American science fiction writer George R. R. Martin.

Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS

1. George Martin started writing scary stories as a child. He had a toy castle where turtles lived, who, alas, often died. He came up with the idea that turtles kill each other, setting up intrigues and weaving intrigues, and began writing stories about a fairy-tale kingdom inhabited by turtles. He also wrote scary stories that he sold to neighborhood children. Apparently they were really creepy – one boy started having nightmares after them, his mother complained to George’s mother, and he stopped the practice.

2. Martin names Stan Lee as the person who had the greatest influence on him as a writer., creator of Marvel comics (about Iron Man, Spider-Man, Hulk, Fantastic Four, and so on). George was an avid Marvel fan as a child, and credits Lee with being a greater influence on him than Tolstoy or Tolkien. However, when creating Game of Thrones, he was also greatly influenced by the works of Maurice Druon (a writer whom Martin admired all his life and terribly regretted that he never got to know him), Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas.

3. By education, George Martin is a journalist; He graduated with honors in this specialty from Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois), and then taught journalism for some time. However, he was not teaching out of a good life – at that moment he simply did not have enough money (which he preferred to earn by publishing science fiction stories). There was another source of income: after Bobby Fischer became the world chess champion, the United States was swept by “chess fever”, and Martin, who played the game very well, became the director of competitions at the Continental Chess Association. But then the fever ended, and Martin was left broke.

4. He published his first story in 1970, when he was 21 years old. It was called “Hero” (and is now part of the Chronicles of a Thousand Worlds series). It was about a soldier participating in interplanetary wars, but dreaming of retiring and settling on an Earth he had never seen. But the “representative of the Military World” cannot be allowed onto Earth, and as a result, the soldier is treacherously killed.

5. Martin has been living with the same woman for decades. (they officially registered their marriage only in 2011). Her name is Parris McBride, and they met in 1975 at a party in a women’s sauna (oh, the wild 70s!) At the end of the evening, she and the company staged comic fights in the pool. Parris at the time described herself as a “crazy hippie.” Martin joked: “I thought she liked my friend Joe better. But, fortunately, he was married, so he sold Parris to me for two goats and a pregnant guppy. And although it was a good purchase, a few months later I married another woman, Gail. Oops!”. The marriage only lasted a few years, and George and Parris didn’t meet again until the ’80s, “when she was a waitress at the lesbian-feminist restaurant Old Wives’ Tales and kept getting into trouble for playing politically incorrect music.” ” Since then they have not parted.

6. George Martin is a convinced cat person. The first cat (of many) he and Parris got was named Mulligan, and Martin still remembers him: “Although he gave up in recent years, in his youth he was an unsurpassed mouser.”

7. According to Martin, Game of Thrones came “out of nowhere”. “At that moment I was writing scripts for television, and I wanted to do something Big. On TV they kept telling me: “What you came up with will cost too much, remove this character, remove this scenery.” Returning to prose, I could go as wild as I wanted without limiting my imagination. Overall, I knew I wanted to create something epic because I’ve loved Tolkien since I was a kid. But I didn’t have any special ideas about this. In the summer of 1991, I was in Hollywood, but without a television contract, and suddenly began writing the first chapter, where the characters find the direwolf pups. It just appeared. And I knew I had to write about it.”

8. One of the questions Martin is often asked is where exactly is Game of Thrones set? On another planet? After all, the seasons there last literally for years… He answers: “Tolkien called such places a “secondary world.” This is not another planet. This is Earth. But not our Earth. If you want to approach it from a sci-fi perspective, call it an alternate reality… although that would be too sci-fi-y. Tolkien was the first to come up with this when he created Middle-earth. People constantly write to me, setting out some of their theories about the long seasons – “It’s all explained by the fact that the action takes place in a binary star system with a black dwarf…” Well, what should I answer? It’s fantasy, man, it’s magic.”

9. Martin is also often asked about his attitude towards religion. He responds, “I’m a non-practicing Catholic. Although you can consider me an atheist or an agnostic. I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe that this is not the end, that [за пределами нашего мира] there is something else, but I can’t convince the rational part of my mind that it makes sense. Tolkien completely removed this from his books – there are no priests, no temples, no one worships anything in Middle-earth.”

10. George R.R. Martin has two books left in his A Song of Ice and Fire series: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. He has been working on them for a long time and never finishes them; journalists are forbidden to ask him when these books will be published. He himself said about the Game of Thrones series: “There were a couple of years when I thought: “If I finish the book quickly, I’ll be ahead of the series by another two years.” So the show was supposed to speed me up, but in reality it only slowed me down. Every day I sat down to write, and if it was a good day – and on a good day I write three or four pages – I felt terrible. I thought, “God, I have to finish the book. I only wrote four pages, but I should have written 40!” And the end of this series freed me, because now I live at my own pace. There are good days and bad days, but there is much less pressure, although in general it has not gone away.”