nonfiction::
interview::

Robert Shaw presently attends Greenbrier East High School (Lewisburg, West Virginia), where he's completing his senior year. He also has enrolled in college courses on the Greenbrier Valley Campus of New River Community and Technical College. He's fundamentally a renaissance student, with interests ranging from soccer to business administration, English literature to advanced mathematics, fine art to fantasy.

The following interview emerged from this last interest. An avid reader, Shaw has read and studied the first three novels in Song of Ice and Fire, a fantasy series written by George R. R. Martin. Although both the interviewer and the interviewed clearly understand that the novels in this series are fantasies, their discussion often seems more a discussion of elder history than a literary discussion. This stratum of the interview testifies to Martin's keen evocation of an unreal world, and to Shaw's close and rigorous study of that world.
interview with the dragon
robert shaw
Editor's Note: George R. R. Martin is the author of Song of Ice and Fire, an extremely popular fantasy series that now includes three novels (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords), with three more novels projected for the series. Although Martin first came to the attention of a great many fantasy readers when he began (in the late 1990s) to publish this fantasy series, he in fact had a long and distinguished career in print and television well before this latest endeavor. Born September 20, 1948 in George R. R. Martin at Loch Ness; photograph by Parris.  Click on the picture to visit Martin's website. Bayonne, New Jersey, Martin sold his first monster stories to neighborhood children "for pennies, dramatic readings included." In February 1971, Galaxy published his short story, "The Hero," Martin's first publication as a professional writer.

The year before, Martin had taken a BS (summa cum laude) in journalism from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois). A year later he completed an MS in journalism from the same institution. In the following years, Martin undertook various writing endeavors, including a year-long appointment as writer-in-residence at Clarke College (Dubuque, Iowa); during this time he published A Song for Lya (a shortstory collection, 1976) and the novel Dying of the Light (1977). Although Martin's fiction won a number of awards (including three Hugo and two Nebulas), in the early 1980s Martin turned for a time from print publication to TV scripting, in 1986 taking a position as story editor for the resurrected Twilight Zone series at CBS Television. A year later he joined the writing crew of Beauty and the Beast, the highly acclaimed CBS series starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman. By 1989 Martin had become Co-Supervising Producer of the show.

In 1991, while still working on TV projects, Martin began work on A Game of Thrones, the novel that would become the first in his Song of Ice and Fire series. By the time that this novel appeared in 1996, Martin had once again restructured his life so that he could devote full creative energies to his emerging series. The author presently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he's at work on A Feast of Crows, the fourth novel in his acclaimed fantasy series.




Shaw: The series has a strong flavor of political and historical intrigue compared to most fantasy series. Did you deliberately set out to create this variation on more traditional fantasies?

Martin: Yes, I did. I've read a lot of fantasy in my day, of course starting with J. R. R. Tolkein, Robert E. Howard, when I was young, many fantasies since. I enjoy fantasy as a reader but I also enjoy historical fiction. I've read a lot of that as well, writers like Thomas P. Costain and Sharon Kay Penmen and Nigel Trantor. What I wanted to do with this was something that I thought was a little different. I wanted to write a fantasy that had some of the flavor of historical fiction as well as the flavor of traditional fantasy.

Shaw: The series has a large "background history." Did you deliberately set out to create this huge matrix supporting the foreground narrative?

Martin: Yes. I think its necessary in contemporary fantasy. J. R. R Tolkein when he wrote Lord of the Rings of course was I think really the first one to do this. He worked out his world in such amazing detail. He had been working on it for decades before he even started Lord of the Rings with The Silmarillon. I think that really set the template from that time forward. Fantasy readers want a world created with a lot of detail. The setting becomes almost a character in these kinds of books. You'll hear readers talking about wanting to go to Middle Earth or the Land or some of the other great fantasy places that have been created. You can't get away with just setting a fantasy in a generic kingdom. Readers want a sense of history, they want a sense of reality. The whole setting and background have to be fully fleshed out. So yes, I really put a lot of work into trying to get that sense of reality for my world of Westeros.

Shaw: Yes, you've created quite a world. You have quite a few fans who actually believe they're in Westeros.

Martin: [laughs] Yes, sometimes I do myself.

Shaw: Do you think that you'll write a book like The Silmarillon?

Martin: I don't know. In my career I've written many different things. Right now I'm trying to finish Song of Ice and Fire. I still have several books to go. I'm writing the fourth book right now, and it's taking longer than it should. Even after I finish that, I have at least 2 more books to go, so that's going to take me through to 2007, 2008, something around there. After that, who knows what I'll feel like doing? I'll worry about that when I get to the time.

Shaw: The series title (Song of Ice and Fire) draws on two images that are opposite. With these images, do you mean to suggest that any kind of peace and reconciliation are a lost hope for the people of Westeros?

Martin: No, not necessarily. I think the contrasts of ice and fire, of love and hate, all the things that they symbolize is one of the themes of what the series is about. You can't really encapsulate that in a nutshell, but that's certainly a part of it. I like titles that work on several different levels where the title seems to have an obvious meaning but, if you think about it, also a secondary meaning, perhaps even a tertiary. That's what I'm striving for here.

Shaw: You created Jon as a bastard and an outcast from the get-go. Yet he's also one of the most attractive characters. Did you choose to make Jon a bastard to make him more attractive as an "underdog," or was his bastard birth central to the shaping of his character itself?

Martin: Almost all the characters have problems in some way. Very few of my major viewpoint characters have all the answers or have an easy path through life. They all have burdens to bear. Some of them are women in a society that doesn't necessarily value women or give them a lot of power or independence. Tyrion of course is a dwarf which has its own challenges. Dany is an exile, powerless, penniless, at the mercy of other people, and Jon is a bastard. These things shape their characters. Your experiences in life, your place in life inevitably is going to change who you are.

Shaw: Lord Stark accepts Jon as though he were a true-born son, while Lady Stark rejects him. But neither of them are true parental figures to him. Are these complex relations just a reflection of the typical family life that characterizes all the key families in the novel, or are these relations also central in shaping Jon's character?

Martin: They're certainly important in shaping Jon's character. I might dispute whether Lord Stark is a true parental figure to Jon. He does serve as a pretty good parental figure to Jon and to all of his children by Catelyn as well. Of course, the standards of what characterized being a good father or a parental figure are very different in a medieval setting than they are today, so that does have to be borne in mind when you're looking at these things. Today we would be horrified if someone took their eight-year-old son and sent him across the country to be a servant in someone else's house, but in the middle ages they did that sort of fostering all the time.

Shaw: The direwolves are closely identified with the Stark children and with Jon, and their appearance sets everything in motion. Does Jon's loss of his direwolf in the third novel portend disaster for him in the future?

Martin: He gets the direwolf back in the third novel too, of course. There is a significant point, though, concerning Jon and Ghost in the third novel. There is a period in the novel where he cannot feel him, he cannot sense him as he previously did, then he can again. That's a minor but still significant plot point.

Shaw: As the novels unfold, Jon becomes increasingly identified with the northern cold and ice, just as Dany is closely tied to the southern heat and fire. Will these two ultimately embody the central image of the series, Ice and Fire?

Martin: That's certainly one way to interpret it. That's for my readers to argue out. That may be one possible meaning. There may be a secondary meaning, or a tertiary meaning as well.

Shaw: Did you draw on real-world relationships and personal experiences to mould Jon Snow's character, or is he entirely a child of your imagination?

Martin: He's a bit of both, I suppose. I think in creating any character you have to draw on people you know, and you have to draw people you read about in history books, history texts, the lives of people during the period, that's all important. I think the ultimate, the most important source is yourself, though, because you never really and truly know anyone except yourself. So I think there's a large piece of me in all the characters, you just use it differently. You have to try to get inside their head and ask, How would I feel if I were this person in this situation? What would it be like? While you're writing about that character you really are that character.

Shaw: Do you have a certain character that you feel closest to?

Martin: Probably Tyrion. Tyrion is a lot of fun to write about. He's got the sharp tongue and that kind of dark cynical way of looking at things. Those chapters are a lot of fun to write. And he's an adult, too, which makes it a little easier. The kids are tough to write, especially the younger kids. I think Bran is probably the hardest character to write because he's the youngest of the major viewpoint characters.

Shaw: Yes, but his character is very well developed. Rikon, though, not too much is said about him.

Martin: He was too young, and I couldn't. The idea of trying to write from the viewpoint of a four-year-old, no [laughs], I didn't want to do that.

Shaw: What are we to make of the animal transformations so closely associated with Jon?

Martin: All of the Stark kids have certain links to the wolf. I think in Westeros there's a certain amount of identification of all of these great houses to their sigils, to the animal charges that they bear. The Lannisters are always likening themselves to lions, for example, and their motto "Hear me roar" speaks of a certain way of looking at life. But I think for the Starks it goes a little bit beyond that, especially in this generation, with these direwolves. It's more than just a handy metaphor with them.

Shaw: You mentioned how closely tied the Stark children are with the direwolves, but how about Sansa now that Lady's dead?

Martin: She lost hers, so it kind of leaves her a little adrift. Of course Arya has lost her's too, she's separated from Nymeria.

Shaw: She just started having her transformations also, though.

Martin: Right.

Shaw: There's some speculation that you plan to replace Lady with the Hound, possibly?

Martin: What? Interesting speculation. I won't comment on that. [laughs]

Shaw: That's one of those points that are just intriguing.

Martin: That's what the readers will have to figure out for themselves, and argue about. Be a little bit elliptical, sometimes.

Shaw: At one point Greywind characterizes Ghost as the quiet one who was "one of them but not one of them." Since the direwolves seem to reflect the children, does this characterization of Ghost mean that Jon is somehow a part of but still separate from the people around him?

Martin: Oh yes, I think that's always been true. Even in Winterfell, as a kid before the wolves, Jon was the bastard. He was the odd one out. The rest of them are all brothers and sisters. He's only a half-brother, so he's not as closely tied to them. In some circumstances he could share everything with his brothers, he could train with Robb and all that, but then another circumstance would come up (like when the king came to the castle and they were choosing who could sit at the high table) and he's not welcome there. So he's of them, he's part of the family, he's part of the siblings, but he's a little bit apart too. Ghost is very similar to that. He's the albino, he's the one who makes no noise, so he's related to the other direwolves but one apart as well.

Shaw: Is there a certain reason why they named obsidian "dragonglass" or why you did that?

Martin: Yes, there is a reason.

Shaw: Are dragons somehow the mortal enemy of the Others?

Martin: There are a lot of legends, and you'll be hearing more about them in the future books, but a lot of stuff about Others and about dragons maybe isn't completely understood by the people of the present. Obsidian is of course volcanic glass; it's formed by immense heat and pressure down in the earth. The dragons themselves are creatures of intense heat.

Shaw: I wasn't sure if you had added something to obsidian for the fantasy.

Martin: I've given it magical characteristics that of course real obsidian doesn't necessarily have. After all, we live in a world that has no magic. My world does have magic, so it's a little bit different.

Shaw: Can you explain why the King's Guard chose to stand and fight Ned at the Tower of the Joy instead of protecting the remaining royal family members?

Martin: The King's Guards don't get to make up their own orders. They serve the king, they protect the king and the royal family, but they're also bound to obey their orders, and if Prince Rhaegar gave them a certain order, they would do that. They can't say, "No we don't like that order, we'll do something else."

Shaw: What exactly caused the downfall of Valyria?

Martin: You'll hear more about that in future books.

Shaw: Are all the Targaryans immune to fire?

Martin: No, no Targaryans are immune to fire. The thing with Dany and the dragons, that was just a one-time magical event, very special and unique. The Targaryans can tolerate a bit more heat than most ordinary people, they like really hot baths and things like that, but that doesn't mean they're totally immune to fire, no. Dragons, on the other hand, are pretty much immune to fire.

Shaw: Is there any reason why you never hear of direwolves north of the Wall?

Martin: They're an extinct animal in that part. They're a very large and dangerous predator, and people have probably hunted them out.

Shaw: Is there any possible way for the vow of the Black to be revoked, other than what Stannis offered Jon?

Martin: Well, not historically, but of course kings can always change the rules if they want. The Kings Guard was created by Aegon the Conqueror, and he initially created the rules that they lived by, drawing on some previous historical traditions, and other things were perhaps added and modified later, but they've been fixed in their present form for a long time. But you can see them changing in the books. When Joffrey dismisses Ser Barristan from the King's Guard, on account of age, that's precedent breaking. Normally they serve until they die. Of course, Cersei later dismisses Ser Boris Blount for cowardice, but that's unusual too. So these things are subject to change.

Shaw: Do you know what substance an Other sword is made from.

Martin: Ice. But not like regular old ice. The Others can do things with ice that we can't imagine and make substances of it.

Shaw: Thank you, sir. I'm looking forward to your next book.

Martin: I'm working on it. Take care.


"Interview with the Dragon" Copyright © 2003 Robert Shaw.
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