Short answers, pulled from the story.
Martin began writing A Song of Ice and Fire in the summer of 1991, when a vivid idea of a boy watching a beheading and finding direwolves in the snow came to him while he was working on an unrelated science fiction novel called Avalon. The first volume, A Game of Thrones, was published in August 1996.
A Song of Ice and Fire is planned as a seven-book series. As of 2026, five volumes have been published: A Game of Thrones (1996), A Clash of Kings (1999), A Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005), and A Dance with Dragons (2011). The sixth novel, The Winds of Winter, and the seventh, A Dream of Spring, remain unfinished.
As of 2026, more than 100 million copies of A Song of Ice and Fire have been sold in 47 languages. The fourth and fifth volumes each reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller lists when published in 2005 and 2011 respectively.
Martin drew on English medieval history, particularly the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, and the Albigensian Crusade. The "Red Wedding" scene was based on the Black Dinner of 1440 and the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 from Scottish history. The French historical novels The Accursed Kings by Maurice Druon, about the French monarchy in the 13th and 14th centuries, were also a named influence.
Martin attributed the delay primarily to untangling what he called "the Meereenese knot", making the chronology and characters mesh as multiple storylines converged around Daenerys in Meereen. He also acknowledged spending too much time rewriting and perfecting the story. A Dance with Dragons was eventually published in July 2011, at around 1,600 manuscript pages the longest of the five completed volumes.
Each chapter is narrated in the third-person limited through the eyes of a single point-of-view character, a technique Martin learned as a journalism student. A Game of Thrones begins with nine such characters; by A Dance with Dragons the number has grown to 31. Martin was inspired by Wild Cards, a multi-authored shared universe series he has edited since 1985, and he structures chapters to end on cliffhangers, a habit from his years writing for television.