George R.R. Martin, the writer who rewrote fantasy and kept the world waiting

For a novelist, there are worse problems than having too many readers. George R.R. Martin has spent the better part of a decade working on The Winds of Winter, the sixth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire — a manuscript that has been awaited since 2011, when the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons, appeared. In the years between, HBO’s Game of Thrones transformed his Westerosi epic into a global phenomenon, generating an audience vastly larger than any novel could reach on its own. The pressure that followed is unlike anything in modern literary history: hundreds of millions of people know the characters, but only five books worth of the story has been written.

Martin grew up in the apartment buildings of Bayonne, New Jersey, reading science fiction paperbacks in a housing project where the larger world arrived mostly through the page. He studied journalism at Northwestern University — graduating summa cum laude in 1970, then a master’s degree the following year — but the craft training stuck less as a vocation than as discipline: a journalist’s insistence that every sentence carry its weight. His first professional sale, the short story “The Hero,” appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1971. He was twenty-two.

The next decade established him as one of the most versatile voices in American science fiction short fiction. Hugo and Nebula awards accumulated. “A Song for Lya” won the Hugo in 1975. “Sandkings” took both awards in 1980. When his third novel, The Armageddon Rag (1983), collapsed commercially — a supernatural thriller that arrived exactly when the publishing market for rock-and-roll horror did not — the failure redirected him to Hollywood. For nearly a decade, Martin wrote television: the CBS Twilight Zone revival, Beauty and the Beast, Max Headroom. The scripts gave him structural compression. The industry gave him the conviction he was a novelist.

A Game of Thrones appeared in 1996, published by Bantam Books to an audience that had no idea what it was being handed. Martin had been building Westeros from a scene that arrived spontaneously — direwolves, a dead stag — and from a conviction about how fantasy had been operating: too carefully, too reluctant to put its world in actual danger. The series that followed — A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons — delivered on that conviction without mercy. Main characters died. Heroes were beheaded. The moral system at the center of the story ground people down regardless of their virtue. Lev Grossman, writing in Time in 2005, called him “the American Tolkien.” It was the kind of label Martin has never entirely embraced.

The unresolved center of Martin’s public identity is The Winds of Winter, and to understand it requires knowing what happened while he was supposed to be finishing it. Game of Thrones launched on HBO in 2011 — the same year A Dance with Dragons finally appeared, nearly six years after the previous volume. The show caught up with the books, then passed them, and delivered its own ending in 2019. That ending — the show’s, not Martin’s — received a response ranging from disappointed to hostile. Martin has indicated the literary version will differ. Meanwhile the manuscript continues: approximately 1,100 pages completed, roughly three-quarters done by his own accounting. No publication date announced. For readers, the situation is peculiar — a version of the ending already exists, known and debated, but the ending that started everything has yet to be written.

Martin’s output during this period has not been absence. Fire & Blood (2018), a prose chronicle of the Targaryen dynasty written in the mode of a fictional academic history, demonstrated that Westeros was not a setting that exhausted him. He has continued as executive producer on House of the Dragon, HBO’s prequel series. He has also maintained the Wild Cards shared-universe anthology he created in 1987 — a project that grew out of a tabletop role-playing campaign and has involved dozens of writers across nearly four decades. His earlier novel Fevre Dream (1982), a Gothic vampire story set on the antebellum Mississippi River, still circulates as evidence of a range that predates the fantasy empire.

Martin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife Parris McBride, whom he married in 2011. He owns the Jean Cocteau Cinema, a restored historic arthouse theatre he reopened in 2013, and a bookshop nearby. His donation to the Meow Wolf arts collective helped establish one of the most discussed contemporary art installations in the American Southwest.

The Winds of Winter carries weight beyond its plot. It is the piece of the A Song of Ice and Fire argument that has been pending for fourteen years — the chapter that multiple television seasons have been forced to write around. Whether it arrives before the spinoffs multiply further or after them, the book remains the original claim. Martin built a kingdom and left one gate open.

Tags: game of thrones, American writers, novelists, A Dance with Dragons, A Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire