Game of Thrones (TV)

The series uses magic in some very unusual ways, as the supernatural element becomes stronger with each book. Is this pattern going to continue?

Martin: The amount of magic certainly is going to increase, yes, and that's been part of my design from the first. However, I think even by the end, it's still not going to have as much overt magic as many of the other fantasies out there.

In Ice and Fire, you’ve abandoned the traditional Tolkien-esque characters, like orcs, elves and ogres. Was it an intentional departure?

I wanted to do a more realistic type of fantasy—fantasy that, in some ways, was more like historical fiction. It’s a fantasy world. It’s not set in England or France or anything. It’s set in a kingdom I created. But it’s not a high-magic world like Tolkien’s. Magic is very rare, and you don't see it very often. Mostly I’m concerned with writing about human beings. Tolkien was great, and I love Tolkien. I love what he did. I wanted to find my own tone and voice there, something that melded fantasy with historical fiction.

To what extent are your characters based on historical figures, especially the Lannisters and the Lancasters, and the Borgias, for example?

GRRM: Well, I certainly read a lot of history, and I try to draw on that when writing this book, when writing this series of books. When I set out and began this story I wanted to flavor it as much with the flavor of historical fiction as with fantasy. While I admire Tolkien vastly, a lot of the fantasy that has followed in recent years has not been as well done as Tolkien, let us say, and a particular variety is set in sort of a Disneyland middle ages, where it's not really, they may have kings and dukes and they may be fighting with swords and riding around on horses but you can that the author doesn’t really grasp some of the way the middles ages worked.
I wanted to avoid that and stay a little closer to history. In that, with that in mind, I read a lot of history, I read a lot of historical fiction, the Wars of the Roses which some people have compared this series too was certainly an inspiration. That being said, there were other inspirations too, the Crusades were an inspiration, the Albigensian Crusade, the Hundred Years War, some of the Scottish border wars, some of the incidents from Scottish history, French history, all of this was grist for the mill.
I don't like to just take a character from history, whoever it is, and just change his name, kind of file off the serial number and present him as my own character. What I much prefer to do is perhaps take 2 or 3 characters from history and mix them up together or do juxtapositions that are original; I mean I don't want…I love historical fiction as a reader, but one of the problems with historical fiction, if you read a lot of history, you're always going to know how it's comes out. If you read a novel that’s actually set during the Wars of the Roses, you know what’s going to happen to those two little boys in the tower; you know who's going to win the Battle of Bosworth Fields. You know the ultimate fate of the mad King Henry VI. So I don't like that, I don’t want someone to just look at my book and know what happens because they're recognizing historical analogues, I like the stories to be unpredictable.
So that extent, I think most of my characters, while they may partake of historical personages, there is no one for one correspondence anywhere.

It seems very closely tied in to history, but would you call it a fantasy novel?
It's definitely a fantasy novel. It has dragons and so forth in it. It does have the feel of historical fiction. I love history. I wanted to get a lot of sense of history in A Storm of Swords and the other books and some of the feel of historical fiction. Historical fiction is wonderful to read, but the only problem I have with historical fiction is that I know too much history. So I always know what's going to happen. So you're reading a novel about the War of the Roses and no matter how good or bad it is, you know who is going to win. With this sort of thing you can take people by surprise. It reads like historical fiction, it feels like historical fiction but you don't know how it's going to come out.
Most epic fantasy or high fantasy has a quasi-medieval setting. Ever since Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. So, in that sense, it's squarely in the tradition of many of the writers that have gone before. What I try to do is give it a little more of the feel of historical fiction than some of those other books had before it which have, I suppose, a more fantasy or fantastic feel. My take on the genre has somewhat less magic and sorcery onstage and more emphasis on swordplay and battles and political intrigue and the characters. Most of all: the characters.

GRRM: Well, in some ways that's the same answer as the previous question. Not directly, but I love castles, I visit castles whenever I travel in countries where they have castles, and I particularly actually like the ruined ones. I get a kick out of walking around a ruined castle. So I've certainly learned a lot of things, I've drawn from that.
There are a couple castles in Scotland that are ruined, that no longer really exist in their medieval form that have inspired Pyke. I think Tantallon is one, or was one. These are castles that are built on sea-stacks, on rocks that thrust out of the sea. So the gate of the castle in on the headland but to get to the main keeps or towers you have to cross over bridges that connected. Well, Tantallon was an example of that and I think there was another Scottish castle built along the same lines and I used that as the basis for Pyke.
Hadrian's Wall, of course, I think was the inspiration for the Wall. I've never been to China so I've never had a chance to see their Great Wall but I have been to Scotland and I have walked along what remains of Hadrian's Wall and that was actually an inspiring experience. I was traveling and we got there late, all of the tour busses were leaving, the sun was going down and so we pretty well had it to ourselves. I remember standing along that wall and it was Fall, it was late October or early November and the wind was picking up and I looked across trying to think what it would be like to be a Roman legionary, maybe someone from Italy or Sicily or Greece who was posted to this place and what would be likely to come out of those hills to attack him there on the wall, what he must have felt, it was a very kind of lonely feeling. And I've always held onto that and certainly it was a feeling I tried to tap into when I created the Wall and the men of the Night’s Watch.
But of course, the other thing about fantasy is bigger than real life, so you don't just take Hadrian's Wall and write something, you have to have something bigger than Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian's Wall is like, I don't know, 20 feet tall, if that, 10 feet tall, and my wall is like 700 feet tall and built of ice and it's much more impressive. I think that's true of all the castles. There are no real life castles that can match the castles of Westeros. That being said, they are still modest compared to some of the things in Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien's castles. Then again, there is less magic in my world, so it would be harder to build.