George R. R. Martin

A Santa Fe resident since 1979, George R.R. Martin is that rarest of creatures: a best-selling, commercially successful novelist whose fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (Bantam), beginning with the book Game of Thrones, tops bestseller charts and has become a hit HBO cable series. A regular at Santa Fe’s Tecolote Café for breakfast and The Bull Ring for dinner, Martin describes his epic fantasy series as “low magic” with the emphasis on characters. He tells Wolf Schneider about his journey from New Jersey to Hollywood, where he worked as a story editor on The Twilight Zone and a producer on Beauty and the Beast, and why he settled in New Mexico. And yes, he calls himself George R.R. Martin to differentiate himself from the famous Beatles producer, George Martin.

What made you move to Santa Fe?

I like the climate, and I like the fact that it has all four seasons—unlike California, where it’s always summer.

Your series has been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—do you see similarities?

Yes, like Lord of the Rings it’s epic fantasy. But Tolkien was an Oxford don, and I am a longshoreman’s son from Bayonne, New Jersey, and this colors my point of view about life and love and the major issues.

Did you receive the biggest paycheck of your life when HBO began production on Game of Thrones?

Actually not, I’ve gotten bigger paychecks! [Laughs] Some of my books do rather well!

How do you feel about the books being translated to TV?

Great—they’re being very faithful to the books, and HBO has very high production values. I’m a co-executive producer, and I do one script per season. And I’m involved in the casting.

The fifth book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, was released in the summer of 2011, after a wait of five years. What took so long?

I’m slow! And this book is 1,500 pages in manuscript. Some days I write a sentence; some days I write four or five pages.

How many books have you sold?

Game of Thrones just passed one million copies in mass-market paperback. Around the world, I’ve probably sold about 20 million books total. That’s an estimate, but that’s the ballpark.

So where do you imagine this kingdom of the A Song of Ice and Fire series being, this place where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, and the brutal cold is returning?

Much of it is loosely based on medieval England. Our major location for filming is Belfast in Northern Ireland. We’ve also filmed in Morocco and on the island
of Malta.

Has New Mexico inspired any aspect of the series? Maybe someplace like White Sands?

I love White Sands, and I have white sands in the country called Dorne, which is the southernmost part of my seven kingdoms.

At 62 now, are you having the greatest success and visibility of your life, as The New York Times intimated this spring?

Yeah, I think I am. Time magazine just named me one of their Top 100 most influential people in the world! It only took me 60 years to become an overnight success.
                                                                 
Santa Fe-based Wolf Schneider has written for O, More, InStyle, Interview, and Mademoiselle.

[back to the top]

Discover more Southwest authors in our archives.