Father of Dragons
Today marks the 76th birthday of the most ruthless and bloodthirsty contemporary writer in the world. One of the distinctive features of his writing style is to create an appealing and vivid character, one loved by millions of readers who closely follow their fate – only to mercilessly and unexpectedly kill them off at the hands of treacherous antagonists.
"I want readers to feel as though someone in their family has died. That is the triumph of a writer, if they have made their character so real that the reader mourns their death on a deep emotional level," explains this author, rightfully dubbed the "American Tolkien." Indeed, the worlds he creates are so meticulously developed and detailed that they not only rival but surpass Tolkien's Middle-earth. His name is George Raymond Richard Martin, and his most famous series is A Song of Ice and Fire.
In mid-September, filming wrapped in Belfast on the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a prequel to the cult show Game of Thrones. The season will be short, consisting of only six episodes, and will premiere on HBO in 2025. The author himself, who was not entirely satisfied with the adaptation of House of the Dragon, praised the new project, saying that the main characters, Dunk and Egg, seemed to have stepped right off the pages of his book. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is not the only new series based on George Martin's books – there are at least seven more series in development on streaming platforms, including one about Aegon the Conqueror, all set in the world of Westeros, the setting of Game of Thrones. Given the abundance of adaptations and the unrelenting interest of producers in new books, it’s no surprise that George Martin has been listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.
Martin's first writing attempt came during preparatory school – it was the Encyclopedia of Space, where real planets and stars coexisted alongside fantastical worlds from comics and planets that the future writer had invented himself.
His first "real" stories (mostly in the horror genre) that he managed to complete were sold to neighbouring kids for a penny per page. As the writer recalled, "Life was beautiful... until my most profitable customer started having nightmares and told his mother about my monster stories. She came to my mother, who spoke with my father – and I switched from monsters to astronauts and stopped showing my creations to other people."
Like any workaholic writer, Martin has a daily routine that he tries to stick to, but it doesn’t always go to plan – hard to believe, but one of the most prolific writers of our time is quite the procrastinator: "I wake up at 9 a.m., spend about an hour on coffee, breakfast, and trying to wake up, and by 10 a.m. I start work. I usually check my email first, and maybe that’s a mistake – there are always messages that need an urgent reply. But on the best days, I quickly deal with the emails and start thinking about Westeros, working on the book. On such days, at around a quarter past ten, I place a cup of hot coffee next to my computer and dive into writing, and the next thing I notice is that it’s dark outside, night has fallen, and the coffee has long since gone cold… But that’s on a good day. On a bad day, I reread the chapters I wrote yesterday, I don’t like something, I edit the text, rewrite it, work for about an hour, though it feels like five, and then I think: maybe I should check my email again?"
Perhaps this explains why, although the story of the Game of Thrones characters ended long ago, Martin has been working on the sixth book in the saga, The Winds of Winter, since 2011, with no release date in sight. As for the final seventh book, A Dream of Spring, its likelihood of being finished is unclear even to Martin himself. He has repeatedly said that, due to his age, he may not have time to complete his grand fantasy cycle that brought him global fame – which is why he has shared with publishers and film producers the plot outline for the sixth and seventh books of A Song of Ice and Fire, so they have a general understanding of how the story and characters will develop.
The writer continues to live with his wife in Santa Fe in the house he bought back in the early 80s, though he has since purchased two additional houses – one for an office and the other for a library. Overall, one of the richest writers in the world lives quite modestly and is also Santa Fe's biggest philanthropist – with the enormous royalties from the Game of Thrones adaptations, Martin restored a derelict cinema and a bowling club in the city and created the non-profit "Stagecoach Foundation" to support filmmakers.
It would be surprising if a writer who created a logical and well-thought-out world where magic, White Walkers, and dragons exist didn’t have a fondness for fire-breathing winged reptiles. His favourite dragons in films are Smaug from The Hobbit and Vermithrax from Dragonslayer. And here’s what today’s birthday boy had to say on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the initial nuclear threats from Putin and his cronies:
"I’d love to ride one of the dragons from my books to the Kremlin and burn it to the ground."
Well, hundreds of millions of people around the world would be delighted to see such a fiery show, but since dragons don’t exist in our world, we can only hope that Ukraine will finally receive permission to strike deep into the rear of the Russian aggressor with long-range weapons.
As Daenerys Targaryen would say: "Dracarys!"