George RR Martin BBC at the Edinburgh Festivals

Thank you, all.

Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

My name is Stuart Kelly, I'm a writer and critic

and former judge of the Man Booker Prize.

And it is an absolute honour to be here with George RR Martin.

Now, I've been asked by the festival to say that the tent

is completely secure.

Apparently, some people have been rather worried that the tent

is flapping slightly. So...

LAUGHTER

If the winds of late summer blow, you will all be OK.

As I say, it's an incredible honour to be here with George.

He has been described as the American Tolkien,

the Shakespeare of fantasy.

A Song Of Ice And Fire is already longer...

LAUGHTER

..is already longer than Marcel Proust,

and has...and has many more sword fights and dragons

than A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.

We're going to have a chat together and then it's over to you.

I'm going to leave lots of time for questions.

I know we won't get through everyone, so my apologies in advance

if your question isn't selected.

Please put your hands together for George RR Martin.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Let me...

Let me say, about this issue of questions and assigning, two things.

Um, first of all, I write the books.

I know at a lot of events like this,

I get a lot of questions about the TV show.

Um, certainly, I have some connection with the TV show.

I wrote one episode.

But, really, the books are my thing, so I prefer more questions

about the books and less about who we are casting for season five.

Yeah, cos I heard it was going to be... No!

LAUGHTER

George, we're in Edinburgh and, reading the books, one thing

which struck me was the number of Scottish historical references.

I mean, you've talked before about the Wall and being at Hadrian's Wall

and thinking about what strange creatures might live

to the north of it. Well, here they are!

LAUGHTER

The Red Wedding is inspired in part by the Glencoe Massacre,

and you've talked a bit about...

- And the Black Dinner. - And the Black Dinner.

I took the two of them and put those together, yeah.

And, you know, you also have things such as...

You know, you've talked about Walter Scott and the chivalric romance,

about Nigel Tranter.

Tell me a bit about your relationship with Scotland.

Well, I don't know if I really have a relationship, perhaps a flirtation.

LAUGHTER

But, uh, I've...I've visited Scotland probably about a half-dozen times

now over the years.

The first time was in 1981.

I know my dear friend and sometime collaborator,

Lisa Tuttle, is here in the audience. There she is. And she, she...

although actually a Texan,

moved to England initially a number of years ago, in the late '70s.

And in 1981, I visited her.

And we travelled all over in England

and then we went up to Scotland, driving.

And we did hit Hadrian's Wall one day in 1981,

which was ten years before I even started writing this.

But we got there right at the end of the day.

All the tour buses had left.

Um, it was near sunset and we were climbing up on the wall just when

everybody else was leaving. And I remember standing there,

it was, like, October. It was a cold...cold day.

Not quite as cold and grey as this day is, in August!

LAUGHTER

But still pretty cold and grey.

And I stood on that wall and...

stared off into Scotland.

Well, I guess it's not Scotland any more.

It was Scotland once upon a time, but...

- Scot-ish. - LAUGHING: Yes!

And tried to think what it was like to be a Roman legionary from,

you know, southern Italy or Greece or even North Africa,

who had been posted there at the end of the world.

And it was sort of a profound feeling -

"I have to capture this in a book."

But fantasy is always bigger, so when it came time to write the books,

I made the Wall, you know, 100 times as high and much longer, and of...

made it of ice. Which would be much cooler.

LAUGHTER

I personally think If Scotland does secede,

the first thing you should do is build a gigantic wall of ice...

LAUGHTER

..between Scotland and England.

It would be a great tourist attraction and...

and then you could keep the English out, if you wanted!

Um, but, yeah, you mentioned Nigel Tranter,

and...I think it was on that same 1981 trip that I picked up

a few of his novels and read them.

Unfortunately, I never met the man. I would have enjoyed that.

I know he died a few years ago but continued to write well into his 90s.

An amazing number of books covering every aspect of Scottish history,

um, from the Dark Ages up through...

Well, I don't know if he quite reached the present,

- but he...he got pretty late. - Yeah.

They all have very unfortunate endings,

when the Scots lose and the heroes die horribly,

but up until that point,

they were all, you know, fascinating and engrossing books.

And that's where I heard about the Black Dinner for the first time.

That's where I heard about the Glencoe Massacre.

And, you know, I read a lot of history and historical fiction,

always, you know, with an eye of, "What can I pillage and use?"

And there was certainly a tremendous amount there that...

that could be used.

My wife is always saying, when I'm reading a new history book,

and, you know, I say, "You can't make this stuff up.

"Look at what happened here," and, you know, in...

..100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.

Was there something particular about the sort of bloodthirstiness

of much of Scottish history that you found particularly easy to

sort of mould into a fictional form?

HE LAUGHS

You know, I-I...

Scottish history is very bloody.

But then so is most of history.

I mean, what was different for me about Scottish history

was that it's extensively chronicled and it is chronicled in English.

You know? I've travelled...

As a child and a young man, we were poor, we never went anywhere,

so I had a very limited world.

But I've travelled fairly extensively since the '80s, in my adult years,

and I find myself in countries...

..that have great histories, particularly medieval histories,

which is my particular area of interest,

but the books have never been translated into English.

You know, so I'll be in Germany or Czechoslovakia or Romania

and I'll see some great book about the medieval history of Romania.

But it won't be in English,

and I don't, unfortunately, read Romanian.

So these things are denied me.

But English history and Scottish history,

to a lesser extent, French history, is, of course, very well chronicled

and I have read a ton of it.

I don't think it's particularly bloodier than

some of these other areas of the world.

It's just I have more access to it.

History, particularly medieval history,

is really written in blood, as I've said more than once. We've...

We've done some appalling things down through the centuries

to each other, and as bloody and terrible as our modern times are,

I do think, if you look at it...

If we take the long view and go all the way back to the ancient times,

there is some moral evolution going on.

The human race is making progress.

It may be painfully slow, so in the individual human lifetime,

you don't necessarily see the progress that you would like,

but in the long view, you can... it's pretty discernible.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the evolution

and progress of your own work. That...

Looking at the work from before A Song Of Ice And Fire,

it struck me that there were certain kinds of themes and concerns

and images which are coalescing

and crystallising in the books you're writing now.

Whether it was the story about the alien sect canonising Judas

and Judas having access to dragons, giving him power in that area,

or the dying of the light with the planet going into this cold

interstellar space and the 13 very distinct cultures that evolved on it,

or had visited it and took time there.

Or even something like Sandkings,

which I thought was absolutely masterful in the way in which

a grand conspiracy to cause economic damage and create warfare...

And I started thinking, you know, if fans were to read through

your work before A Song Of Ice And Fire, do you think

there would be hints about the ultimate direction of that series?

I don't know, but I certainly encourage people to try.

LAUGHTER

You know, I have a...

I do have quite a long body of work that predates Ice And Fire.

I started writing Game Of Thrones in 1991,

but I sold my first story in 1971.

So there are 20 years of other books - science fiction, horror,

occasional fantasy, short story - that predate Ice And Fire.

But I am startled by the fact...

I swear, at least half my readers think

that I came out of nowhere with A Song Of Ice And Fire

and they know nothing of the other work.

So I'm always trying to encourage people to read the other work.

Um, you know, I don't tend to think of...

..precursors or themes.

I mean, when I focus, I'm just telling one individual story,

and that's the story I want to tell.

But, certainly, there are periods of your life where you are...

..you're obsessed with certain...

things that have affected you, that you're thinking about

at that stage of your life.

And, again, if you take the long view, you can

see my early work in the '70s was predominantly science fiction.

It was, I think, a particularly romantic blend of science fiction.

In the early '80s, I started writing some horror stories.

Um, that, again, was probably Lisa's fault.

I visited her down in Texas while we were working on Windhaven,

and she was writing all these horror stories.

And I read them while... while I was hanging around her house

and said, "Ah, I can do some of this too." And I did.

And then I started mixing and matching,

which I always thought was interesting. I like to...

I like to break the rules. And you can certainly see that in my fantasy,

but you could also see it in some of these earlier works I did,

like Sandkings, which is a science fiction story,

but it's also a horror story.

Nightflyers, same thing.

You know, I was reading a lot of critical studies by then

by people who were...

Horror was becoming very popular in the '80s

and science fiction was waning a little.

And there were some critics pontificating about,

"Oh, these are two very different genres cos, you know,

"science fiction represents the intellect

"and the knowable universe and horror represents a universe,

"an inimicable universe, beyond our control."

So the two can never mix cos they are polar opposites.

So I promptly said, "Ha! I'll show him!

"I'll mix them up and come up with something that's both a good

"science fiction story and a good horror story."

So, I'm... I always have that sort of impulse

to try to do things that they say can't be done.

That's interesting in terms of breaking rules,

because it strikes me that one thing about fantasy is, in a genre where

anything can happen, you have to make quite strict rules for yourself.

Um, when you first started Ice And Fire,

were there certain rules that you thought,

"These will be absolutely rigid throughout the series,

"that magic is waning, that the politics has to be comprehensible?"

Well, I-I...

In some sense, you're always in dialogue

with the writers who go before you.

And, you know, in my case, people have called me the American Tolkien.

They've cited this thing, and Tolkien, of course,

was an enormous influence on me.

It's still a book that I revere, Lord Of The Rings.

I reread it every few years.

I first read it when I was 12 or 13 years old.

It had an enormous effect on me. Um...

So, in some sense, when I started this,

I was replying to Tolkien, but even more so, I think

I was replying to the Tolkien imitators who had followed him.

You know, I think modern genre fantasy... Fantasy, of course,

goes all the way back to as long as literature existed.

- I mean, you can... - Absolutely.

The Iliad, The Odyssey, Epic Of Gilgamesh, all fantasies.

But modern fantasy really begins with Tolkien,

the secondary-world fantasy that he made so popular.

And that was followed in the '70s and '80s

by a legion of Tolkien imitators who...

to my mind...

..took a lot of the elements that Tolkien used but cheapened them.

And didn't really think about them. And I...

There was this hunger for more stuff like Tolkien, I think,

on the part of the audience, but they were being sold...

you know, degraded goods here.

And I... Reading them, at least, glancing at some of them...

..the thought of, "No, this is not how it should be done.

"This is all wrong," you know, fastened itself in my head.

There was the Disneyland Middle Ages,

as I've referred to in some other talks I've given,

where the writers were taking the whole structure of medieval

times with castles and knights and princesses and all that,

but they were writing it from a very modern, 20th-century American

or perhaps British point of view.

And...it was more like a Renaissance fair than actual medieval times

and if you read somebody like Nigel Tranter

or...or Thomas B Costain,

another great historical novelist,

even the classics, like Sir Walter Scott,

you get a much more feel for what the Middle Ages actually was

than the Disneyland thing,

so I wanted to combine, just as I had combined science fiction and horror

with stories like Sandkings, I wanted to combine

the wonder and imagination of the traditional Tolkienist fantasy

with the grittiness and the realism of the best historical fiction

and produce something that could stand in both traditions.

And the moral realism, as well, of it, in that, you know,

there's no good orcs in Tolkien,

whereas one thing which I think stands out

with Ice And Fire is the moral realism.

Characters are constantly on a moral arc,

which vacillates across the books.

I've always...I've always been attracted to great characters,

I think, as long as I can remember.

What I call great characters, characters...

- Who might be the first? - ..who wrestle with the issues.

I mean, even in Tolkien, to my mind...

And Tolkien is not as black and white in some ways as people see him.

I mean, Boromir is one of my favourite characters in Tolkien.

He is basically a good man. He's basically a hero, but he...

he succumbs to the temptation of the ring.

He wants the power in order to save his country,

to do good for all the... He does a bad thing for all the right reasons.

Saruman is another great character

who starts out being a great wizard on...

fighting for what we consider the good side,

but then succumbs completely to the temptation and...

becomes a very dark character,

a deluded character, I think.

Gollum, again, a fascinatingly complex character who straddles...

These are the most interesting characters, I think,

in Lord Of The Rings

and characters have always fascinated me. You know, I, er...

I began, when I was a kid, as a comic-book fan.

I read a lot of comic books and the first words of mine

that were ever published were in Marvel Comics,

um...a Fantastic Four letter column,

Fantastic Four number 20,

a letter of praise about Fantastic Four number 17,

where basically I said, "Shakespeare, move over, Stan Lee has arrived."

LAUGHTER

And...I published a number of letters

in the Marvel letter columns of that age.

One of them... The comedian John Hodgman came up to me

with a Xerox of one at a Hollywood event

and it was a letter I'd written to The Avengers

about the issue in which

the character of Wonder Man was first introduced

and I just loved it. I mean,

the letter was a complete praise of this brilliant issue.

Now, those of you who are not comic-book geeks here, you know,

The Avengers, you know The Avengers, right? You've seen the movie

even if you didn't read the old comic books like I did in the day.

So, Wonder Man is this character who comes in and he joins The Avengers.

He's this great hero, he's really powerful,

he joins The Avengers, but he is secretly a bad guy

who has been planted in The Avengers to destroy them from within,

but when the moment comes where he is supposed to betray them

and destroy them, he has come to like them so much

by being a spy among them that he can't bring himself to do it.

Instead, he sacrifices himself and dies at the end of the issue.

And, of course, I loved this.

Even at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever it was,

everything about this issue appealed to me and I look at it and say,

"Well, there's my literary influence right there, it's Stan Lee!"

It's this great character who's, you know, you think he's good,

but really he's evil, but at the end he's really good,

but then he gives up his life and he dies for it.

Of course, they ruined it by bringing him back in later issues, but...

LAUGHTER

But, at the time I wrote the letter, I didn't know that,

I thought he died, so, you know.

So maybe Stan Lee is the greatest literary influence on me,

even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien or Sir Walter Scott

or any of them.

I'm going to open it up immediately to the audience.

Now, we've got some roving mics.

If we could see some hands and if we could get the mics very quickly

to that person there and to that person there.

Thank you.

Hello. I love the books, thank you for them.

Without giving anything away, which I'm sure you won't,

when you first started writing Ice And Fire,

had you decided how it was all going to end

and how many people would get killed off en route...

LAUGHTER

..and have you changed your mind about any of it

as you've continued to write?

I...I, er...

I did change my mind on small things occasionally, you know.

Writing leads you down certain roads and sometimes you get other ideas.

I mean, I've been working on this since 1991, as I say.

I'm not going to say I knew exactly, in 1991,

everything that was going to happen.

In fact, in 1991, I thought it was a trilogy.

LAUGHTER

So the tale has grown in the telling.

But I do know the broad strikes

and I have known those since roughly 1991

and I've known the major deaths that would occur

and who would ultimately survive

and what the fates of the survivors would be.

At least the major characters.

But there are important secondary characters,

including some that a lot of people in the audience probably like,

who have kind of grown up and sort of shoved their way into the narrative

and...and I don't necessarily know their fate,

or whether they are going to live or die.

I'll make that up as we go along and, er...

I do know at least two people who are going to die...

LAUGHTER

..because they just paid for the privilege.

I did this fundraiser for the wolf sanctuary in New Mexico

and there are two guys who paid 20,000 apiece

to be killed horribly in my books, so I have to...

I have to introduce these guys,

hopefully in a way that you won't notice,

I don't want to intrude on the books,

but I'll take their name and I'll tweak their name somehow

and then, you know, I'll dump them in a lake of acid or...

have their head chopped off.

People seem to enjoy this, and the wolves will benefit, so...

that's very cool.

I like wolves.

The person over here with the mic?

Hi, you have lots of great characters in your books.

Most of them, of mine, have died, unfortunately,

but when you are writing, which is your favourite character

and which one do you enjoy writing the most?

Um, I enjoy writing all of them,

but I think Tyrion is probably my favourite.

I have a lot of affection for Arya too, but really, all of them,

even the ones that are sort of despicable or unfortunate,

like Theon or Victarion.

You know, when I write them, I'm crawling inside their skin,

I'm looking at the world through their eyes, at least for...

the duration of writing the chapter, I have to identify with them.

So, you know, it's like walk a mile in my shoes

or walk 100 leagues in my shoes.

I kind of have to see the world through their eyes

and that builds up a certain understanding and affection of them.

One of the things I want to do with all my characters,

and this is part of this question of realistic characters,

is give them motivations for the things we do.

I mean, we...

we look at the world... and we see evil in the world,

or things that we consider evil.

I mean, I've been watching the news lately,

the stuff that's going on in Iraq and Syria,

this group Isis and things that they are doing certainly seems evil to me,

but then I've seen a documentary

where people have gone and interviewed these guys

and the Isis guys don't think they're evil.

They're not like the Red Skull or Dr Doom or Sauron.

They're not getting up in the morning

and saying, "Ha-ha-ha! What evil can I do today?"

They think what they're doing is heroic.

They have their own motivations for it, as deluded and twisted

and wrong as those motivations may seem to us.

And that's what I try to do when I write any character

who might be considered dark, is what are their motivations,

how do they see the world, what's their...

what's their culture, what's their ethical and moral values? So...

And there's one at the back, just here. Yeah.

It's interesting you're sat next to a Booker Prize judge

because, of course, Americans are now eligible for prizes like that,

but, I mean, the truth is, you probably won't be nominated

because of the genre you write in. I mean, how do you feel about that?

Does it annoy you that literary fiction is somehow

seen as better than what you write?

I'm not so sure!

Well... You know, I'm...

I've certainly been aware of this and, again, since I'm a kid.

Um...

And I take heart with the fact that it is changing. It is changing.

I mean, when I was, like, 12 and 13 years old,

I had teachers take books away from me,

science fiction books by Heinlein and Asimov and Tolkien,

take books away from me in school and say, "You're a smart kid,

"you get good grades, why are you reading this shit?" You know.

Well, they didn't use "shit". LAUGHTER

They were teachers, they said "trash".

You know, "Whet your mind,

"you should be reading Silas Marner, or something like that."

Um...

And, er, if...if I had been reading Silas Marner,

I probably would have stopped reading. Er...

But...

The, er...

There was a lot of prejudice against all genre fiction,

particularly against science fiction and fantasy

and it's still there, but it's not nearly what it was.

I mean, Michael Chabon has won the Pulitzer Prize.

Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about, basically,

a science-fiction nerd in his Oscar Wao book. We see...

Lord Of The Rings was voted the greatest novel of the 20th century

in the... Was it the Times or the Guardian or...?

- It was the Times. - One of them did a poll.

And I know many people were outraged by that,

but obviously many more people weren't outraged

because they voted for it. Er...

So, I think these things are breaking down.

It's an artificial distinction anyway.

Literary fiction in its present form is a genre itself. Um...

And we should...

We should recognise that through most of literary history,

this distinction did not exist.

I think if you really, you know, study literary history,

it all goes back to Robert Louis Stevenson

and his quarrel with Henry James and that was unfortunate.

It... It created this artificial division between popular culture

and real culture, between...

literature on one hand

and things that were just popular fiction on the other.

But enough time has passed that I think that's going away.

The real test is what books are going to survive, you know,

and I won't be around to know, but...

You know, Tolkien has certainly survived. It's...been a long time

since those books came out in the '30s and in the '50s

and we're still reading him, we're still reading him by the millions.

His story has survived,

his characters have entered the popular culture.

Will that be the case with mine? I don't know.

I think that's every writer's dream, but, er...

Maybe so.

But all you can do is write the best stories you can

and then put it in the hands of posterity and...

the fact that people are arguing about my books...

is a sign that I take very well, you know, because...

A writer's real enemy is obscurity. Um... I mean, I...

And I've been there.

I've had a long career, like 20 years before Ice And Fire.

I gave book signings where no-one came.

Now, you guys are all going to be queueing up

to get my signature here after this and...

But I remember sitting in malls behind a giant stack of my books

and two people came in in an hour and, you know,

asked me where the cookbooks were.

LAUGHTER

So, er, you know, it's better to have this debate, it's better

to have the books being noticed and read and talked about

and I'll take that.

It is changing quite dramatically.

David Mitchell's book on the Booker long list this year,

the fifth section of it is an epic fantasy battle

in the Chapel Of The Dusk between the Anchorites and the Atemporals.

Now, that would not have been sort of seen as Booker material

even ten years ago.

To the person at the back that's got the mic there.

Hi. I was wondering if you could tell us about your process

of keeping plot points and characters continuous

throughout all the books.

Cos the world is so large and there are so many characters,

I've always been interested to know how you keep track of them all.

With increasing difficulty. LAUGHTER

You know, I... I don't have a good answer for that. How do I do it?

I just do it as best I can.

I have charts, I have genealogies,

um, but most of it is in my head.

Um...

I have sometimes said, only half jokingly,

that it's because I have a brain defect of some sort. I...

The brain synapses that most people use to keep track of real life,

I use to Westeros and my characters,

so I will meet all of you when you come by

and then, if I meet you tomorrow, I won't know who the hell you are

because I'll have forgotten you already.

I apologise. It's nothing personal, but I'm using those...

those brains synapses,

to remember some obscure character

who was in the second book and had two lines.

LAUGHTER

I do think I have...

We have a new book coming out in October, The World Of Ice And Fire,

which I've been working on with my friends

Elio Garcia and Linda Antonssen for some years.

It was supposed to be out, like, three years ago,

like many of my books.

LAUGHTER But it's the history of Westeros

and the lands beyond and it's a beautiful coffee-table book.

It will be out in October.

And that's got a tremendous amount of new history and characters

and names that I have to keep track of.

Er, but..

I don't know how I do it, but hopefully I will continue to do it,

at least for two more books.

To this person here.

I've got a big...

I've got a big soft spot for villains,

or what we call villains broadly,

in fiction and in non-fiction.

It's probably why Tywin is my favourite character

and I've got a big soft spot for Victarion as well

because he's so self-serving and he's so kind of vicious.

Do you get...

Like you say that Tyrion and Arya are more your...

your kind of favourite characters who you have a sort of bond with.

Do you get a sense of fun

when you write the characters who are more sort of evil, if we say broadly?

Well, you know, writing a villain can be fun,

I mean, there's no doubt about it,

having a really nasty piece of work can be amusing to write about.

Even if they are doing appalling things,

maybe the more appalling the better.

That said, even those characters, I try to give some...

some dimension to and provide, as I said earlier, the motivations for.

I mean, Tywin Lannister did not think he was evil

and, if you read The World Of Ice And Fire

and The History Of The Westerlands,

you'll see the situation that he came out of with his family

and what he was facing and why he is the person that he is.

I also think, you know, after the Red Wedding,

there's the infamous exchange between Tyrion and Tywin,

where Tywin asks the question, you know, why is it...

Why is it more moral to kill 10,000 people in a battle

than a dozen at dinner? Er...

Which, to my mind, is a good question

that I really wanted my readers to think about.

Um, because, you know, that is the philosophy of our world

and most of history here, that if we...if we...

you know, kill a dozen people at dinner, that's a horrible murder,

but it's very honourable to march to war

and fight a major battle where 10,000 die

and Tywin is probably right to be questioning that.

I'm not saying that...

that was a good thing,

but I think it's at least worth thinking about, debating.

Um...

I'm not a writer who has a lot of answers.

I am a writer who likes to ask questions

and to make my readers ask the questions of themselves

and to argue with each other.

You know, I don't often follow the...

all the sites online that have grown up around my books.

I did once upon a time, way back in the '90s,

when the first ones came up, Dragonstone from Australia,

an Australian named Peter Gibbs ran that,

and I was really thrilled because, you know,

I'd been through all those years of nobody coming up to my signings

and all that, and now, here there was this new interweb thing

and there were sites devoted to my books and people arguing about them.

Pretty soon it got so big, I said,

"You know, I can't follow this any more and I'd better not,"

but I'm still aware of their existence out there

and they're huge, they're gigantic

and they argue constantly about the characters in the books.

And...

That pleases me no end

because it means I'm successfully asking the questions

and people are responding to these characters as if they were real.

People were saying, "That Tywin... Tywin is horrible,

"he's Adolf Hitler." "No, no, Tywin really has a good point."

And they're clashing about Tywin

and, to my mind, that's a sign

that I've created a fully fleshed character

and not just a black piece of cardboard.

There are a lot of strong female characters in Ice And Fire.

Are there any women from history

that you have been particularly inspired by?

Um... Well, I'm... I've been inspired...

There are strong women through history. Um...

And maybe not so much in fantasy.

There are some fantasies out there...

And you have to remember when I talk about it, too,

that there's a lot of fantasies come after Ice And Fire,

since I've begun, so...

some of the generalisations I'm going to make

are really specifically from Tolkien to the...

to the mid, early '90s, when I started writing this book, but...

You know, I enjoyed Xena The Warrior Princess,

that was a lot of fun to watch,

but I didn't think it was actually an accurate portrayal

of a woman warrior and what she would have to be like.

I sort of created Brienne of Tarth as an answer to that,

but I was also inspired by people like Eleanor of Aquitaine and, er...

And not so much Joan of Arc,

although I was certainly aware of him,

but some of the queens of Scottish history,

well, from Lady Macbeth on down, were strong women who didn't

necessarily put on chainmail bikinis and go forth to fight in battles,

but exercised immense power by other ways.

Mary Queen of Scots was

an idiot, but... LAUGHTER

..but was certainly a strong-willed woman

and she ran up against an even stronger and rather smarter woman

and came out on the losing end there.

But still a fascinating character in her own way

and the struggles that she went and some of her predecessors,

some of the other Scottish queens who, er...ruled as regents from...

Those of you who know your Scottish history know

that Scotland kept getting stuck with, like, three-year-old kings

and these long periods of regencies

where all the lords would fight over the regency

and usually the queen was in the middle of that,

so, you know, I did want to reflect...different types of women.

One of the things that I have a great advantage of

is with my cast of characters

because I have so many characters,

that in something like writing women,

I can have strong women and weak women,

I can have noble women and selfish women,

I can have smart women and stupid women,

which is true of any group, I think, and is the way to...

Cos we're all different. I think your problem comes when you...

when you stereotype a group as all being kind of the same,

especially if you give them negative characteristics.

Um, when, actually, all groups that I know of...

Yes, we're influenced by our culture

and there are certain cultural similarities

and we fulfil certain societal roles,

but the individual differences are very important

and we get very different personalities,

even within the same culture and society, and I try to reflect that.

But it has been... The number of women who have liked my books

is a great source of satisfaction to me

and many of my signings are more women than men

and they say that they do like various of my women characters

and that's...

That's cool. I'm very pleased by that.

Well, in terms of reading in general,

it tends to be more women than men, unfortunately.

Yes, that's... That's true, too.

Um, there's, um...

There is a lot of fan theories out there about various things

that are going to be happening in your books

and one of them in particular about someone's parentage

that I'm not going to go into. LAUGHTER

But do you have a desire to surprise your audience,

where, if you hear a particular prevailing fan theory,

you might want to change your mind about things...in general?

INTERVIEWER: It's kind of the Lost paradigm, isn't it?

The Lost producers did look at what fans were saying

and then deliberately take a swerve.

Yeah, I...I've wrestled with this issue

because I do want to surprise my readers.

I hate predictable fiction as a reader.

I don't want to write predictable fiction.

I want to surprise and delight my reader

and take the story in directions they didn't see coming.

But...

You can't change the plans and that is one of the reasons...

I mentioned that, you know,

I used to read some of these fan boards

back in the '90s and the early '00s, when they were new

and then I stopped doing that because...

Well, for a variety of reasons.

One is because I didn't have the time, two is...

..this very issue of...

so many readers were reading the books with so much attention

that they were throwing up some theories

and a lot of the theories were amusing bullshit...

LAUGHTER ..but very creative,

but some of the theories were right.

You know, the readers, at least one or two readers,

had correctly put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues

that I had planted in the... in the books and...

came to the right solution. So what do I do then? Do I change it?

And I wrestled with that issue

and I think changing it would have been a disaster.

I mean, because the clues were there.

I'm planting all these clues that the butler did it

and then you're halfway through the series

and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it

and you say, "Hmm, OK, the chambermaid did it." Well...

you've got all these clues that are pointing at the butler

that somehow you have to retroactively deal with or something.

No, you can't do that,

so I'm just going to go ahead

and some of my readers who don't read the boards,

of which, thankfully, there are still hundreds of thousands,

will still be surprised and other readers will say,

"See? I said that four years ago. I said the butler did it.

"I'm really smarter than you guys." LAUGHTER

And that's just the way you have to do it here.

This young lady has had her hand up for some time,

so let's give her a chance.

That will be the last one, I'm afraid.

OK, you right there, you with the... Yeah.

Here comes the... HE CHUCKLES

You said before about wanting to write characters

which are morally grey.

Which characters in the book do you think are closest

to having absolute morality, one way or the other?

And do you think it's a good thing to have some characters like that?

A good question to end on.

Which characters are closer to having absolute morality?

Was that the question?

- Yes. - Um...

Well, I think someone like Brienne

has started with a very strong moral base,

a very strong sense of what she believes in

and principles that we would consider good, but, of course,

she is now being exposed to the real world in a way she wasn't.

She led a fairly sheltered life.

So the question is, what will she be at the end of it? You know.

And you can see a character like Jaime

who's swinging back and forth the other ways, or Tyrion.

You know, I like to take all of these characters and,

wherever they start from, and change them and subject them to...

to traumatic and difficult events that will shake their world views

and maybe cause them to re-examine that.

Even Ned Stark...

..compromised his honour in the last act of his before he died

by confessing to crimes he had not committed, so...

Um...

There is very little absolute in the world of Ice And Fire.

This has been the most fabulous hour.

I'm glad to know that if you do read all of the internet,

you will get the right answers at some point.

LAUGHTER

All I can say is, this has been the youngest-looking audience

since I chaired Neil Gaiman at the Book Festival.

LAUGHTER

It has been an absolute pleasure and I'm sure you're going to want

to give George a huge round of applause.

Thank you all for coming.