If you've ever seen an episode – any episode – of Game of Thrones, you'll probably have a fairly good idea of what its originator looks like. George R R Martin looks, to put it mildly, a bit bonkers and nothing like one of the 100 "most influential people in the world", as voted by Time magazine in 2011. Like some sort of dark-arts Santa Claus, he's rather rotund and possessed of a wispy silver beard and plenty of black clothing. He could pass for a member of The Grateful Dead or be part of the cast in any Harry Potter film.
Millions of people all around the world dissect everything he does, every word he writes. When he joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago (a confirmed account to stump the many impostor Tweeters pretending to be him), he amassed tens of thousands of followers in a matter of hours, and it's little wonder because Game of Thrones, the television show based on Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, is the biggest thing on the box right now.
The fourth season has just finished being aired in the US and various other countries and, while figures are still being amassed, there's little doubt that the finale will have been one of the biggest audience draws in living memory. The final episode of season three became the most pirated show of 2013, when nearly six million people illegally downloaded it online. Viewers desperate to learn the fate of Tyrion Lannister (the diminutive and always excellent Peter Dinklage), who had been sentenced to death at the end of episode eight, tuned in in their millions just a few days ago to catch the end of a season that had drawn an average audience of 18.6 million (if you include catch-up service broadcasts). The Sopranos, the previous record holder for HBO, peaked at an average of 18.2 million viewers in 2002.
On paper at least, it can be difficult to see the appeal of the show, never mind the epic novels it’s based on. Often bleak, almost always joyless and bloody beyond belief, there’s very little to smile about – the lives of the characters are hard, either embattled or enslaved, and many of the protagonists are killed off just when you’re getting to either know or like them. Perhaps this is the key to its success, that you never quite know what will happen (a Martin speciality – “People die in wars. People get maimed in wars, and many of them are good, likeable people who you would like to not see die,” he once explained) and, now that seasons five and six have been confirmed by HBO, that has become a very real problem. Nobody knows – not even the HBO hierarchy or the show’s directors and scriptwriters – what happens in the future.
Martin is late with his next slew of books – and television, as we know, waits for no man. The people who run the show, David Benioff and D B Weiss, intend to adapt the entirety of the novel series if HBO permits it and, last year, the producer Frank Doelger said: "We'll probably get through to seven seasons." Benioff and Weiss have said they don't want to pad out Game of Thrones while waiting for Martin to get his books finished – he has been known to take six years to finish one instalment – and there are at least two left to come. It's entirely possible, they have said, that the television series could end long before the last novel is published.
During the early development phase of the show, Martin, concerned he might prematurely die before his magnum opus was completed, told major future plot points to Benioff and Weiss, but it’s entirely obvious to onlookers that the show will eventually overtake his own output. In fact, last year Martin had to divulge further development details for the show’s possible future seasons, including the inevitable demise of all the main characters. With so many child actors in the show, a lengthy hiatus could never work as they continue to grow into adults, so the clock is definitely ticking for Martin.
Almost pre-empting the issue, producers changed tack after the first two seasons. One and two had both been based on one book each but from the third onward, the writers adapted A Song of Ice and Fire as a whole, giving themselves the freedom to move events back and forth to meet the requirements of the screen adaptation. Martin is evidently not a man to be rushed.
He was born George Raymond Martin (he took on the name Richard later in life, hence the double R) in Bayonne, New Jersey, on September 20, 1948. The son of Raymond Collins Martin, a half-Italian dockworker, and Margaret Brady, his half-Irish wife, Martin is the oldest of three siblings and grew up, he has said, dreaming and fantasising about a life far more exciting than his own. From their home he could see ships and tankers arriving from far-flung countries and he had an encyclopaedia with a list of flags, which he used to identify where they had travelled from to Newark. His imagination began to run riot.
Initially Martin's release valve was through writing horror stories about monsters and mythical kingdoms he'd dreamt up, which he used to sell to other children in his neighbourhood. While attending school he became an avid consumer of comic books, especially those dealing with superheroes, and he wrote a letter to the editor of Fantastic Four, which was published in November 1963. More letters followed, resulting in a network of fellow fans writing to him at his published address – a network that put Martin in good stead for a future as a fiction writer.
In 1970 he graduated with honours as a bachelor of science in journalism at Northwestern University in Illinois, and went on to complete his master’s the following year. During this time, war was raging in Vietnam and Martin avoided the draft, obtaining conscientious objector status, opting for alternative voluntary work. He became an expert chess player (not surprising, given his labyrinthine plot lines), directing various tournaments, and became an English and journalism teacher at Clarke College (now University) in Dubuque, Iowa.
He claims he enjoyed teaching but that the sudden death of his friend and fellow author Tom Reamy in the autumn of 1977 caused him to re-evaluate his own life, which was when he decided to become a full-time writer (he’d been selling fiction stories to various publications on-and-off for years). Martin resigned from his job and headed for the more temperate climes of Santa Fe in 1979, where he still resides with his second wife and fellow author, Parris McBride.
His work as an author was hit-and-miss for a while. In 1983, his novel The Armageddon Rag was a commercial disaster and he says it finished him as an author for a time – but it did get him into television because it had been optioned by Hollywood, which led to a job offer from CBS as a writer for The Twilight Zone.
He felt unfulfilled within Hollywood, however, and returned to writing full-time in 1991, which was when he began the epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, with the first novel, A Game of Thrones, published in 1996. Since then the books in this series have sold more than 25 million copies in the United States alone and Martin is ranked as the world's 12th most-successful author – not bad going for a former teacher.
He’s an amiable enough fellow, despite his enormous wealth and influence, and has become known as someone with a very hands-on approach to his fan base, regularly appearing at festivals to meet and greet his army of devoted followers.
That army’s ranks will swell ever further as more people tune into the television series and the world eagerly awaits his next instalments. But even if the show does indeed overtake his ancient word processor, Martin is on board as an executive producer and it’s certain that it will maintain the course he originally set for it. George R R Martin is a true heavyweight, in every sense of the word.
