In a century past, an obscure fantasy novel emerged from the ever-churning seas of book publishing where an infinity of stories drown unread.
By Helen Sloan
Game of Thrones : Sean Bean stars in HBO’s popular series based on Martin’s books.
By Helen Sloan
Game of Thrones : Sean Bean stars in HBO’s popular series based on Martin’s books.
But championed by an army of obsessed fans, primarily young and male, this 1996 tale of dynastic warfare on a medieval-like continent named Westeros has evolved from cult favorite to best-selling series to this year’s hit HBO show Game of Thrones.
Behold George R.R. Martin and his Song of Ice and Fire cycle. Today, more than 650,000 hardcover copies of A Dance With Dragons (Bantam, $35), the fifth book in the series, go on sale in the USA, with translators in 40-some languages standing by.
Based on the first book, AGame of Thrones, the HBO show (which dropped the “A” in the title and wrapped its first season last month) is a sexy, savage saga centered on three powerful families: the Starks of Winterfell, the Lannisters and the Targaryens. Throw in a Genghis Khan-like superstud, dragons, incest and deadly intrigue, and you have the recipe for a summer cable sensation.
But the HBO series offered a mere sampling compared with the addictive and intricate books. Imagine what would emerge if J.R.R. Tolkien (TheLord of the Rings) were locked in a room with the writing staff of The Sopranos, Niccolo Machiavelli, horror-meister H.P. Lovecraft and a gaggle of experts in Mongolian and medieval British history.
In Martin’s new book, former teenage bride/princess Daenerys Targaryen rules in the East, aided by her trio of dragons; the big-hearted dwarf Tyrion Lannister goes questing; and Winterfell’s Jon Snow gets lots of airtime.
Things have certainly changed for Martin, 62, since his book tour for A Game of Thrones in 1996. At a Dallas bookstore, he was thrilled to see hundreds of people until he realized they were parents and kids. “Clifford the Big Red Dog crushed me,” he recalls. “There were like 12 people to see me. It was humbling.”
George R.R. Martin by the numbers
8.5 million: Number of copies in the USA of his Song of Ice and Fire books
4 million: Number of books printed since January, when HBO started promoting its Game of Thrones series
5: Number of books in the series so far
15: Current ranking of Book 1, A Game of Thrones on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list
2: Highest all-time ranking on the list (Nov. 17, 2005, debut for A Feast for Crows, Book 4)
96: Weeks books in the series have spent on the list
4,197: Total number of pages in the series so far
On a recent visit to Slovenia, 2,000 fans stood in line to meet Martin, who now gets recognized in airports. “It’s flattering if a little disconcerting,” he says.
The Santa Fe author writes about war, ambition, money and magic, as well as the hunger for love and power.
Most of all, Martin says, he writes about what William Faulkner famously said was the only thing worth writing about: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of the series is the pull it exerts over young men, a group associated with Playstations, not the Plantagenets. (The series draws on elements of England’s 15th-century War of the Roses.)
Ladies! Put down that Web flamethrower; older fans, step away from the vitriol button on your laptop. Few things enrage Martin’s fans more than the stereotype that the only people who love fantasy fiction are nerd boys.
In fact, the Song cycle is traditionally described as a fantasy series for people who hate fantasy. “It’s got great characters, great storytelling — the fact that it’s fantasy is almost beside the point,” says Martin’s publisher, Scott Shannon.
A broad appeal
Martin disputes the notion that he’s somehow a niche writer for the Halo set.
He points out that at signings he’s had fans as young as 11 (“that’s too young to be reading the books,” which include sex and graphic violence) and readers in their 80s. “They tell me to write faster because (they say), ‘I’m very old,’” he says. (He intends to write two more books in the series.)
Martin prefers being compared to Larry McMurtry, whose 1985 Western novel Lonesome Dove drew millions of readers, the majority of whom never before or after read a word about cowboys and cattle drives.
Nonetheless, while many authors have admirers who might come out for a bookstore reading, Martin has a committed fan base to rival J.K. Rowling’s.
One such group is “Brotherhood without Banners,” an informal community with tens of thousands of members worldwide.
“It is similar to being a Trekkie in that it is not so much asking someone to be included, but deciding you are one,” explains founder David McCaman.
Now 38, McCaman discovered AGame of Thrones 15 years ago when his wife urged him to buy it in a Menlo Park, Calif., bookstore. “If she hadn’t done that, my life would be much different, for the worse,” he says.
What is the series’ appeal? According to McCaman: “Turns fantasy upside down on its head. Epic in scope and personal in narrative…It’s gritty, it is harsh, it is a play-for-keeps epic … where it is the people that drive the emotional connection, not the magic things and creatures.”
In the outside world, McCaman is the vice president of marketing for Hands-On Entertainment, a social and mobile gaming company in San Francisco. A collector of Martin memorabilia, McCaman has a direwolf tattooed on his shoulder (it’s a symbol of the Stark clan).
Through “Brotherhood without Banners,” McCaman has become friends with Martin, with whom he often chats about NFL football and Martin’s wife, Parris. “No one treats his fans better and no one wants to please their fans more,” he says.
Globe-spanning fandom
Across the ocean in Sweden, another Martin fan, Elio Garcia, Jr., 33, runs Westeros.org with his girlfriend of almost 13 years Linda Antonsson, 36. Garcia, an American Ph.D. candidate in English Literature, and Antonsson, 36, a translator, both read Game of Thrones in 1997. They are collaborating with Martin on an upcoming guidebook called The World of Ice and Fire.
“There’s a number of things that sets George apart from many of his contemporaries,” Garcia writes in an e-mail. “Despite the merciless way he has with his characters, at heart he is a capital-R Romantic, in the old sense, and it shows in the way he can build atmosphere and delve into the psyches of his characters.”
The couple launched their website in 1997 as a “labor of love.” Today they estimate 50% of their traffic is from outside the U.S. Overall, it is about 70 % male, but Antonsson notes there is “a female readership who enjoy the series intensely.”
Last month, westeros.org got more than 13 million page views and 600,000 unique visitors, a fivefold increase in traffic, thanks to the HBO series.
Books differ from TV series
Game of Thrones is HBO’s third-highest-rated show after True Blood and BoardwalkEmpire, says Sue Naegle, president of HBO Entertainment. With a cumulative viewership of 8.9 million per episode, “it’s been a huge success,” she says. (The first season ran April 17- June 19.)
The season ended with a shocker: the permanent departure of hero Ned Stark (Sean Bean). Naegle is mum on which male actor will star in Season 2 next year. (Natalie Dormer from The Tudors has joined the cast.)
Martin’s series, Naegle says, was a natural for HBO: “Dynastic families at war, the thirst for power, greed, the human condition — these are very relatable themes.”
While the series has received critical praise, HBO took certain liberties with the book, adding so many buxom, naked prostitutes that TV’s Westeros makes Vegas look like a convent.
Naegle says of HBO’s version: “It’s fun and a little saucy, and that’s part of the world of paid cable.”
Co-executive producer Martin isn’t complaining. “Well, there were a lot of brothels in the Middle Ages,” says Martin, who has contributed two scripts.
In order to create his epic series, Martin first had to leave Hollywood. He grew up in a working-class family in Bayonne, N.J. (His father was a longshoreman.)
A professional writer from age 21 when he published his first short story, Martin from the mid-1980s through the mid-’90s worked in L.A. as a TV writer and producer on The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. He also wrote a lot of scripts “no one got to see.” Yes, he says, “they give you dump trucks of money, but I wanted the audience. I wanted to take the curtain call. I wanted people to tell me they love my books.”
Ambiguous like our world
Although Time has dubbed Martin the “American Tolkein,” Martin’s approach to the world is very different from the Rings creator’s. Unlike the traditional fantasy narrative of a brave young hero who triumphs over evil, Martin’s Westeros teems with moral ambiguity.
Noble characters doom the ones they love best, the innocent often suffer horribly and evildoers flourish.
“I’ve always been attracted by gray characters,” says Martin. “I don’t see Orcs and I don’t see angels. The hero is the villain on the other side.”
But for groups like “Brotherhood without Banners,” Martin’s triumph has no dark side.
“All the fans from the early days always knew deep down this day would come,” says McCaman. “We hoped for it, like any group, partially afraid of having this amazing tale discovered by the ‘outside world,’ and we are all proud and thrilled that George has received the success he deserves.”
As Martin’s fans might say: Long live the king.
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