Recommended: George Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire

I found this on dusksite.com - Figured I'd post it in case anyone was interested.

Interview posted by Rick on 12/10/02

An Interview with George R. R. Martin

Conducted by Greg Gerrand

Q: In a recent interview the author Matthew Woodring Stover described you as perhaps the only writer who might save the epic fantasy series. Do you think this is a fair description?

A: [Laughs] Well no not entirely, I think there's actually lots of good epic fantasy being done. I think that's a very complimentary description of course, and I'm pleased to accept it on those terms. There are new authors like Tad Williams and Robin Hobb working in fantasy currently who are doing some excellent work, and there are people who've been doing some good work all along. People like Jack Vance, who's one of my favorite writers. What magnificent fantasies he's been doing since the fifties. So there's a lot of hopes for fantasy.

Q: Are there authors out there that you believe to be criminally under-read or ignored?

A: Yes, even some authors that are well known. I mentioned Jack Vance before. He's the greatest living science fiction writer, and fantasist. He's very well known of course, he's a Grand Master of science fiction, but he has never appeared on a best seller list. He doesn't have the kind of readership of Tolkien or Jordan, and he deserves that readership. He's as good as Tolkien in some ways; he's one of the greatest stylists. Another underappreciated writer is Howard Waldrop, my old friend and collaborator. Howard's difficulty is of course that he writes primarily short stories. People these days don't read short stories so much as they like to read big fat novels.

Q: One of the main elements of your fantasy fiction is a subversion of the expected. Is this a conscious effort on your part?

A: Oh, there's a certain amount that's definitely conscious. I like to mess with reader expectations a little. I like books, both as a writer and a reader, to be unpredictable and I think that the problem with a lot of ordinary fantasy that's out there these days is that it has become very predictable. By tweaking those things, inverting them, making people think about them a little more I think it's fun for me and the readers both.

Q: You could say that there's very little of Joseph Campbell in your work.

A: [Laughs] Well, I'm certainly familiar with him, but no. Consciously I've not included a lot of that.

Q: I've noticed that some readers of A Song of Ice and Fire, usually the more conservative readers, have complained that your fantasy is not fantastic enough. In this complaint they more often than not focus on the amount of death in your books. Do you think that some people read fantasy to escape the reality of death?

A: [Pause] Well, that's an interesting question. I don't know - I think people read fantasy, and read books, to get away from their lives. That's sometimes put down as escapism, but no I don't necessarily think that there is anything wrong with that. I think all literature is fundamentally escapist. It takes us to different places; it takes us out of our mundane existence. It takes us to other places and allows us to lead other lives, to experience things we might never experience in our own lives -- going to war, climbing mountains, having passionate love affairs, what have you. Even mimetic fiction does this. It broadens our lives by giving us a vicarious experience. Fantasy adds the element of magic to that, creating a broader canvas than mainstream fiction.

Q: You announced recently that the title of the forth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire has been changed from A Dance With Dragons to A Feast For Crows. Is this because the book has changed from what you originally intended to write?

A: Well yeah, it changed fundamentally. Essentially my plan, as I has announced in many previous interviews, was to have a five year gap between the end of the third book and the beginning of the fourth in which some of the younger characters would grow up somewhat, and I would come back after that five year hiatus and I would pick up the action at that that point. And that was the basis on which I started writing the fourth book, which at that point was called A Dance with Dragons. The structure of these books is extremely complex. I'm working with eight or nine different viewpoint characters, essentially writing a novel about each of them for each of these books and then weaving them together. What I found was that while the five-year gap worked admirably for some of those characters it didn't work at all for others. And I was skipping many events or relating them only in summary or flashback, many events which I feel could be very effectively dramatized, and would work better if dramatized. So, after a fair amount of wrestling with this I decided to scrap the five-year gap. At that point A Dance With Dragons becomes the fifth book and the book that I'm now working on, A Feast For Crows, is essentially the book that covers the five year gap that I previously going to skip over. That's an oversimplification to an extent because it takes a certain amount of restructuring, and some the events that were going to be in the fourth book are pushed to the fifth book, while others remain. Of course this has impacted on what I can actually do in that five-year gap, but more interesting stuff is going to be happening now that I'm going to be dramatizing it.

Q; Will there still only be six books?

A: I'm still aiming for six books, yes indeed.

Q: And will this book approach the size of the third?

A: I hope not, but I can't say confidently. My plan is for it to be more the size of the second book.

Q: I'm going to ask a question relating to this year's Hugo Awards. The range of nominees caused some people, perhaps those with particularly tight hats, to bring up the subject of the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Why do you think this matters to some people?

A: Well, I'm certainly one of the people to whom this division does not matter. I've given a speech at some conventions, which I may eventually publish, where I talk about the differences between science fiction and fantasy. To my mind it's largely a difference of flavor. The difference between vanilla ice cream and strawberry ice cream. They're both ice cream. They just have somewhat different flavorings. I read science fiction, fantasy and also horror when I was a kid pretty much interchangeably. And I write it pretty much interchangeably. I don't feel that I'm doing something entirely different when I switch genres. That's one point of view. The other point of view, which I do hear sometimes is this view that science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally different, diametrically opposed. The people that put forward this viewpoint almost always are almost always putting forward the collerary that science fiction is great and noble and wonderful and that fantasy is horrible and evil and tragic. I think this is nonsense, I think it shows their ignorance of the history of these two related genres which have been twins for centuries, if not millennia. In a way you could even argue that science fiction is just a sub-genre of fantasy. I think that argument holds more water than the one that says they're utterly different.

Q: This latter point of view seems similar to the ongoing debate of science versus religion.

A: It's because the way we think of science. Science has a lot of prestige. Scientists in their white coats are the magicians of the modern era. The argument might hold water if science fiction had become what Hugo Gernsback had wanted it to become, if it had become primarily educational literature, its purpose to teach people about science, all the science in it to be very rigorous. But a genre that survives on intergalactic feudalism, faster than light drives and time travel, these being the tropes of science fiction, is not that different from fantasy. Certainly not in any fundamental way.

Q: Looking back on your published work, the word "Song" appears regularly in titles of your books.

A: I've used that almost from the beginning of my career. A Song for Lya was a very early story; it was the title for my first collection of stories. My second was Songs of Stars and Shadows. I've had a few others, such as Songs that Dead Men Sing. At one point I was going to have all my books have "Song" in the title, but over the checkered career that one has in the publishing industry I ran into editors who didn't like the idea or wanted a different title, so that theme went out. I don't know, maybe I'm just a frustrated songwriter, but there's something about it that I like and it gives a certain unity to my work.

Q: The past year seems to have brought a fair number of your older works back in print. How many will we see in the future?

A: Certainly quite a few. Bantam Books, my main publisher in the states, has purchased the rights to my four older novels. They're bringing them out in between the volumes of the fantasy, and Windhaven was the first of those. It came out a few months ago and the next one in a year or so from now will be Fevere Dream. The others will follow. Some of my old collections will come out; we're doing a reissue of the Wild Cards books with iBooks. They're doing some trade paperback editions with illustrations by comic artists, and also some e-book editions that are available online. We're not only reissuing the old Wild Cards books; we're adding a couple of new books to that series. The first new book, Deuces Down, was just released this month. It is the sixteenth volume in the overall series. So Wild Cards has come back to life, and I'm getting a lot of offers. When you have a series that's successful you suddenly have a lot of offers to field. I'm not going to accept all of them, I think you can put too many books out there, and I think some of my books are going to remain out of print. But certainly there are lots of old books coming back.

Q: Do you think we might see a DVD collection of Beauty and the Beast?

A: I don't know. I'm pretty much out of touch with them - Republic Pictures holds the rights. After the series ended they did start issuing them on laser disk, and they got to about episode eight before they stopped for whatever reason. They also did videotapes: they got well into the second season but never reached the third, or at least just the beginning of the third. So, DVDs, I don't know. It depends whether they think there's a market for them.

Q: Fevere Dream was included in the Fantasy Masterworks series from Orion. With this book, you joined a great many others in writing an American vampire story. It seems these days that America has made the Vampire it's own. Is there a reason for this?

A: Well, I think contemporary publishing is largely imitative. When you have a great success you're going to get a lot of similar product. You can trace the popularity of this great vampire boom not to Bram Stoker, whose influence has passed, but to Anne Rice. I'm by no means a great Anne Rice fan but there's no doubt that her books were extremely successful, and many of the vampire books that have followed have been extremely successful. People like to read about vampires. I did the one book about them in 1981, so it's twenty years ago. I thought about doing some sequels but have never got around to doing them. I think that in part it's because the part about historical horror that I really love is the history. I had some interesting ideas that were fairly original to the Fevere Dream vampires, but I used them there. I don't know that I really have a lot more to say about vampires. Maybe I'll write the sequels one day, maybe I won't. It's difficult to say. I wouldn't be able to do them for years, as I have all these Songs of Ice and Fire to write.

Q: You're just over half way through writing this work. Does it make you feel somehow hedged in?

A: It does seem like a big task. Sometimes when I look at it and think: god, I've got another four thousand pages to write and it's going to take another five to six years of my life. It is a lot, particularly for someone like me who really hasn't done a lot of series. I've always gone on to different projects and different things. Switching between science fictions and fantasy and horror, doing what I wanted to do. So it's a big task. On the other hand, I love the world and I love the characters so I do enjoy writing them.

Q: Neil Gaiman's online journal opened the eyes of many non-authors to the amount of work that the author has to complete after they finish a book. I imagine that you have a somewhat more momentous task given the size of a volume such as A Storm of Swords, going through proof copies and such. Is this a difficult task for you?

A: Yes, actually it is. You want the books to be perfect, but god that work is tedious. And it's not work that you can easily delegate because no one else knows the books as well as you do. You can rely on editors and copy editors to find some mistakes, but evidently some get through. In my case I have British and American publishers that are on different tracks, they're not using the same plates. In some cases the British publisher will use the American plate or vice versa, but my publishers don't work together that way. Each one does their own typesets, which means I have two sets of copyedited manuscripts to correct, two sets of proofs to correct, with thousand page books it does take a lot of time. Some writers love that, love the fine detail work. I don't. I never enjoy correcting galley proofs or that sort of thing, but it comes with the territory. It has to be done.

Q: You've said in previous interviews that you live your books as you write them. Is this how you manage to keep the large numbers of characters and plotlines straight when you are writing, that you have lived the books yourself?

A: There's an element of truth to that, that's true. I joke sometimes when people ask me at conventions how I remember all these characters; I make a standard joke that I remember the characters better than the people in real life. Except it isn't a joke, it's really true. I can remember some minor knight who had three lines in A Game of Thrones, while I'll completely forget someone I met in a convention in September. So the vicarious experience, the imaginary experience is in some ways a more intense experience than life.

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Recommended: George Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire

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