“One of the things he (Tolkien) did that was really extraordinary was create Middle-Earth in such detail. Martin’s needle-point detail work is, at least in part, inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe and his posthumously published Silmarillion concordance of fictional myth, legend, and history. And you guys wonder where the sixth book is. George, for his part, fleshed the thing out to the tune of 300,000 words. Elio and Linda sent George an outline in the neighborhood of 70,000 words. The contract with Bantam called for some 50,ooo words. The plan was for Elio and Linda to come up with an outline of sorts, based on what was known from the existing books, and for George to then flesh out the details. Along the way, as happens to all things Westeros, the story just grew and grew and grew. “You know how that goes,” said Martin to much laughter from the audience. It actually arrives in stores, virtual or otherwise, on the 28th of October, 2014. It was originally contracted to be published in 2008.
The road to The World of Ice & Fire is as winding as Martin’s story. Rather than go back and checking all the details, I send it to Elio and say, ‘Did I contradict anything I said in a previous book?’ and he’ll say, ‘Yes, you did, this character you killed three books ago.’” From superfan to webmaster to fact checker and now co-author, this is like getting called up from the fantasy geek minor leagues. “When I write a new chapter, it saves me time. “He really does have a frighteningly exhaustive knowledge of my world and my characters,” said Martin at 92Y.
Enter Elio Garcia, who at that time was simply a fan of the books, to point out certain inconsistencies contained therein. Of course with any epic-fantasy the world is a character,” said Martin at 92Y.Īs George’s story grew - from a planned trilogy of books to a sprawling and currently theoretical seven, which doesn’t include prequels - the many hundreds ofcharacters great and small and the various place names on two different continents simply became too unwieldy for their creator to keep track of on his own. “This is a book that really began with my readers and my fans. It’s something his fans have been asking after for years, including his co-authors, Elio and Linda, who began peppering Martin with questions about Westerosi history over email back in the mid-1990s. Herein are the tales of the Dawn Age, the Age of Heroes, the Doom of Valyria, the Andal Invasion, Summerhall, the wars between the First Men and the Children of the Forest, and much more that has never been seen, including the Summer Islands and Sothoryos. The World of Ice & Fire takes all of those disparate references to cataclysmic events and mass migrations and fleshes them out along with lush illustrations of notable characters, places, sigils, and lineages. Martin’s books mention, in varying levels of detail, rulers and their kingdoms, their wives and husbands, their families, their paramours, their animals, and the tragedies that befell them stretching back for centuries before the events that brought the Starks and the Lannisters to war and Dany to Slaver’s Bay. They may not move the story forward, but they do expand the scope. When you find yourself waiting years for the next installment of the series, those swamps of pages you found yourself bogged down in - the descriptions of the feasts and the sigils and the clothing - can become a rich vein of unmined narrative. At times, that can make his books a tedious slog. Martin seems to delight in going above and beyond what is actually required to simply tell the story. World building is, of course, a feature of all fantasy and sci-fi fiction.
#Summer islands game of thrones series
On Sunday night, Martin appeared at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a talk moderated by Salon’s Laura Miller, to discuss his new book that is not the book that all his fans are waiting for.įor any of the millions of people who have read or are reading George’s ASoIaF books, or the millions upon millions of people who watch the HBO series A Game of Thrones by legal and illicit means, I’m guessing there are two details that define the series: (1) the story’s ruthlessness, its willingness to do away with any character, no matter how seemingly integral, often in ways that are gut-wrenchingly awful (2) its astoundingly immersive, granularly detailed fictional history. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, The World of Ice & Fire, co-written by Martin himself along with the superfans-turned- faux-fact-archivists and webmasters Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson. So begins the soon-to-be-released new coffee table compendium of the fictional history of George R.R. “There are none who can say with certain knowledge when the world began, yet this has not stopped many maesters and learned men from seeking the answer.” Indeed.
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