Book Review: THE WORLDS OF GEORGE RR MARTIN

Title: The Worlds of George RR Martin

Author: Tom Huddleston

Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Pages: 208

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I must confess that I haven’t ever read anything by George RR Martin, nor have I seen the series that it inspired. My excuse is that I don’t like fantasy.

But after reading this book about his inspiration, I’m now inspired by Martin’s prolific ability and more equipped in my own journey as a writer.

In this book, the author introduces us to the breath of Martin’s inspiration, stemming from his voracious reading of history, comic-book characters, the works of great science and fantasy authors, cartography and the study of atlases, among other things. The author describes Martin as a voracious gatherer of knowledge, of experience, or story.

The book is supplemented with an eclectic collection of photos of Martin’s childhood home, various paintings of subjects that inspired him etc. Among others, there are photos of him at the signing table at the 2014 world science Fiction Convention, as also the cast of Game of Thrones on HBO and covers of the first editions of his books. There are photos of paintings depicting the history on which his oeuvre is based.

 

The book details his life, education, publishing successes and failures and his tryst with writing for TV, besides the influences on his life and writing and the episodes of The Twilight Zone that he scripted.

It’s fantastic to read about how Martin’s books grew and the powerful storytelling that drove that growth. The book explores Martin’s journey to writing the book and the Game of Thrones series, their production, impact and relationship with the source novels. the Epilogue talks about the astonishing success of the book and its adaptation to the silver screen (did you know that the first episode scored 2.2 million viewers on the first night itself?).

The book was divided into chapters, named after locations in the book, such as the Wall, Winterfell and the Iron Islands. There is no fixed format to the layout of the pages. Quotes accompanying photos take up whole pages, sometimes even double spreads.

Ideas are cheap … it’s the execution that is all-important.

We’re all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices.

The world is one great web, and a man dare not touch a single strand lest all the others tremble.

Every man who walks the earth casts a shadow on the world.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time … they have the whole things designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed ... They know if they planted a fantasy seed or a mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.

Never having read the books or watched the series, and being largely unfamiliar with European history, which we didn’t study at school, I wasn’t always able to figure out what was happening. There was a lot I couldn’t relate to, but the author’s style was engaging.

I got a sense of the depth of reading and research that informed Martin’s work, in terms of history, the mythology of Norse, Saxon and other cultures, the architecture and geography of the regions in which the books are set, and Martin’s own vast reading of historical fiction, fantasy and horror.

I want to point out just one error in the book. The author points out that the name given to a particular “city’s distinctive elephant-drawn carts, hathay, echoes the Hindu word for elephant, hathi.” The right word here is Hindi. Hindi is a language. Hinduism is a religion followed by Hindu people.

 

Towards the end, the author tells us about how far the books are inspired by the real world. The threat of "Winter is coming" in the book is synonymous with the real danger of climate change in the real world.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)