A Song of Ice and Fire

• 1. Introduction

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  A Song of Ice and Fire began not with a plan for a sprawling saga but with a single image: a boy watching a beheading, then finding direwolves in the snow. George R. R. Martin was sitting between Hollywood projects in the summer of 1991, working on an unrelated science fiction novel called Avalon, when that image arrived. He set Avalon aside and finished the chapter in a few days. By the time he had written a handful more, he was drawing maps and genealogies for a world he had not yet named. What started as a projected trilogy of 800-page books has become a story that has sold more than 100 million copies in 47 languages, inspired three television series, and still lacks two of its seven planned volumes. How did a book that did not even reach the lower positions of the bestseller list on its first publication in August 1996 become one of the most widely read works of fantasy ever written? And why, more than three decades after that first chapter, are readers still waiting for the ending Martin says he knows in broad strokes but has not yet set down on the page?

• 2. A Career Before the Throne

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  Martin had his first short story published in 1971 and his first novel in 1977, building a following that was real but modest. By the mid-1990s he had won three Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards, mostly for short fiction. Readers within the science fiction and fantasy community knew his name; the general public did not. That gap is what pushed him to Hollywood in the mid-1980s. He worked principally on the revival of The Twilight Zone throughout 1986 and on Beauty and the Beast until 1990, and he developed his own TV pilots and wrote feature film scripts alongside that work. None of his pilots made it to air. ABC ordered his series Doorways but ultimately never broadcast it. The frustration was creative as much as professional. Television budgets forced him to cut characters and compress battle scenes that he knew, on the page, could be as large as he needed them to be. That constraint, more than any single event, turned Martin back toward novels. He had admired J. R. R. Tolkien since childhood and wanted to write at that scale, though he had no specific idea yet. Avalon was supposed to be that project. It never got past three chapters.

• 3. Building the World

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  Martin gave his agent Kirby McCauley the first 200 pages of A Game of Thrones and a two-page story projection in 1994, pitching it as the first of a trilogy. The other two volumes were provisionally titled A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter. By the time the manuscript reached 1,400 pages without an ending in sight, he had revised that to four books, then six, then a pair of linked trilogies. The finished manuscript for A Game of Thrones ran to 1,088 pages without its appendices. The Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan contributed a short endorsement for the cover, which Martin's publishers credited with helping launch the series with fantasy readers. Martin's approach to world-building was deliberate in its restraint. He drew heavily on English medieval history because, as an American who reads only English, that was the most accessible body of source material for him. The Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, and the Albigensian Crusade all left marks on the fictional history of Westeros. The French historical novels The Accursed Kings by Maurice Druon, about the French monarchy in the 13th and 14th centuries, were another named source. The "Red Wedding", a pivotal scene in A Storm of Swords, drew from two events in Scottish history: the Black Dinner of 1440 and the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692. He kept several bookcases filled with medieval history books and visited historic European landmarks for research, immersing himself in topics as granular as clothing, food, and tournament customs.

• 4. The Machinery of Storytelling

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  Martin learned the technique of limited third-person point-of-view narration as a young journalism student, and A Game of Thrones opens with nine such viewpoint characters. By the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons, that number had grown to 31. The approach was partly inspired by Wild Cards, a multi-authored shared universe book series that Martin had been editing since 1985. Each chapter is designed to end on a tense or revelational moment, a habit carried over from his years writing for television, where the act-break cliffhanger is a structural requirement. The same television background gave him a principle he called "cutting out the fat and leaving the muscle", a final editing pass that he credits with bringing the page count of A Dance with Dragons down by nearly eighty pages. He begins each new book with an outline of the chapter order but may write several successive chapters from a single character's viewpoint rather than working chronologically; the chapters are rearranged later to sharpen the intercutting of storylines. The unreliable narrator is a structural tool as well as a thematic one. Because readers see events only through the eyes of the character whose chapter they are in, what appears to be established fact may later be contradicted or reframed. Martin foreshadows events he planned from the beginning but is careful not to make the story predictable. He has said that much of the key to the series' future lies in events that took place more than a dozen years before the first page of A Game of Thrones. Jon Snow accumulates 42 point-of-view chapters across the first five books, the most of any single character.

• 5. The Middle Books and Their Complications

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  After A Storm of Swords appeared in November 2000, Martin intended to write three more volumes, with the fourth focusing on Daenerys Targaryen's return to Westeros after a five-year gap that would allow the younger characters to age. In 2001, he was still optimistic the fourth book might arrive by the end of 2002. The five-year gap turned out not to work. Covering what had happened during those years through flashback alone felt unsatisfying, and making nothing happen for five years was implausible. Martin realized he needed an additional interim book, which became A Feast for Crows, picking up immediately after A Storm of Swords ended. The material from the written 250-page prologue was folded into new viewpoint chapters from Dorne and the Iron Islands. Then A Feast for Crows surpassed the manuscript length of A Storm of Swords, and Martin faced a second structural problem. Rather than split the book chronologically into two halves, which his publishers suggested, a friend proposed dividing it geographically. Martin moved all the storylines set in the east and the far north into a separate volume, A Dance with Dragons, which would run in parallel with A Feast for Crows rather than continuing after it. A Feast for Crows reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list in November 2005. Time magazine's Lev Grossman called Martin "the American Tolkien" in his review. Nevertheless, fans and critics were frustrated that the story split left the fates of Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen unresolved at the book's end. Martin noted in the epilogue that A Dance with Dragons would follow within a year. It took six more years.

• 6. The Long Wait for Winter

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  A Dance with Dragons was published in July 2011 after six years of writing, at around 1,600 manuscript pages the longest of the five completed volumes. Martin attributed the delay primarily to what he called "the Meereenese knot", the task of making the chronology and characters mesh as multiple storylines converged around Daenerys in the city of Meereen. HBO had acquired the rights to turn the series into a television drama in 2007, and the first season of Game of Thrones premiered in April 2011, the same summer A Dance with Dragons finally appeared. Martin had expected to stay ahead of the show. By 2013, head writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had learned the end stories for all the core characters directly from Martin, in case the show outpaced the books. It did. The sixth novel, The Winds of Winter, remains unfinished. In October 2022, Martin estimated he had written approximately 1,100 to 1,200 pages and had roughly 400 to 500 pages left. He gave a similar estimate in November 2023, describing himself as "struggling" with the manuscript. By the middle of 2010, five chapters from the viewpoints of Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Arianne Martell, and Aeron Greyjoy, totaling around 100 pages, had already been completed. In December 2011 he posted a Theon Greyjoy chapter publicly, and several others have followed. Martin has indicated he will not permit another writer to finish the series, and that the final two volumes will take readers farther north than any previous book, with the Others finally making a full appearance.

• 7. Sales, Fandom, and Cultural Reach

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  A Dance with Dragons sold 170,000 hardcovers, 110,000 e-books, and 18,000 audio books on its first day of publication alone in July 2011, the highest single-day sales of any new fiction title at that point in the year. The paperback of A Game of Thrones had already reached its 34th printing by 2010 and crossed the one million mark. Martin became the tenth author to sell one million Amazon Kindle e-books. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2011, and USA Today named him their Author of the Year for the same year. Forbes estimated his earnings at $15 million in 2011. The first installment had not registered on any bestseller list when it appeared in 1996, its early success built entirely by word of mouth and the advocacy of independent booksellers. As the fandom grew, so did its intensity. The fan site Westeros.org was co-founded in 1999 by Elio M. Garcia Jr., a Swedish-based fan of Cuban descent, and Linda Antonsson, who introduced him to the series. The Brotherhood Without Banners, an unofficial global fan club, formed in 2001. When the six-year wait for A Dance with Dragons became a flashpoint, a movement called the GRRuMblers formed in 2009 with sites including Finish the Book, George and Is Winter Coming. Martin responded publicly with a statement titled "To My Detractors". The New Yorker observed that few contemporary authors had inspired such intensity from readers who professed to love their work. The television adaptation significantly widened the geographic reach of the books, bringing new readers in markets including India and Brazil.