everybody from Alexander the Great to Napoleon to all the great figures in history, but also the ordinary guy,” he says.

Long a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series, Mr Martin says that his characters differ in at least one major respect. “I don’t think there are any real dark lords out there, as Tolkien and his imitators have filled fantasy with,” he says. “Evil is real, evil exists in our universe, but it’s ordinary people who do evil.” Besides that, “as much as I love Tolkien, I love going places that Tolkien would never go,” he says. “There’s obviously no porn or erotica in Middle Earth.”

Events in the HBO show have moved beyond the timeline in Mr Martin’s books, but he says the television version hasn’t changed his own plans for the final sixth and seventh books. “I’m still going to finish it the way I always wanted to finish it, the way it’s been in my head for 25 years now,” he says, declining to provide any details.

Mr Martin says that he writes seven days a week, except during fall football season, when he takes Sundays off to watch Giants and Jets games on TV. He and his wife Parris live in Santa Fe, where he resurfaced from his mountain hideaway before this article’s photo shoot. He also spends time reading science fiction, mystery novels and thrillers; lately he’s been paging through Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” novels.

He won’t go so far as to relate the events in his books to today’s politics, but he hopes that Westeros offers us lessons, including the ways that power can corrupt. “Maybe some kid who is reading it now … will be a president or senator, and the lessons of Westeros will have been incorporated into his worldview and affect some decision he makes 20 or 30 years from now.” Then he pauses to think. “It depends on who he models himself on, Jon Snow or a new Joffrey,” citing a noble hero and a sadistic boy king. “We don’t need anyone modelling themselves after Joffrey.”

WSJ