Browse content similar to George RR Martin. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
Thank you, all. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:11 | |
Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. | 0:00:11 | 0:00:13 | |
Welcome to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
My name is Stuart Kelly, I'm a writer and critic | 0:00:15 | 0:00:18 | |
and former judge of the Man Booker Prize. | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
And it is an absolute honour to be here with George RR Martin. | 0:00:21 | 0:00:26 | |
Now, I've been asked by the festival to say that the tent | 0:00:26 | 0:00:30 | |
is completely secure. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:31 | |
Apparently, some people have been rather worried that the tent | 0:00:31 | 0:00:33 | |
is flapping slightly. So... | 0:00:33 | 0:00:35 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:00:35 | 0:00:37 | |
If the winds of late summer blow, you will all be OK. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
As I say, it's an incredible honour to be here with George. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
He has been described as the American Tolkien, | 0:00:44 | 0:00:47 | |
the Shakespeare of fantasy. | 0:00:47 | 0:00:49 | |
A Song Of Ice And Fire is already longer... | 0:00:49 | 0:00:52 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:00:52 | 0:00:53 | |
..is already longer than Marcel Proust, | 0:00:53 | 0:00:56 | |
and has...and has many more sword fights and dragons | 0:00:56 | 0:00:59 | |
than A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
We're going to have a chat together and then it's over to you. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:04 | |
I'm going to leave lots of time for questions. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
I know we won't get through everyone, so my apologies in advance | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
if your question isn't selected. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:11 | |
Please put your hands together for George RR Martin. | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
Let me... | 0:01:25 | 0:01:26 | |
Let me say, about this issue of questions and assigning, two things. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:30 | |
Um, first of all, I write the books. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:35 | |
I know at a lot of events like this, | 0:01:35 | 0:01:36 | |
I get a lot of questions about the TV show. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:39 | |
Um, certainly, I have some connection with the TV show. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
I wrote one episode. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:43 | |
But, really, the books are my thing, so I prefer more questions | 0:01:43 | 0:01:46 | |
about the books and less about who we are casting for season five. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:51 | |
Yeah, cos I heard it was going to be... No! | 0:01:51 | 0:01:53 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:01:53 | 0:01:55 | |
George, we're in Edinburgh and, reading the books, one thing | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
which struck me was the number of Scottish historical references. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:05 | |
I mean, you've talked before about the Wall and being at Hadrian's Wall | 0:02:05 | 0:02:09 | |
and thinking about what strange creatures might live | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
to the north of it. Well, here they are! | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:02:14 | 0:02:16 | |
The Red Wedding is inspired in part by the Glencoe Massacre, | 0:02:16 | 0:02:20 | |
and you've talked a bit about... | 0:02:20 | 0:02:21 | |
- And the Black Dinner. - And the Black Dinner. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:23 | |
I took the two of them and put those together, yeah. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:26 | |
And, you know, you also have things such as... | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
You know, you've talked about Walter Scott and the chivalric romance, | 0:02:29 | 0:02:32 | |
about Nigel Tranter. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
Tell me a bit about your relationship with Scotland. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:36 | |
Well, I don't know if I really have a relationship, perhaps a flirtation. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:02:41 | 0:02:43 | |
But, uh, I've...I've visited Scotland probably about a half-dozen times | 0:02:43 | 0:02:48 | |
now over the years. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:49 | |
The first time was in 1981. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
I know my dear friend and sometime collaborator, | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
Lisa Tuttle, is here in the audience. There she is. And she, she... | 0:02:55 | 0:02:59 | |
although actually a Texan, | 0:02:59 | 0:03:01 | |
moved to England initially a number of years ago, in the late '70s. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:06 | |
And in 1981, I visited her. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
And we travelled all over in England | 0:03:09 | 0:03:12 | |
and then we went up to Scotland, driving. | 0:03:12 | 0:03:15 | |
And we did hit Hadrian's Wall one day in 1981, | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
which was ten years before I even started writing this. | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
But we got there right at the end of the day. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
All the tour buses had left. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
Um, it was near sunset and we were climbing up on the wall just when | 0:03:27 | 0:03:32 | |
everybody else was leaving. And I remember standing there, | 0:03:32 | 0:03:34 | |
it was, like, October. It was a cold...cold day. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:38 | |
Not quite as cold and grey as this day is, in August! | 0:03:38 | 0:03:41 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:03:41 | 0:03:43 | |
But still pretty cold and grey. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:45 | |
And I stood on that wall and... | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
stared off into Scotland. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
Well, I guess it's not Scotland any more. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:54 | |
It was Scotland once upon a time, but... | 0:03:54 | 0:03:56 | |
- Scot-ish. - LAUGHING: Yes! | 0:03:56 | 0:03:58 | |
And tried to think what it was like to be a Roman legionary from, | 0:03:58 | 0:04:01 | |
you know, southern Italy or Greece or even North Africa, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:06 | |
who had been posted there at the end of the world. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:09 | |
And it was sort of a profound feeling - | 0:04:09 | 0:04:10 | |
"I have to capture this in a book." | 0:04:10 | 0:04:12 | |
But fantasy is always bigger, so when it came time to write the books, | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
I made the Wall, you know, 100 times as high and much longer, and of... | 0:04:16 | 0:04:23 | |
made it of ice. Which would be much cooler. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:25 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:04:25 | 0:04:27 | |
I personally think If Scotland does secede, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:29 | |
the first thing you should do is build a gigantic wall of ice... | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:04:32 | 0:04:33 | |
..between Scotland and England. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:35 | |
It would be a great tourist attraction and... | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
and then you could keep the English out, if you wanted! | 0:04:38 | 0:04:42 | |
Um, but, yeah, you mentioned Nigel Tranter, | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
and...I think it was on that same 1981 trip that I picked up | 0:04:45 | 0:04:51 | |
a few of his novels and read them. | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
Unfortunately, I never met the man. I would have enjoyed that. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
I know he died a few years ago but continued to write well into his 90s. | 0:04:57 | 0:05:02 | |
An amazing number of books covering every aspect of Scottish history, | 0:05:02 | 0:05:07 | |
um, from the Dark Ages up through... | 0:05:07 | 0:05:11 | |
Well, I don't know if he quite reached the present, | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
- but he...he got pretty late. - Yeah. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:16 | |
They all have very unfortunate endings, | 0:05:16 | 0:05:18 | |
when the Scots lose and the heroes die horribly, | 0:05:18 | 0:05:22 | |
but up until that point, | 0:05:22 | 0:05:24 | |
they were all, you know, fascinating and engrossing books. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
And that's where I heard about the Black Dinner for the first time. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
That's where I heard about the Glencoe Massacre. | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
And, you know, I read a lot of history and historical fiction, | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
always, you know, with an eye of, "What can I pillage and use?" | 0:05:37 | 0:05:41 | |
And there was certainly a tremendous amount there that... | 0:05:41 | 0:05:45 | |
that could be used. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:47 | |
My wife is always saying, when I'm reading a new history book, | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
and, you know, I say, "You can't make this stuff up. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:53 | |
"Look at what happened here," and, you know, in... | 0:05:53 | 0:05:56 | |
..100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
Was there something particular about the sort of bloodthirstiness | 0:06:01 | 0:06:05 | |
of much of Scottish history that you found particularly easy to | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
sort of mould into a fictional form? | 0:06:08 | 0:06:10 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:06:10 | 0:06:12 | |
You know, I-I... | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
Scottish history is very bloody. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:18 | |
But then so is most of history. | 0:06:18 | 0:06:20 | |
I mean, what was different for me about Scottish history | 0:06:20 | 0:06:23 | |
was that it's extensively chronicled and it is chronicled in English. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
You know? I've travelled... | 0:06:27 | 0:06:30 | |
As a child and a young man, we were poor, we never went anywhere, | 0:06:30 | 0:06:35 | |
so I had a very limited world. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:37 | |
But I've travelled fairly extensively since the '80s, in my adult years, | 0:06:37 | 0:06:42 | |
and I find myself in countries... | 0:06:42 | 0:06:44 | |
..that have great histories, particularly medieval histories, | 0:06:45 | 0:06:48 | |
which is my particular area of interest, | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
but the books have never been translated into English. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:52 | |
You know, so I'll be in Germany or Czechoslovakia or Romania | 0:06:52 | 0:06:57 | |
and I'll see some great book about the medieval history of Romania. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:01 | |
But it won't be in English, | 0:07:01 | 0:07:03 | |
and I don't, unfortunately, read Romanian. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:05 | |
So these things are denied me. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
But English history and Scottish history, | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
to a lesser extent, French history, is, of course, very well chronicled | 0:07:10 | 0:07:13 | |
and I have read a ton of it. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:15 | |
I don't think it's particularly bloodier than | 0:07:15 | 0:07:17 | |
some of these other areas of the world. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:19 | |
It's just I have more access to it. | 0:07:19 | 0:07:22 | |
History, particularly medieval history, | 0:07:22 | 0:07:24 | |
is really written in blood, as I've said more than once. We've... | 0:07:24 | 0:07:29 | |
We've done some appalling things down through the centuries | 0:07:29 | 0:07:32 | |
to each other, and as bloody and terrible as our modern times are, | 0:07:32 | 0:07:37 | |
I do think, if you look at it... | 0:07:37 | 0:07:39 | |
If we take the long view and go all the way back to the ancient times, | 0:07:39 | 0:07:44 | |
there is some moral evolution going on. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:48 | |
The human race is making progress. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:50 | |
It may be painfully slow, so in the individual human lifetime, | 0:07:50 | 0:07:54 | |
you don't necessarily see the progress that you would like, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
but in the long view, you can... it's pretty discernible. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
I'd like to talk a little bit about the evolution | 0:08:01 | 0:08:03 | |
and progress of your own work. That... | 0:08:03 | 0:08:05 | |
Looking at the work from before A Song Of Ice And Fire, | 0:08:05 | 0:08:10 | |
it struck me that there were certain kinds of themes and concerns | 0:08:10 | 0:08:14 | |
and images which are coalescing | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
and crystallising in the books you're writing now. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:20 | |
Whether it was the story about the alien sect canonising Judas | 0:08:20 | 0:08:25 | |
and Judas having access to dragons, giving him power in that area, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:30 | |
or the dying of the light with the planet going into this cold | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
interstellar space and the 13 very distinct cultures that evolved on it, | 0:08:34 | 0:08:38 | |
or had visited it and took time there. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:41 | |
Or even something like Sandkings, | 0:08:41 | 0:08:43 | |
which I thought was absolutely masterful in the way in which | 0:08:43 | 0:08:46 | |
a grand conspiracy to cause economic damage and create warfare... | 0:08:46 | 0:08:50 | |
And I started thinking, you know, if fans were to read through | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
your work before A Song Of Ice And Fire, do you think | 0:08:53 | 0:08:57 | |
there would be hints about the ultimate direction of that series? | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
I don't know, but I certainly encourage people to try. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:09:06 | 0:09:08 | |
You know, I have a... | 0:09:11 | 0:09:13 | |
I do have quite a long body of work that predates Ice And Fire. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:18 | |
I started writing Game Of Thrones in 1991, | 0:09:18 | 0:09:22 | |
but I sold my first story in 1971. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
So there are 20 years of other books - science fiction, horror, | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
occasional fantasy, short story - that predate Ice And Fire. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:32 | |
But I am startled by the fact... | 0:09:32 | 0:09:34 | |
I swear, at least half my readers think | 0:09:34 | 0:09:36 | |
that I came out of nowhere with A Song Of Ice And Fire | 0:09:36 | 0:09:39 | |
and they know nothing of the other work. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
So I'm always trying to encourage people to read the other work. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:45 | |
Um, you know, I don't tend to think of... | 0:09:45 | 0:09:48 | |
..precursors or themes. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:51 | |
I mean, when I focus, I'm just telling one individual story, | 0:09:51 | 0:09:54 | |
and that's the story I want to tell. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:56 | |
But, certainly, there are periods of your life where you are... | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
..you're obsessed with certain... | 0:10:01 | 0:10:04 | |
things that have affected you, that you're thinking about | 0:10:04 | 0:10:06 | |
at that stage of your life. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:08 | |
And, again, if you take the long view, you can | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
see my early work in the '70s was predominantly science fiction. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:17 | |
It was, I think, a particularly romantic blend of science fiction. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:21 | |
In the early '80s, I started writing some horror stories. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:27 | |
Um, that, again, was probably Lisa's fault. | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
I visited her down in Texas while we were working on Windhaven, | 0:10:30 | 0:10:33 | |
and she was writing all these horror stories. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:35 | |
And I read them while... while I was hanging around her house | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
and said, "Ah, I can do some of this too." And I did. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
And then I started mixing and matching, | 0:10:41 | 0:10:43 | |
which I always thought was interesting. I like to... | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
I like to break the rules. And you can certainly see that in my fantasy, | 0:10:47 | 0:10:52 | |
but you could also see it in some of these earlier works I did, | 0:10:52 | 0:10:57 | |
like Sandkings, which is a science fiction story, | 0:10:57 | 0:11:00 | |
but it's also a horror story. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:02 | |
Nightflyers, same thing. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:03 | |
You know, I was reading a lot of critical studies by then | 0:11:03 | 0:11:06 | |
by people who were... | 0:11:06 | 0:11:08 | |
Horror was becoming very popular in the '80s | 0:11:08 | 0:11:10 | |
and science fiction was waning a little. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
And there were some critics pontificating about, | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
"Oh, these are two very different genres cos, you know, | 0:11:15 | 0:11:17 | |
"science fiction represents the intellect | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
"and the knowable universe and horror represents a universe, | 0:11:20 | 0:11:23 | |
"an inimicable universe, beyond our control." | 0:11:23 | 0:11:26 | |
So the two can never mix cos they are polar opposites. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:30 | |
So I promptly said, "Ha! I'll show him! | 0:11:30 | 0:11:33 | |
"I'll mix them up and come up with something that's both a good | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
"science fiction story and a good horror story." | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
So, I'm... I always have that sort of impulse | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
to try to do things that they say can't be done. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:45 | |
That's interesting in terms of breaking rules, | 0:11:45 | 0:11:48 | |
because it strikes me that one thing about fantasy is, in a genre where | 0:11:48 | 0:11:52 | |
anything can happen, you have to make quite strict rules for yourself. | 0:11:52 | 0:11:56 | |
Um, when you first started Ice And Fire, | 0:11:56 | 0:11:59 | |
were there certain rules that you thought, | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
"These will be absolutely rigid throughout the series, | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
"that magic is waning, that the politics has to be comprehensible?" | 0:12:05 | 0:12:10 | |
Well, I-I... | 0:12:12 | 0:12:13 | |
In some sense, you're always in dialogue | 0:12:15 | 0:12:18 | |
with the writers who go before you. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:20 | |
And, you know, in my case, people have called me the American Tolkien. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:25 | |
They've cited this thing, and Tolkien, of course, | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
was an enormous influence on me. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:29 | |
It's still a book that I revere, Lord Of The Rings. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
I reread it every few years. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:34 | |
I first read it when I was 12 or 13 years old. | 0:12:34 | 0:12:36 | |
It had an enormous effect on me. Um... | 0:12:36 | 0:12:39 | |
So, in some sense, when I started this, | 0:12:41 | 0:12:43 | |
I was replying to Tolkien, but even more so, I think | 0:12:43 | 0:12:46 | |
I was replying to the Tolkien imitators who had followed him. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:50 | |
You know, I think modern genre fantasy... Fantasy, of course, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
goes all the way back to as long as literature existed. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
- I mean, you can... - Absolutely. | 0:12:57 | 0:12:58 | |
The Iliad, The Odyssey, Epic Of Gilgamesh, all fantasies. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:04 | |
But modern fantasy really begins with Tolkien, | 0:13:04 | 0:13:07 | |
the secondary-world fantasy that he made so popular. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:11 | |
And that was followed in the '70s and '80s | 0:13:11 | 0:13:15 | |
by a legion of Tolkien imitators who... | 0:13:15 | 0:13:18 | |
to my mind... | 0:13:18 | 0:13:20 | |
..took a lot of the elements that Tolkien used but cheapened them. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:26 | |
And didn't really think about them. And I... | 0:13:26 | 0:13:30 | |
There was this hunger for more stuff like Tolkien, I think, | 0:13:30 | 0:13:33 | |
on the part of the audience, but they were being sold... | 0:13:33 | 0:13:38 | |
you know, degraded goods here. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:40 | |
And I... Reading them, at least, glancing at some of them... | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
..the thought of, "No, this is not how it should be done. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:50 | |
"This is all wrong," you know, fastened itself in my head. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:55 | |
There was the Disneyland Middle Ages, | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
as I've referred to in some other talks I've given, | 0:13:57 | 0:14:01 | |
where the writers were taking the whole structure of medieval | 0:14:01 | 0:14:05 | |
times with castles and knights and princesses and all that, | 0:14:05 | 0:14:10 | |
but they were writing it from a very modern, 20th-century American | 0:14:10 | 0:14:15 | |
or perhaps British point of view. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
And...it was more like a Renaissance fair than actual medieval times | 0:14:18 | 0:14:23 | |
and if you read somebody like Nigel Tranter | 0:14:23 | 0:14:27 | |
or...or Thomas B Costain, | 0:14:27 | 0:14:30 | |
another great historical novelist, | 0:14:30 | 0:14:33 | |
even the classics, like Sir Walter Scott, | 0:14:33 | 0:14:37 | |
you get a much more feel for what the Middle Ages actually was | 0:14:37 | 0:14:42 | |
than the Disneyland thing, | 0:14:42 | 0:14:44 | |
so I wanted to combine, just as I had combined science fiction and horror | 0:14:44 | 0:14:49 | |
with stories like Sandkings, I wanted to combine | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
the wonder and imagination of the traditional Tolkienist fantasy | 0:14:52 | 0:14:56 | |
with the grittiness and the realism of the best historical fiction | 0:14:56 | 0:15:01 | |
and produce something that could stand in both traditions. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
And the moral realism, as well, of it, in that, you know, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:08 | |
there's no good orcs in Tolkien, | 0:15:08 | 0:15:10 | |
whereas one thing which I think stands out | 0:15:10 | 0:15:13 | |
with Ice And Fire is the moral realism. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
Characters are constantly on a moral arc, | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
which vacillates across the books. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:20 | |
I've always...I've always been attracted to great characters, | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
I think, as long as I can remember. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:27 | |
What I call great characters, characters... | 0:15:27 | 0:15:29 | |
- Who might be the first? - ..who wrestle with the issues. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:31 | |
I mean, even in Tolkien, to my mind... | 0:15:31 | 0:15:34 | |
And Tolkien is not as black and white in some ways as people see him. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:40 | |
I mean, Boromir is one of my favourite characters in Tolkien. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:43 | |
He is basically a good man. He's basically a hero, but he... | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
he succumbs to the temptation of the ring. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
He wants the power in order to save his country, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
to do good for all the... He does a bad thing for all the right reasons. | 0:15:50 | 0:15:53 | |
Saruman is another great character | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
who starts out being a great wizard on... | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
fighting for what we consider the good side, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:02 | |
but then succumbs completely to the temptation and... | 0:16:02 | 0:16:05 | |
becomes a very dark character, | 0:16:05 | 0:16:10 | |
a deluded character, I think. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:12 | |
Gollum, again, a fascinatingly complex character who straddles... | 0:16:12 | 0:16:18 | |
These are the most interesting characters, I think, | 0:16:18 | 0:16:20 | |
in Lord Of The Rings | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
and characters have always fascinated me. You know, I, er... | 0:16:22 | 0:16:28 | |
I began, when I was a kid, as a comic-book fan. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:32 | |
I read a lot of comic books and the first words of mine | 0:16:32 | 0:16:36 | |
that were ever published were in Marvel Comics, | 0:16:36 | 0:16:40 | |
um...a Fantastic Four letter column, | 0:16:40 | 0:16:43 | |
Fantastic Four number 20, | 0:16:43 | 0:16:45 | |
a letter of praise about Fantastic Four number 17, | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
where basically I said, "Shakespeare, move over, Stan Lee has arrived." | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:16:52 | 0:16:54 | |
And...I published a number of letters | 0:16:54 | 0:16:58 | |
in the Marvel letter columns of that age. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:00 | |
One of them... The comedian John Hodgman came up to me | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
with a Xerox of one at a Hollywood event | 0:17:03 | 0:17:07 | |
and it was a letter I'd written to The Avengers | 0:17:07 | 0:17:09 | |
about the issue in which | 0:17:09 | 0:17:11 | |
the character of Wonder Man was first introduced | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
and I just loved it. I mean, | 0:17:14 | 0:17:15 | |
the letter was a complete praise of this brilliant issue. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:19 | |
Now, those of you who are not comic-book geeks here, you know, | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
The Avengers, you know The Avengers, right? You've seen the movie | 0:17:22 | 0:17:24 | |
even if you didn't read the old comic books like I did in the day. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
So, Wonder Man is this character who comes in and he joins The Avengers. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:33 | |
He's this great hero, he's really powerful, | 0:17:33 | 0:17:35 | |
he joins The Avengers, but he is secretly a bad guy | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
who has been planted in The Avengers to destroy them from within, | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
but when the moment comes where he is supposed to betray them | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
and destroy them, he has come to like them so much | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
by being a spy among them that he can't bring himself to do it. | 0:17:48 | 0:17:51 | |
Instead, he sacrifices himself and dies at the end of the issue. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
And, of course, I loved this. | 0:17:55 | 0:17:57 | |
Even at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever it was, | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
everything about this issue appealed to me and I look at it and say, | 0:17:59 | 0:18:02 | |
"Well, there's my literary influence right there, it's Stan Lee!" | 0:18:02 | 0:18:06 | |
It's this great character who's, you know, you think he's good, | 0:18:06 | 0:18:10 | |
but really he's evil, but at the end he's really good, | 0:18:10 | 0:18:13 | |
but then he gives up his life and he dies for it. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:15 | |
Of course, they ruined it by bringing him back in later issues, but... | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:18:18 | 0:18:19 | |
But, at the time I wrote the letter, I didn't know that, | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
I thought he died, so, you know. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:24 | |
So maybe Stan Lee is the greatest literary influence on me, | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien or Sir Walter Scott | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
or any of them. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:31 | |
I'm going to open it up immediately to the audience. | 0:18:31 | 0:18:34 | |
Now, we've got some roving mics. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:36 | |
If we could see some hands and if we could get the mics very quickly | 0:18:36 | 0:18:40 | |
to that person there and to that person there. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:43 | |
Thank you. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:45 | |
Hello. I love the books, thank you for them. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
Without giving anything away, which I'm sure you won't, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
when you first started writing Ice And Fire, | 0:18:51 | 0:18:53 | |
had you decided how it was all going to end | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
and how many people would get killed off en route... | 0:18:56 | 0:18:59 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:18:59 | 0:19:01 | |
..and have you changed your mind about any of it | 0:19:01 | 0:19:03 | |
as you've continued to write? | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
I...I, er... | 0:19:05 | 0:19:06 | |
I did change my mind on small things occasionally, you know. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:12 | |
Writing leads you down certain roads and sometimes you get other ideas. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:18 | |
I mean, I've been working on this since 1991, as I say. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
I'm not going to say I knew exactly, in 1991, | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
everything that was going to happen. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
In fact, in 1991, I thought it was a trilogy. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:28 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:19:28 | 0:19:30 | |
So the tale has grown in the telling. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:33 | |
But I do know the broad strikes | 0:19:33 | 0:19:35 | |
and I have known those since roughly 1991 | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
and I've known the major deaths that would occur | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
and who would ultimately survive | 0:19:41 | 0:19:43 | |
and what the fates of the survivors would be. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
At least the major characters. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:48 | |
But there are important secondary characters, | 0:19:48 | 0:19:50 | |
including some that a lot of people in the audience probably like, | 0:19:50 | 0:19:54 | |
who have kind of grown up and sort of shoved their way into the narrative | 0:19:54 | 0:19:59 | |
and...and I don't necessarily know their fate, | 0:19:59 | 0:20:03 | |
or whether they are going to live or die. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:07 | |
I'll make that up as we go along and, er... | 0:20:07 | 0:20:11 | |
I do know at least two people who are going to die... | 0:20:13 | 0:20:16 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:20:16 | 0:20:18 | |
..because they just paid for the privilege. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:20 | |
I did this fundraiser for the wolf sanctuary in New Mexico | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
and there are two guys who paid 20,000 apiece | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
to be killed horribly in my books, so I have to... | 0:20:26 | 0:20:30 | |
I have to introduce these guys, | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
hopefully in a way that you won't notice, | 0:20:33 | 0:20:34 | |
I don't want to intrude on the books, | 0:20:34 | 0:20:36 | |
but I'll take their name and I'll tweak their name somehow | 0:20:36 | 0:20:39 | |
and then, you know, I'll dump them in a lake of acid or... | 0:20:39 | 0:20:43 | |
have their head chopped off. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:45 | |
People seem to enjoy this, and the wolves will benefit, so... | 0:20:45 | 0:20:49 | |
that's very cool. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:51 | |
I like wolves. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:53 | |
The person over here with the mic? | 0:20:54 | 0:20:56 | |
Hi, you have lots of great characters in your books. | 0:20:56 | 0:20:58 | |
Most of them, of mine, have died, unfortunately, | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
but when you are writing, which is your favourite character | 0:21:01 | 0:21:05 | |
and which one do you enjoy writing the most? | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
Um, I enjoy writing all of them, | 0:21:09 | 0:21:12 | |
but I think Tyrion is probably my favourite. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:14 | |
I have a lot of affection for Arya too, but really, all of them, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
even the ones that are sort of despicable or unfortunate, | 0:21:17 | 0:21:22 | |
like Theon or Victarion. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
You know, when I write them, I'm crawling inside their skin, | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
I'm looking at the world through their eyes, at least for... | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
the duration of writing the chapter, I have to identify with them. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:36 | |
So, you know, it's like walk a mile in my shoes | 0:21:36 | 0:21:39 | |
or walk 100 leagues in my shoes. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:40 | |
I kind of have to see the world through their eyes | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
and that builds up a certain understanding and affection of them. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
One of the things I want to do with all my characters, | 0:21:46 | 0:21:49 | |
and this is part of this question of realistic characters, | 0:21:49 | 0:21:53 | |
is give them motivations for the things we do. | 0:21:53 | 0:21:56 | |
I mean, we... | 0:21:56 | 0:21:57 | |
we look at the world... and we see evil in the world, | 0:21:57 | 0:22:03 | |
or things that we consider evil. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:05 | |
I mean, I've been watching the news lately, | 0:22:05 | 0:22:07 | |
the stuff that's going on in Iraq and Syria, | 0:22:07 | 0:22:10 | |
this group Isis and things that they are doing certainly seems evil to me, | 0:22:10 | 0:22:15 | |
but then I've seen a documentary | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
where people have gone and interviewed these guys | 0:22:18 | 0:22:20 | |
and the Isis guys don't think they're evil. | 0:22:20 | 0:22:22 | |
They're not like the Red Skull or Dr Doom or Sauron. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
They're not getting up in the morning | 0:22:25 | 0:22:27 | |
and saying, "Ha-ha-ha! What evil can I do today?" | 0:22:27 | 0:22:29 | |
They think what they're doing is heroic. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
They have their own motivations for it, as deluded and twisted | 0:22:32 | 0:22:37 | |
and wrong as those motivations may seem to us. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:40 | |
And that's what I try to do when I write any character | 0:22:40 | 0:22:42 | |
who might be considered dark, is what are their motivations, | 0:22:42 | 0:22:45 | |
how do they see the world, what's their... | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
what's their culture, what's their ethical and moral values? So... | 0:22:48 | 0:22:52 | |
And there's one at the back, just here. Yeah. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:55 | |
It's interesting you're sat next to a Booker Prize judge | 0:22:58 | 0:23:02 | |
because, of course, Americans are now eligible for prizes like that, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:07 | |
but, I mean, the truth is, you probably won't be nominated | 0:23:07 | 0:23:11 | |
because of the genre you write in. I mean, how do you feel about that? | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
Does it annoy you that literary fiction is somehow | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
seen as better than what you write? | 0:23:17 | 0:23:19 | |
I'm not so sure! | 0:23:19 | 0:23:21 | |
Well... You know, I'm... | 0:23:22 | 0:23:25 | |
I've certainly been aware of this and, again, since I'm a kid. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:29 | |
Um... | 0:23:29 | 0:23:30 | |
And I take heart with the fact that it is changing. It is changing. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:36 | |
I mean, when I was, like, 12 and 13 years old, | 0:23:36 | 0:23:40 | |
I had teachers take books away from me, | 0:23:40 | 0:23:44 | |
science fiction books by Heinlein and Asimov and Tolkien, | 0:23:44 | 0:23:47 | |
take books away from me in school and say, "You're a smart kid, | 0:23:47 | 0:23:51 | |
"you get good grades, why are you reading this shit?" You know. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:54 | |
Well, they didn't use "shit". LAUGHTER | 0:23:54 | 0:23:56 | |
They were teachers, they said "trash". | 0:23:56 | 0:23:59 | |
You know, "Whet your mind, | 0:23:59 | 0:24:00 | |
"you should be reading Silas Marner, or something like that." | 0:24:00 | 0:24:05 | |
Um... | 0:24:05 | 0:24:07 | |
And, er, if...if I had been reading Silas Marner, | 0:24:07 | 0:24:10 | |
I probably would have stopped reading. Er... | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
But... | 0:24:13 | 0:24:15 | |
The, er... | 0:24:15 | 0:24:18 | |
There was a lot of prejudice against all genre fiction, | 0:24:18 | 0:24:20 | |
particularly against science fiction and fantasy | 0:24:20 | 0:24:23 | |
and it's still there, but it's not nearly what it was. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:27 | |
I mean, Michael Chabon has won the Pulitzer Prize. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about, basically, | 0:24:30 | 0:24:34 | |
a science-fiction nerd in his Oscar Wao book. We see... | 0:24:34 | 0:24:40 | |
Lord Of The Rings was voted the greatest novel of the 20th century | 0:24:40 | 0:24:44 | |
in the... Was it the Times or the Guardian or...? | 0:24:44 | 0:24:46 | |
- It was the Times. - One of them did a poll. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:48 | |
And I know many people were outraged by that, | 0:24:48 | 0:24:50 | |
but obviously many more people weren't outraged | 0:24:50 | 0:24:53 | |
because they voted for it. Er... | 0:24:53 | 0:24:56 | |
So, I think these things are breaking down. | 0:24:56 | 0:24:59 | |
It's an artificial distinction anyway. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:03 | |
Literary fiction in its present form is a genre itself. Um... | 0:25:03 | 0:25:08 | |
And we should... | 0:25:08 | 0:25:09 | |
We should recognise that through most of literary history, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
this distinction did not exist. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
I think if you really, you know, study literary history, | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
it all goes back to Robert Louis Stevenson | 0:25:19 | 0:25:20 | |
and his quarrel with Henry James and that was unfortunate. | 0:25:20 | 0:25:25 | |
It... It created this artificial division between popular culture | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
and real culture, between... | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
literature on one hand | 0:25:31 | 0:25:33 | |
and things that were just popular fiction on the other. | 0:25:33 | 0:25:37 | |
But enough time has passed that I think that's going away. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:40 | |
The real test is what books are going to survive, you know, | 0:25:40 | 0:25:45 | |
and I won't be around to know, but... | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
You know, Tolkien has certainly survived. It's...been a long time | 0:25:49 | 0:25:54 | |
since those books came out in the '30s and in the '50s | 0:25:54 | 0:25:56 | |
and we're still reading him, we're still reading him by the millions. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:00 | |
His story has survived, | 0:26:00 | 0:26:01 | |
his characters have entered the popular culture. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
Will that be the case with mine? I don't know. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:06 | |
I think that's every writer's dream, but, er... | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
Maybe so. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:12 | |
But all you can do is write the best stories you can | 0:26:13 | 0:26:15 | |
and then put it in the hands of posterity and... | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
the fact that people are arguing about my books... | 0:26:19 | 0:26:23 | |
is a sign that I take very well, you know, because... | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
A writer's real enemy is obscurity. Um... I mean, I... | 0:26:28 | 0:26:34 | |
And I've been there. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:35 | |
I've had a long career, like 20 years before Ice And Fire. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
I gave book signings where no-one came. | 0:26:38 | 0:26:40 | |
Now, you guys are all going to be queueing up | 0:26:40 | 0:26:43 | |
to get my signature here after this and... | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
But I remember sitting in malls behind a giant stack of my books | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
and two people came in in an hour and, you know, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
asked me where the cookbooks were. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:55 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:26:55 | 0:26:57 | |
So, er, you know, it's better to have this debate, it's better | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
to have the books being noticed and read and talked about | 0:27:00 | 0:27:03 | |
and I'll take that. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:05 | |
It is changing quite dramatically. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:07 | |
David Mitchell's book on the Booker long list this year, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
the fifth section of it is an epic fantasy battle | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
in the Chapel Of The Dusk between the Anchorites and the Atemporals. | 0:27:14 | 0:27:17 | |
Now, that would not have been sort of seen as Booker material | 0:27:17 | 0:27:20 | |
even ten years ago. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:22 | |
To the person at the back that's got the mic there. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:24 | |
Hi. I was wondering if you could tell us about your process | 0:27:24 | 0:27:28 | |
of keeping plot points and characters continuous | 0:27:28 | 0:27:31 | |
throughout all the books. | 0:27:31 | 0:27:32 | |
Cos the world is so large and there are so many characters, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
I've always been interested to know how you keep track of them all. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:38 | |
With increasing difficulty. LAUGHTER | 0:27:38 | 0:27:42 | |
You know, I... I don't have a good answer for that. How do I do it? | 0:27:43 | 0:27:48 | |
I just do it as best I can. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
I have charts, I have genealogies, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:52 | |
um, but most of it is in my head. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:56 | |
Um... | 0:27:56 | 0:27:58 | |
I have sometimes said, only half jokingly, | 0:27:59 | 0:28:04 | |
that it's because I have a brain defect of some sort. I... | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
The brain synapses that most people use to keep track of real life, | 0:28:08 | 0:28:13 | |
I use to Westeros and my characters, | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
so I will meet all of you when you come by | 0:28:16 | 0:28:19 | |
and then, if I meet you tomorrow, I won't know who the hell you are | 0:28:19 | 0:28:22 | |
because I'll have forgotten you already. | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
I apologise. It's nothing personal, but I'm using those... | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
those brains synapses, | 0:28:27 | 0:28:29 | |
to remember some obscure character | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
who was in the second book and had two lines. | 0:28:31 | 0:28:33 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:28:33 | 0:28:34 | |
I do think I have... | 0:28:34 | 0:28:36 | |
We have a new book coming out in October, The World Of Ice And Fire, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:39 | |
which I've been working on with my friends | 0:28:39 | 0:28:41 | |
Elio Garcia and Linda Antonssen for some years. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
It was supposed to be out, like, three years ago, | 0:28:44 | 0:28:46 | |
like many of my books. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
LAUGHTER But it's the history of Westeros | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
and the lands beyond and it's a beautiful coffee-table book. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:54 | |
It will be out in October. | 0:28:54 | 0:28:56 | |
And that's got a tremendous amount of new history and characters | 0:28:56 | 0:28:59 | |
and names that I have to keep track of. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:02 | |
Er, but.. | 0:29:02 | 0:29:04 | |
I don't know how I do it, but hopefully I will continue to do it, | 0:29:04 | 0:29:09 | |
at least for two more books. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:11 | |
To this person here. | 0:29:12 | 0:29:14 | |
I've got a big... | 0:29:14 | 0:29:16 | |
I've got a big soft spot for villains, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:18 | |
or what we call villains broadly, | 0:29:18 | 0:29:20 | |
in fiction and in non-fiction. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:23 | |
It's probably why Tywin is my favourite character | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
and I've got a big soft spot for Victarion as well | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
because he's so self-serving and he's so kind of vicious. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
Do you get... | 0:29:32 | 0:29:33 | |
Like you say that Tyrion and Arya are more your... | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
your kind of favourite characters who you have a sort of bond with. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
Do you get a sense of fun | 0:29:39 | 0:29:41 | |
when you write the characters who are more sort of evil, if we say broadly? | 0:29:41 | 0:29:45 | |
Well, you know, writing a villain can be fun, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:49 | |
I mean, there's no doubt about it, | 0:29:49 | 0:29:52 | |
having a really nasty piece of work can be amusing to write about. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:58 | |
Even if they are doing appalling things, | 0:29:58 | 0:30:00 | |
maybe the more appalling the better. | 0:30:00 | 0:30:02 | |
That said, even those characters, I try to give some... | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
some dimension to and provide, as I said earlier, the motivations for. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:10 | |
I mean, Tywin Lannister did not think he was evil | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
and, if you read The World Of Ice And Fire | 0:30:13 | 0:30:15 | |
and The History Of The Westerlands, | 0:30:15 | 0:30:17 | |
you'll see the situation that he came out of with his family | 0:30:17 | 0:30:20 | |
and what he was facing and why he is the person that he is. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:25 | |
I also think, you know, after the Red Wedding, | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
there's the infamous exchange between Tyrion and Tywin, | 0:30:30 | 0:30:36 | |
where Tywin asks the question, you know, why is it... | 0:30:36 | 0:30:39 | |
Why is it more moral to kill 10,000 people in a battle | 0:30:41 | 0:30:45 | |
than a dozen at dinner? Er... | 0:30:45 | 0:30:47 | |
Which, to my mind, is a good question | 0:30:47 | 0:30:49 | |
that I really wanted my readers to think about. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:53 | |
Um, because, you know, that is the philosophy of our world | 0:30:53 | 0:30:58 | |
and most of history here, that if we...if we... | 0:30:58 | 0:31:02 | |
you know, kill a dozen people at dinner, that's a horrible murder, | 0:31:02 | 0:31:07 | |
but it's very honourable to march to war | 0:31:07 | 0:31:10 | |
and fight a major battle where 10,000 die | 0:31:10 | 0:31:12 | |
and Tywin is probably right to be questioning that. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
I'm not saying that... | 0:31:16 | 0:31:18 | |
that was a good thing, | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
but I think it's at least worth thinking about, debating. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:23 | |
Um... | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
I'm not a writer who has a lot of answers. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:29 | |
I am a writer who likes to ask questions | 0:31:30 | 0:31:33 | |
and to make my readers ask the questions of themselves | 0:31:33 | 0:31:36 | |
and to argue with each other. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
You know, I don't often follow the... | 0:31:39 | 0:31:43 | |
all the sites online that have grown up around my books. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:46 | |
I did once upon a time, way back in the '90s, | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
when the first ones came up, Dragonstone from Australia, | 0:31:49 | 0:31:52 | |
an Australian named Peter Gibbs ran that, | 0:31:52 | 0:31:54 | |
and I was really thrilled because, you know, | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
I'd been through all those years of nobody coming up to my signings | 0:31:57 | 0:32:00 | |
and all that, and now, here there was this new interweb thing | 0:32:00 | 0:32:04 | |
and there were sites devoted to my books and people arguing about them. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
Pretty soon it got so big, I said, | 0:32:07 | 0:32:08 | |
"You know, I can't follow this any more and I'd better not," | 0:32:08 | 0:32:11 | |
but I'm still aware of their existence out there | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
and they're huge, they're gigantic | 0:32:13 | 0:32:15 | |
and they argue constantly about the characters in the books. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:18 | |
And... | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
That pleases me no end | 0:32:20 | 0:32:22 | |
because it means I'm successfully asking the questions | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
and people are responding to these characters as if they were real. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:28 | |
People were saying, "That Tywin... Tywin is horrible, | 0:32:28 | 0:32:30 | |
"he's Adolf Hitler." "No, no, Tywin really has a good point." | 0:32:30 | 0:32:34 | |
And they're clashing about Tywin | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
and, to my mind, that's a sign | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
that I've created a fully fleshed character | 0:32:39 | 0:32:41 | |
and not just a black piece of cardboard. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
There are a lot of strong female characters in Ice And Fire. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:49 | |
Are there any women from history | 0:32:49 | 0:32:50 | |
that you have been particularly inspired by? | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
Um... Well, I'm... I've been inspired... | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
There are strong women through history. Um... | 0:32:59 | 0:33:03 | |
And maybe not so much in fantasy. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:08 | |
There are some fantasies out there... | 0:33:08 | 0:33:12 | |
And you have to remember when I talk about it, too, | 0:33:12 | 0:33:15 | |
that there's a lot of fantasies come after Ice And Fire, | 0:33:15 | 0:33:19 | |
since I've begun, so... | 0:33:19 | 0:33:21 | |
some of the generalisations I'm going to make | 0:33:21 | 0:33:25 | |
are really specifically from Tolkien to the... | 0:33:25 | 0:33:28 | |
to the mid, early '90s, when I started writing this book, but... | 0:33:28 | 0:33:33 | |
You know, I enjoyed Xena The Warrior Princess, | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
that was a lot of fun to watch, | 0:33:36 | 0:33:37 | |
but I didn't think it was actually an accurate portrayal | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
of a woman warrior and what she would have to be like. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:45 | |
I sort of created Brienne of Tarth as an answer to that, | 0:33:45 | 0:33:51 | |
but I was also inspired by people like Eleanor of Aquitaine and, er... | 0:33:51 | 0:33:56 | |
And not so much Joan of Arc, | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
although I was certainly aware of him, | 0:33:59 | 0:34:01 | |
but some of the queens of Scottish history, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:05 | |
well, from Lady Macbeth on down, were strong women who didn't | 0:34:05 | 0:34:10 | |
necessarily put on chainmail bikinis and go forth to fight in battles, | 0:34:10 | 0:34:15 | |
but exercised immense power by other ways. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:18 | |
Mary Queen of Scots was | 0:34:20 | 0:34:22 | |
an idiot, but... LAUGHTER | 0:34:22 | 0:34:24 | |
..but was certainly a strong-willed woman | 0:34:24 | 0:34:26 | |
and she ran up against an even stronger and rather smarter woman | 0:34:26 | 0:34:30 | |
and came out on the losing end there. | 0:34:30 | 0:34:32 | |
But still a fascinating character in her own way | 0:34:32 | 0:34:34 | |
and the struggles that she went and some of her predecessors, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
some of the other Scottish queens who, er...ruled as regents from... | 0:34:37 | 0:34:44 | |
Those of you who know your Scottish history know | 0:34:44 | 0:34:46 | |
that Scotland kept getting stuck with, like, three-year-old kings | 0:34:46 | 0:34:50 | |
and these long periods of regencies | 0:34:50 | 0:34:51 | |
where all the lords would fight over the regency | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
and usually the queen was in the middle of that, | 0:34:54 | 0:34:56 | |
so, you know, I did want to reflect...different types of women. | 0:34:56 | 0:35:02 | |
One of the things that I have a great advantage of | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
is with my cast of characters | 0:35:06 | 0:35:08 | |
because I have so many characters, | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
that in something like writing women, | 0:35:11 | 0:35:13 | |
I can have strong women and weak women, | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
I can have noble women and selfish women, | 0:35:16 | 0:35:18 | |
I can have smart women and stupid women, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:21 | |
which is true of any group, I think, and is the way to... | 0:35:21 | 0:35:25 | |
Cos we're all different. I think your problem comes when you... | 0:35:25 | 0:35:28 | |
when you stereotype a group as all being kind of the same, | 0:35:28 | 0:35:32 | |
especially if you give them negative characteristics. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:35 | |
Um, when, actually, all groups that I know of... | 0:35:35 | 0:35:39 | |
Yes, we're influenced by our culture | 0:35:39 | 0:35:40 | |
and there are certain cultural similarities | 0:35:40 | 0:35:42 | |
and we fulfil certain societal roles, | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
but the individual differences are very important | 0:35:45 | 0:35:47 | |
and we get very different personalities, | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
even within the same culture and society, and I try to reflect that. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:54 | |
But it has been... The number of women who have liked my books | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
is a great source of satisfaction to me | 0:35:57 | 0:36:01 | |
and many of my signings are more women than men | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
and they say that they do like various of my women characters | 0:36:04 | 0:36:09 | |
and that's... | 0:36:09 | 0:36:12 | |
That's cool. I'm very pleased by that. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
Well, in terms of reading in general, | 0:36:14 | 0:36:16 | |
it tends to be more women than men, unfortunately. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:18 | |
Yes, that's... That's true, too. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:20 | |
Um, there's, um... | 0:36:21 | 0:36:25 | |
There is a lot of fan theories out there about various things | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
that are going to be happening in your books | 0:36:29 | 0:36:30 | |
and one of them in particular about someone's parentage | 0:36:30 | 0:36:33 | |
that I'm not going to go into. LAUGHTER | 0:36:33 | 0:36:34 | |
But do you have a desire to surprise your audience, | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
where, if you hear a particular prevailing fan theory, | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
you might want to change your mind about things...in general? | 0:36:40 | 0:36:44 | |
INTERVIEWER: It's kind of the Lost paradigm, isn't it? | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
The Lost producers did look at what fans were saying | 0:36:47 | 0:36:49 | |
and then deliberately take a swerve. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:51 | |
Yeah, I...I've wrestled with this issue | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
because I do want to surprise my readers. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:57 | |
I hate predictable fiction as a reader. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
I don't want to write predictable fiction. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
I want to surprise and delight my reader | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
and take the story in directions they didn't see coming. | 0:37:06 | 0:37:08 | |
But... | 0:37:08 | 0:37:10 | |
You can't change the plans and that is one of the reasons... | 0:37:11 | 0:37:16 | |
I mentioned that, you know, | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
I used to read some of these fan boards | 0:37:18 | 0:37:20 | |
back in the '90s and the early '00s, when they were new | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
and then I stopped doing that because... | 0:37:24 | 0:37:27 | |
Well, for a variety of reasons. | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
One is because I didn't have the time, two is... | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
..this very issue of... | 0:37:33 | 0:37:35 | |
so many readers were reading the books with so much attention | 0:37:35 | 0:37:38 | |
that they were throwing up some theories | 0:37:38 | 0:37:41 | |
and a lot of the theories were amusing bullshit... | 0:37:41 | 0:37:44 | |
LAUGHTER ..but very creative, | 0:37:44 | 0:37:46 | |
but some of the theories were right. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
You know, the readers, at least one or two readers, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
had correctly put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues | 0:37:52 | 0:37:56 | |
that I had planted in the... in the books and... | 0:37:56 | 0:38:00 | |
came to the right solution. So what do I do then? Do I change it? | 0:38:00 | 0:38:05 | |
And I wrestled with that issue | 0:38:05 | 0:38:07 | |
and I think changing it would have been a disaster. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:10 | |
I mean, because the clues were there. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:11 | |
I'm planting all these clues that the butler did it | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
and then you're halfway through the series | 0:38:14 | 0:38:16 | |
and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it | 0:38:16 | 0:38:20 | |
and you say, "Hmm, OK, the chambermaid did it." Well... | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
you've got all these clues that are pointing at the butler | 0:38:24 | 0:38:27 | |
that somehow you have to retroactively deal with or something. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
No, you can't do that, | 0:38:31 | 0:38:32 | |
so I'm just going to go ahead | 0:38:32 | 0:38:34 | |
and some of my readers who don't read the boards, | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
of which, thankfully, there are still hundreds of thousands, | 0:38:37 | 0:38:40 | |
will still be surprised and other readers will say, | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
"See? I said that four years ago. I said the butler did it. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:47 | |
"I'm really smarter than you guys." LAUGHTER | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
And that's just the way you have to do it here. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:52 | |
This young lady has had her hand up for some time, | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
so let's give her a chance. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
That will be the last one, I'm afraid. | 0:38:56 | 0:38:58 | |
OK, you right there, you with the... Yeah. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:00 | |
Here comes the... HE CHUCKLES | 0:39:02 | 0:39:03 | |
You said before about wanting to write characters | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
which are morally grey. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
Which characters in the book do you think are closest | 0:39:15 | 0:39:17 | |
to having absolute morality, one way or the other? | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
And do you think it's a good thing to have some characters like that? | 0:39:19 | 0:39:24 | |
A good question to end on. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:26 | |
Which characters are closer to having absolute morality? | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
Was that the question? | 0:39:29 | 0:39:31 | |
- Yes. - Um... | 0:39:31 | 0:39:33 | |
Well, I think someone like Brienne | 0:39:35 | 0:39:37 | |
has started with a very strong moral base, | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
a very strong sense of what she believes in | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
and principles that we would consider good, but, of course, | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
she is now being exposed to the real world in a way she wasn't. | 0:39:47 | 0:39:51 | |
She led a fairly sheltered life. | 0:39:51 | 0:39:53 | |
So the question is, what will she be at the end of it? You know. | 0:39:53 | 0:39:57 | |
And you can see a character like Jaime | 0:39:57 | 0:39:59 | |
who's swinging back and forth the other ways, or Tyrion. | 0:39:59 | 0:40:02 | |
You know, I like to take all of these characters and, | 0:40:04 | 0:40:07 | |
wherever they start from, and change them and subject them to... | 0:40:07 | 0:40:11 | |
to traumatic and difficult events that will shake their world views | 0:40:11 | 0:40:15 | |
and maybe cause them to re-examine that. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
Even Ned Stark... | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
..compromised his honour in the last act of his before he died | 0:40:22 | 0:40:28 | |
by confessing to crimes he had not committed, so... | 0:40:28 | 0:40:31 | |
Um... | 0:40:33 | 0:40:34 | |
There is very little absolute in the world of Ice And Fire. | 0:40:34 | 0:40:39 | |
This has been the most fabulous hour. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:41 | |
I'm glad to know that if you do read all of the internet, | 0:40:41 | 0:40:44 | |
you will get the right answers at some point. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:46 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:40:46 | 0:40:47 | |
All I can say is, this has been the youngest-looking audience | 0:40:47 | 0:40:49 | |
since I chaired Neil Gaiman at the Book Festival. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:51 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:40:51 | 0:40:53 | |
It has been an absolute pleasure and I'm sure you're going to want | 0:40:53 | 0:40:56 | |
to give George a huge round of applause. | 0:40:56 | 0:40:58 | |
Thank you all for coming. | 0:41:01 | 0:41:04 |