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, but it grew even larger in the telling.
Q: How many books will the series be in all?
Martin: Seven is what I am looking at right now. I’m halfway through the fifth and hope to be able to complete that within the year, and hopefully on to the sixth and the seventh. But I am not writing that in blood. The goal is to tell the entire story as I visualize it, and that is more important than how many volumes it’s divided up into. I do definitely see it as a finite series that has an end. I think a work of art needs an end, as well as a beginning and a middle. You do have to wrap it up. You can’t drag it out forever. I think seven volumes will do it.
Q: At this point you must have a pretty clear idea of the overall structure.
Martin: Yes.
Q: How is the creation of an imaginary-world fantasy setting different from creating a planet in science fiction?
For example, in Windhaven you and Lisa Tuttle created a world, but it was a planet, not a fantasy setting. Is it a different kind of creation?
Martin: It’s not terribly different in the way I do it. I was never a hard-science guy, despite the association with Analog. I know how people like Gordy Dickson and Hal Clement in his day would go about creating worlds by figuring out what type of star it was and how far the planet was from the sun and what its axial tilt was, its rate of rotation, its chemical composition. Then they would work things out from that. But I don’t have that kind of background. Mine always came more from the effect. In the case of Windhaven we wanted flying human beings. We said, “How can we get people to fly and make it plausible to fly about on hang-gliders?” Well, a planet should have lighter gravity; that would help, and a lot of wind, etc. So we worked backwards. We didn’t design the planet to see what it would be like. We looked at the effects we wanted and tried to retrofit a planet to that.
In the case of fantasy, of course, it’s a little different. The most conspicuous aspect of the world of Westeros in The Song of Ice and Fire is the long and random nature of the seasons. I have gotten a number of fan letters over the years from readers who are trying to figure out the reason for why the seasons are the way they are. They develop lengthy theories: perhaps it’s a multiple-star system, and what the axial tilt is, but I have to say, “Nice try, guys, but you’re thinking in the wrong direction.” This is a fantasy series. I am going to explain it all eventually, but it’s going to be a fantasy explanation. It’s not going to be a science-fiction explanation.
Q: In a fantasy you have to have a supernatural or mythic core to the story, rather than a scientific one.
Martin: Right. Yes. Exactly.
Q: Did you start Fevre Dream with just the image of a vampire on a steamboat?
Martin: Actually, I started Fevre Dream with the image of the steamboat. I was living in Dubuque Iowa for a number of years in the late ’70s, teaching there. Dubuque is an old river town on the Mississippi. It’s got a very strong sense of its own history, which included a period as a steamboat town. They manufactured some steamboats there. It was an important port on the upper Mississippi. I started reading about the history of that time and became fascinated with the steamboats and the river culture to the extent that I decided I wanted to write a novel about that. It seemed like a colorful sort of alien world.
Interestingly enough, John Brunner over in England was getting interested in steamboats at just the same time. But we went at it very different ways. Brunner decided to do a straight historical and he produced that, a novel called The Great Steamboat Race, which was, I think, quite a good novel, one of the better novels that Brunner wrote in the last period of his career. In my case, since I was a science fiction and fantasy writer, although I had the steamboat era, I never really considered doing just a straight historical. It had to have a fantastic element in there, and somehow vampires, which I had always been interested in independently, seemed to go with steamboats. The whole Dracula thing. There was a dark romanticism both to vampires and to steamboats. The two of them had to go together. Of course the fit wasn’t precise, because there were certain elements of the vampire legend that are inimicable to the steamboat culture. The can’t-cross-running-water thing was a big problem. So I decided very early on that I would do an almost science-fiction version of these vampires. I would try to justify them scientifically as best I could and figure out how vampires could actually live and work. I developed them not as your traditional mythic vampires, but more as a secondary race preying on us and living among us since the dawn of history. But the steamboats were the actual beginning of that book.
Q: I assume you could go back to writing more horror any time. You have at least one horror collection, The Songs the Dead Men Sing. Have you felt the inclination to go back and do more.
Martin: I never think in terms of genres like that. I never say, “I’ve got to do more horror.” It’s more, “Okay I have this story idea. I am enthused about this.” Then I consider whether it’s horror or science fiction, however it falls. If I have an idea that gets my juices flowing, I would love to do it. I do have ideas for various sequels to things that I have done in the past, including a sequel to Fevre Dream. But I’ve had that for years, and whether I will ever get around to writing it, I don’t know. There are unfortunately a lot of ideas and things I would love to write, but only so many hours in the day and so many days in the year.
Q: It seems that what’s hot right now is what might be described as vampire lifetstyle novels, a series of vampire lifestyle novels. I don’t know if your sequel could fit in, a floating vampire lifestyle novel....
Martin: Vampires, unfortunately have been done.... At the time I did Fevre Dream in 1982, Anne Rice had done the first of her books. There were a few other vampire books out there, but there was not nearly the glut that there has been today. I am tempted to return to the world of Fevre Dream, but I have reservations about it too simply because I think that vampires are on the verge of being done to death, so to speak. It’s hard to think of anything original to do. Maybe I should return to “The Skin Trade,” my werewolves. They haven’t been done quite as much.
Q: How about Lovecraft’s themes, horror stories of the larger cosmos? Have you ever given that any thought?
Martin: I loved Lovecraft when I was younger. He was one of my favorite writers when I was high school. I read everything I could get by him. I’ve occasionally played with Lovecraftian things. There is a character in my Wild Cards novel who is haunted by Lovecraftian sorts of dreams at a certain point. I wrote up several of those, when the character was dreaming, in my best Lovecraft imitation. I am not sure how well I did. I certainly tried to do my best to capture it.
I don’t think I could do a pure Lovecraftian story, because there is a certain passivity about
