George R. R. Martin
George Raymond Richard Martin[1] (born George Raymond Martin; September 20, 1948),[2] also known by his initials G.R.R.M.,[3] is an American author, television writer, and television producer. He is best known as the author of the series of epic fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, which were adapted into the Primetime Emmy Award-winning television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019) and its prequel series House of the Dragon (2022–present). He also helped create the Wild Cards anthology series, and contributed worldbuilding for the video game Elden Ring (2022).
George R. R. Martin
George Raymond Martin
September 20, 1948
Bayonne, New Jersey, U.S.
- A Song of Ice and Fire
- Wild Cards anthology series
- The Thousand World stories
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Gale Burnick(m. 1975; div. 1979)
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Parris McBride(m. 2011)
In 2005, Lev Grossman of Time called Martin "the American Tolkien",[4][5][6] and in 2011, he was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.[7][8] He is a longtime resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he helped fund Meow Wolf and owns the Jean Cocteau Cinema.[9][10][11] The city commemorates March 29 as George R. R. Martin Day.[12][13]
Early life[edit]
George Raymond Martin (he adopted the confirmation name Richard at 13 years old)[2] was born on September 20, 1948,[14] in Bayonne, New Jersey,[15] the son of longshoreman Raymond Collins Martin and Margaret Brady Martin. His mother's family had once been wealthy, owning a successful construction business, but lost it all in the Great Depression, something Martin was reminded about every day when he passed what used to be his family's dock and house.[16] He has two younger sisters, Darleen and Jane. He is predominantly of Irish descent;[17] a DNA test on the series Finding Your Roots showed him to be 53.6% "British and Irish", 22.4% Ashkenazi Jewish, and 15.6% "Broadly Northwestern European".[18][19]
The family first lived in a house on Broadway belonging to Martin's great-grandmother. In 1953, they moved to a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks.[20] During Martin's childhood, his world consisted predominantly of "First Street to Fifth Street", between his grade school and his home. This limited world made him want to travel and experience other places, but the only way of doing so was through his imagination, and he became a voracious reader.[21]
Martin began writing and selling monster stories for pennies to other neighborhood children, dramatic readings included. He had to stop once a customer's mother complained about her child's nightmares.[22] He also wrote stories about a mythical kingdom populated by his pet turtles — the turtles died frequently in their toy castle, so he decided they were killing each other off in "sinister plots".[23] Martin had a habit of starting "endless stories" that he never completed, as they did not turn out as well on paper as he had imagined them.[24]
Martin attended Mary Jane Donohoe School and later Marist High School. While there, he became an avid comic-book fan, developing a strong interest in the superheroes being published by Marvel Comics,[25] and later credited Stan Lee for being one of his greatest literary influences; "Maybe Stan Lee is the greatest literary influence on me, even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien."[26] A letter Martin wrote to the editor of Fantastic Four was printed in issue #20 (November 1963); it was the first of many sent, e.g., Fantastic Four #32, #34, and others. Fans who read his letters wrote him letters in turn, and through such contacts, Martin joined the fledgling comics fandom of the era, writing fiction for various fanzines;[27] he bought the first ticket to the world's first Comic-Con, held in New York in 1964.[28][29] In 1965, Martin won comic fandom's Alley Award for Best Fan Fiction for his prose superhero story "Powerman vs. The Blue Barrier".[30]
In 1970, Martin earned a B.S. in journalism with a minor in history from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, graduating summa cum laude; he went on to complete his M.S. in Journalism in 1971, also from Medill.[31] Eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War, to which he objected, Martin applied for and obtained conscientious objector status;[32] he instead did alternative service work for two years (1972–1974) as a VISTA volunteer, attached to the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation.[31]
Career[edit]
Early writing career[edit]
Martin began selling science fiction short stories professionally in 1970, at age 21. His first sale was "The Hero", sold to Galaxy magazine and published in its February 1971 issue; other sales soon followed. His first story to be nominated for the Hugo Award[33] and Nebula Awards was "With Morning Comes Mistfall", published in 1973 in Analog magazine. In 1975 his story "...for a single yesterday" about a post-apocalyptic timetripper was selected for inclusion in Epoch, a science fiction anthology edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg. His first novel, Dying of the Light, was completed in 1976 right before he moved to Dubuque and published in 1977. That same year the enormous success of Star Wars had a huge impact on the publishing industry and science fiction, and he sold the novel for the same amount he would make in three years of teaching.[34]
The short stories he was able to sell in his early 20s gave him some profit but not enough to pay his bills, which prevented him from becoming the full-time writer he wanted to be. The need for a day job occurred simultaneously with the American chess craze which followed Bobby Fischer's victory in the 1972 world chess championship. Martin's own chess skills and experience allowed him to be hired as a tournament director for the Continental Chess Association, which ran chess tournaments on the weekends. This gave him a sufficient income, and because the tournaments only ran on Saturdays and Sundays, it allowed him to work as a writer five days a week from 1973 to 1976. By the time the chess craze subsided and no longer provided an income, he had become much better established as a writer.[35][36]
Teaching[edit]
In the mid-1970s, Martin met English professor George Guthridge from Dubuque, Iowa, at a science fiction convention in Milwaukee. Martin persuaded Guthridge (who later said that at that time he despised science fiction and fantasy) not only to give speculative fiction a second look, but also to write in the field himself. Guthridge has since been a finalist for the Hugo Award and twice for the Nebula Award for science fiction and fantasy. In 1998, Guthridge and Janet Berliner won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel for their Children of the Dusk.[37]
In turn, Guthridge helped Martin in finding a job at Clarke University (then Clarke College). Martin "wasn't making enough money to stay alive" from writing and the chess tournaments, says Guthridge.[38] From 1976 to 1978, Martin was an English and journalism instructor at Clarke, and he became Writer In Residence at the college from 1978 to 1979.[39]
Concentration on writing[edit]
While he enjoyed teaching, the sudden death of friend and fellow author Tom Reamy in late 1977 made Martin reevaluate his own life, and he eventually decided to try to become a full-time writer. In 1979 he resigned from his job and moved from Dubuque to Santa Fe, New Mexico at the end of the year.[40][41] There he would live alone for almost three years, a period he described as tremendously productive in regard of writing.[42]
Martin is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA); he served as the organization's Southwest Regional Director from 1977 to 1979, and as its vice-president from 1996 to 1998.[43] In 1976, for Kansas City's MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), Martin and his friend and fellow writer-editor Gardner Dozois conceived of and organized the first Hugo Losers' Party for the benefit of all past and present Hugo-losing writers on the evening following the convention's Hugo Awards ceremony. Martin was nominated for two Hugos that year but lost both awards, for the novelette "...and Seven Times Never Kill Man" and the novella The Storms of Windhaven, co-written with Lisa Tuttle.[44] Although Martin often writes fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction tales occurring in a loosely defined future history, known informally as "The Thousand Worlds" or "The Manrealm".
In 2017, Martin recalled that he had started writing science fiction-horror hybrids in the late 1970s to disprove a statement from a critic claiming that science fiction and horror were opposites and therefore incompatible. Martin considered Sandkings (1979) the best known of these. Another was the novella Nightflyers (1980), whose screen and television rights were purchased by Vista in 1984, which produced a 1987 film adaptation, Nightflyers, with a screenplay co-written by Martin.[45] Martin was unhappy about having to cut plot elements in order to accommodate the film's small budget.[46] While not a hit at theatres, Martin believes that the film saved his career, and that everything he has written since exists in large part because of it.[47] He has also written at least one piece of political-military fiction, "Night of the Vampyres", collected in Harry Turtledove's anthology The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (2001).[48]
In 1982, Martin published a vampire novel titled Fevre Dream set in the 19th century on the Mississippi River. Unlike traditional vampire novels, in Fevre Dream vampires are not supernatural creatures, but are rather a different species related to humans created by evolution with superhuman powers. Critic Don D'Amassa has praised Fevre Dream for its strong 19th-century atmosphere and wrote: "This is without question one of the greatest vampire novels of all time".[49] Martin followed up Fevre Dream with another horror novel, The Armageddon Rag (1983). The unexpected commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag "essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time", he recalled, and made him consider going into real estate instead.[50]
In 1984, the new editor of Baen Books, Betsy Mitchell, called Martin to ask him if he had considered doing a collection of Haviland Tuf adventures. Martin, who had several favorite series characters like Solomon Kane, Elric, Nicholas van Rijn and Magnus Ridolph, had made an attempt to create such a character on his own in the 1970s with his Tuf stories. He was interested, but was too occupied with the writing of his next book, the never-completed novel Black and White and Red All Over, which occupied most of his writing time the same year. But after the failure of The Armageddon Rag, all editors rejected his upcoming novel, and desperate for money, he accepted Mitchell's offer and wrote some more Tuf stories which were collected in Tuf Voyaging, which sold well enough for Mitchell to suggest a sequel. Martin was willing and agreed to do it, but before he got started he got an offer from Hollywood, where producer Philip DeGuere Jr. wanted to adapt The Armageddon Rag into a film. The film adaptation did not happen, but they stayed in touch, and when DeGuere became the producer for the revival of The Twilight Zone, Martin was offered a job as a writer. Working for television paid a lot better than writing literature, so he decided to move to Hollywood to seek a new career.[23][51][52] At first he worked as staff writer for the show, and then as an executive story consultant.
After the CBS series was cancelled, Martin migrated over to the already-underway satirical science fiction series Max Headroom. He worked on scripts and created the show's "Ped Xing" character. However, before his scripts could go into production, the ABC show was cancelled in the middle of its second season. Martin was hired as a writer-producer on the new dramatic fantasy series Beauty and the Beast; in 1989, he became the show's co-supervising producer and wrote 14 of its episodes.
In 1987, Martin published a collection of short horror stories in Portraits of His Children. During this same period, Martin continued working in print media as a book-series editor, this time overseeing the development of the multi-author Wild Cards book series, which takes place in a shared universe in which a small slice of post–World War II humanity gains superpowers after the release of an alien-engineered virus; new titles are published in the ongoing series from Tor Books. In Second Person, Martin "gives a personal account of the close-knit role-playing game (RPG) culture that gave rise to his Wild Cards shared-world anthologies".[53] An important element in the creation of the multiple-author series was a campaign of Chaosium's role-playing game Superworld (1983) that Martin ran in Albuquerque.[54] Admitting he became completely obsessed with the game, he stopped writing literature for most of 1983, which he refers to as his "lost year", but his shrinking bank accounts made him realize he had to come up with something, and got the idea that perhaps the stories and characters created in Superworld could somehow become profitable.[55] Martin's own contributions to Wild Cards have included Thomas Tudbury, "The Great and Powerful Turtle", a powerful psychokinetic whose flying "shell" consisted of an armored VW Beetle. As of June 2011, 21 Wild Cards volumes had been published in the series; earlier that same year, Martin signed the contract for the 22nd volume, Low Ball (2014), published by Tor Books. In early 2012, Martin signed another Tor contract for the 23rd Wild Cards volume, High Stakes, which was released in August 2016.[56]
In August 2016, Martin announced that Universal Cable Productions had acquired the rights to adapt the Wild Cards novels into a television series.[57] He noted that he himself would not write for the adaptation due to focusing on A Song of Ice and Fire.[57]
Producing[edit]
In 2017, Martin confirmed he would serve as an executive producer of the HBO television series adaptation of the 2010 science fantasy novel Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor.[126] Martin also contributed to the 2022 video game titled Elden Ring, writing the worldbuilding aspects for it.[127][128] In February 2021, it was reported that Martin and Kalinda Vazquez were developing a TV adaptation of Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny, which Martin pitched to HBO in 2020. Martin will be an executive producer, Vazquez the showrunner, writer and executive producer.[129] In March 2021, he signed an overall deal with HBO.[130] Martin will serve as an executive producer of the Peacock TV adaptation in development of his Wild Cards book series, together with Melinda M. Snodgrass and Vince Gerardis, Martin's manager.[131] He will serve as an executive producer of the 2022 AMC series Dark Winds based on Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn & Chee books, together with the creator Graham Roland, the showrunner Vince Calandra, the lead Zahn McClarnon, Kiowa Gordon, Chris Eyre, Robert Redford, Tina Elmo and Vince Gerardis.[132] In 2021, Martin served as one of the producers of the short film Night of the Cooters based on the eponymous short story by Howard Waldrop.[133][134]
Philanthropy[edit]
In 2014, Martin launched a campaign on Prizeo to raise funds for Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and the Food Depot of Santa Fe. As part of the campaign, Martin offered one donor the chance to accompany him on a trip to the wolf sanctuary, including a helicopter ride and dinner. Martin also offered those donating $20,000 or more the opportunity to have a character named after them and "killed off" in an upcoming A Song of Ice and Fire novel. The campaign garnered media attention and raised a total of $502,549.[168][169]
In 2017, Martin announced that he was funding The Miskatonic Scholarship. The Miskatonic Scholarship allows a writer of Lovecraftian cosmic horror to attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop, a six-week writing workshop held at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.[170][171]
Politics[edit]
Growing up, Martin avoided the draft to the Vietnam War by being a conscientious objector and did two years of alternative service. He generally opposes war and thought the Vietnam War was a "terrible mistake for America".[172]
While he did not endorse Barack Obama in 2008, Martin endorsed him for re-election in 2012 calling Obama the most intelligent president since Jimmy Carter.[173] In 2014, Martin endorsed Democratic Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico.[174]
In the midst of pressure to pull the 2014 feature film The Interview from theaters, the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which has been owned by Martin since 2013, decided to show the film. Theater manager Jon Bowman told the Santa Fe New Mexican, "Martin feels strongly about the First Amendment and the idea of artists having the ability to speak their minds and not having to worry about being targets."[175]
Immediately following Bernie Sanders' defeat in the U.S. Democratic primary elections, he supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general 2016 United States presidential election, and criticized Donald Trump during the election and following her defeat, commenting that Trump would "become the worst president in American history".[176][177][178] In response to fans of Martin who compared Trump favorably to characters from A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin doubled-down on his criticism of Trump by making the case to his fans that Trump shares many personality traits in common with King Joffrey, a near-universally hated character from the series, concluding that "Trump is a Grown-Up Joffrey."[179][180]
In May 2019, Martin endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020.[181]
