American science fiction writer George RR Martin.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
1. George Martin started writing scary stories when he was a child. He had a toy castle where turtles lived and, unfortunately, often died. He came up with the idea that turtles kill each other by organizing and weaving intrigues, and he began writing stories about a fairy tale kingdom inhabited by turtles. He also wrote horror stories that he sold to neighborhood children. Apparently they were really creepy: a boy started having nightmares after them, his mother complained to George’s mother, and he stopped practicing.
2. Martin names Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel comics (about Iron Man, Spider-Man, Hulk, Fantastic Four, etc.) as the person who had the greatest influence on him as a writer. George was an avid Marvel fan as a child and credits Lee with being a greater influence on him than Tolstoy or Tolkien. However, in 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 never having met), 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 a time. However, he was not teaching for a good life; At the time he simply didn’t have enough money (which he preferred to earn by publishing science fiction stories). There was another source of income: after Bobby Fischer became world chess champion, the United States was swept by “chess fever,” and Martin, who played very well, became director of competitions for the Continental Chess Association. Chess. But then the fever passed and Martin was ruined.
4. He published his first story in 1970, when he was 21 years old. He was called “Hero” (and is now part of the Thousand World Chronicles series). He was a soldier who participated in interplanetary wars, but dreamed of retiring and settling on an Earth that he had never seen. But the “representative of the military world” cannot be allowed to enter Earth and, as a result, the soldier is treacherously murdered.
5. Martin has been living with the same woman for several decades (they did not officially register their marriage in 2011). Her name is Parris McBride and they met in 1975 at a women’s sauna party (oh, the wild ’70s!). At the end of the evening, she and the company engaged in comical 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 luckily he was married, so he sold me to Parris 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 did not meet again until the ’80s, “when she was a waitress at the lesbian-feminist restaurant Old Wives’ Tales and kept getting in trouble for playing music.” politically incorrect.” “Since then they have not separated.
6. George Martin is a convinced cat lover. The first cat (of many) he and Parris had was named Mulligan, and Martin still remembers him: “Though he gave up in recent years, in his youth he was an unbeatable mouser.”
7. According to Martin, Game of Thrones came “out of nowhere.” “At that time he was writing scripts for television and wanted to do something big. On TV they told me: “What you came up with is going to cost too much, remove this character, remove this scenario.” Going back to the 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 idea about this. In the summer of 1991, I was in Hollywood, but without a television contract, and suddenly I started writing the first chapter, where the characters find the direwolf cubs. It just appeared. And I knew I had to write about it.”
8. One of the questions Martin is often asked is where exactly does Game of Thrones take place? On another planet? After all, the seasons there literally last for years… He replies: “Tolkien called those places a “secondary world.” This is not another planet. This is Earth. But not our Earth. If you want to approach it from a science fiction perspective, call it alternate reality… although that would be too much science fiction. Tolkien was the first to think of this when he created Middle Earth. People constantly write to me expounding some of his theories about 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 am a lapsed Catholic. Although you can consider me an atheist or agnostic. I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe that this is not the end, that [за пределами нашего мира] There’s 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 RR 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 prohibited from asking you when these books will be published. He himself said about the Game of Thrones series: “There were a couple of years where I thought, “If I finish the book quickly, I’ll be another two years ahead of the series.” So the program was supposed to speed me up, but it actually just 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 disappeared.”
