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Costain did a wonderful job on the Plantagenets so I tried to do that for the Targaryens.”Ī still from Game Of Thrones series seven: Conleth Hill as Varys, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Nathalie Emmanuel as Missandei, Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen. It’s old‑fashioned history: he’s not interested in analysing socioeconomic trends or cultural shifts so much as the wars and the assignations and the murders and the plots and the betrayals, all the juicy stuff. “My model for this was the four-volume history of the Plantagenets that Thomas B Costain wrote in the 50s. Martin has always loved popular history Game of Thrones was loosely inspired by accounts of the wars of the Roses. These include Mushroom, a brilliantly bawdy dwarf whose take on history errs towards the filthy. Written in the voice of a maester of the citadel, Archmaester Gyldayn, a “crotchety old guy with strong opinions” who is telling his story hundreds of years after the events he’s chronicling, the structure allows Martin to play about with the unreliability of his narrators, as Gyldayn sorts through his primary sources.
“So that’s what this book is, or the first half of it: a history of the Targaryen kings.” “We had totally destroyed the entire concept of this book,” says Martin. But he was having so much fun that those little additions ended up running to 350,000 words. Martin was just going to “polish and expand the history a little, maybe fill in any holes” about various kings and battles. Fire and Blood stems from a coffee-table book, The World of Ice and Fire, which was being pulled together by two “uber fans”, Elio M Garcia Jr and Linda Antonssen, in 2014. Martin admits he never planned to write it. We start, though, with Fire and Blood, only the first half of a history that will span 300 years and acres of Aegons and Jaehaeryses. As it turns out, Martin brings up the book himself, and is warm and expansive on topics from fame and fortune to his progress on the long-awaited novel. But I know he has a reputation for irascibility, and I also really, really want to ask him about The Winds of Winter. We’ve spoken before, back when A Game of Thrones was about to hit television screens I’m one of those readers who feels slightly smug about loving the books before Ned Stark became Sean Bean, before Emilia Clarke became Daenerys Targaryen. There are not many writers who find their every pronouncement picked over by the press, who have sold 90m copies of their books, who are instantly recognised in public. Martin is probably one of the most famous novelists in the world. So I prepare for the interview with a certain amount of trepidation. Focus on Fire and Blood, his imagined history of the Targaryen dynasty, and all will be well. S trict instructions are issued before interviewing George RR Martin: do not ask about The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, the one fans keep haranguing him about and Martin has been writing since 2011.