George R. R. Martin rarely blogs. He wants to, but the author who inspired HBO’s Game of Thrones attracts armies of angry trolls who use his blog as a virtual Westeros battleground.

“Suddenly, there would be hundreds of messages of fans fighting with each other - even without me posting one thing,” George explained. 

Emotions have been running high since George published A Game of Thrones in 1996, his epic fantasy novel about warring dynasties. Fans are addicted to the life and (lots of) death struggles and continuously hound him for more stories. They’ve been waiting a decade for The Winds Of Winter, the sixth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, but George R. R. Martin won’t be rushed.

He’s spent the last few decades focused on his own life-and-death dramas and become a cultural tour de force in his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. George has reopened Santa Fe’s shuttered movie cinema; teamed up with an art collective to create a ‘multi-verse’ mystery house; and launched the Beastly Books shop. He also opened Santa Fe’s first non-profit film training center, Stagecoach, which aims to create jobs and help the city recover from its post-Covid slump.

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The true superhero emerges‍

George Raymond Martin understands what it’s like to struggle with unemployment, so Stagecoach is close to his heart. Growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, his father was a longshoreman who went through long periods without work. George, born in 1948, grew up in a federal housing project. There was no money for books or luxuries.

He escaped by playing with his dime-store turtles. They kept mysteriously dying overnight - even though George religiously fed them - and he imagined a world of murder and mayhem unfolding as he slept, with mutinous turtles killing each other to control ‘Turtle Castle’.

Comic books were another refuge, as was the local library. The Lord of the Rings had a profound effect on George in junior high school and he still writes in the shadow of author J. R. R. Tolkien. (George adopted the confirmation name Richard at age 13, becoming George R. R. Martin.)

He devoured one book in particular about how to write a science fiction novel, which he checked out of the library every week for two years. By the time he was 16, George was getting letters published in comic books, discovered fan-zines, and had his heart set on a career as a writer.

Writing & war

He earned enough from writing short stories and working as a chess tournament director on the weekends to scrape by. After graduating with a Master’s degree in journalism, George became a teacher. The Vietnam War raged on in the 1970s, however, and George was concerned about being conscripted. He applied for conscientious objector status to avoid the draft.

“The big question they [the draft board] would always ask you is: ‘Would you have fought in World War II against the Nazis?’ And the answer is yes, I would have fought in World War II against the Nazis, but the Viet Cong were not the Nazis and I didn’t think America had any business in Vietnam, so I was objecting to that particular war,” George recalled.

Instead of fighting, he spent two years as a volunteer in a national service program designed to alleviate poverty. Little did George know at the time, the market for sci-fi was about to explode and he would be riding a wave of success in the decades to come.

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The rebirth of sci-fi

Star Wars burst into movie theaters in 1977, and George published his first novel, Dying of the Light, that same year, cashing in on Hollywood’s sci-fi fever.

After the sudden death of his friend and fellow author Tom Reamy, George reevaluated life, quit teaching, and moved to Santa Fe in 1979 to write full time. Decades of print and television jobs followed. George wrote for Beauty and the Beast, The Twilight Zone, and several episodes of Max Headroom that were never filmed.

He also began writing his fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, inspired by Wars of the Roses, The Accursed Kings, and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The trilogy George initially envisioned has already become a five-book series and two more novels are planned. The first, A Game of Thrones, won sci-fi’s Locus Award. The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons (2011), became an international bestseller and remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for 88 weeks.

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The reality of war

Martin didn’t intentionally weave his political views into Game of Thrones or the A Song of Ice and Fire series but part of it his beliefs about war and violence do slip through: ”I’m guilty of killing people (on-screen), but if you’re going to write about war and violence, show the cost. Show how ugly it is. Show both sides of it.” And that includes the gruesome and the glory.

His next television project is the hotly anticipated Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, airing on HBO in late 2022. George has seen the rough cuts but he’s sworn to secrecy about plot lines and production.

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Giving back to Santa Fe

When he’s not plotting, overthrowing dynasties, and killing off characters, George is overseeing Stagecoach, the non-profit he helped set up in honor of David Weininger, a friend who died in 2016:  “Our dream is to bring more jobs to the people of Santa Fe, and to help train the young people of the city for careers in the entertainment industry through internships, mentoring, and education.”

In true superhero style, Martin also helps raise funds for Santa Fe's charities including more than $500,000 to support the Food Deposit and the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary. Martin offered fans the once-in-a-lifetime chance to be written up as a fictional character in one of his novels with the promise of a gory death and an ending fitting of the Red Wedding. 

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He’s also raised money for Santa Fe’s Desert Academy school, sponsors the Miskatonic Scholarship for promising cosmic horror writers, and funds a sci-fi screenwriting grant. 

It’s been a difficult few years for the author. He lost friends to Covid-19 and had to temporarily shut down his cinema, art installation, and Stagecoach non-profit training facility during the pandemic. While he sat down to finish his latest novel during the lockdowns, George still hasn’t managed to finish The Winds Of Winter, the sixth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Fans are getting restless, but George assured them he’s not retiring. 

The story of warring Westeros will carry on. 

“Human beings are endlessly fascinating to me. The fact that we do have good and evil in us. We can be angels or we can be monsters. And how do we make these choices and go through life? That’s the stuff I love to wrestle with.”