Interview with George R. R. Martin

The World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Dublin later this week and George R. R. Martin will be attending. The Irish Times has an interview with him in which he discusses the changes in the science fiction field since he started publishing in the 1970s.

Martin has been publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories since the 1970s, but he has been reading them a lot longer. “I started out as a little kid in Bayonne, New Jersey, reading comics,” he says. “I think I was 11 or 12 years old when a friend of my mother’s gave me a Robert A Heinlein book as a Christmas present. I adored it. I had an allowance of $1 a week, and suddenly I was buying 35c paperbacks instead of three or four comic books. And I never looked back.”

What made those genres so attractive to him as a child? “I grew up in a blue-collar family,” he says. “My father was a longshoreman. We lived in a public housing project. We didn’t even own a car. We didn’t go anywhere. We lived on First Street, and my school was on Fifth Street, so my world was five blocks long, and there was always this urge in me, maybe from reading, to see the wonders of the world – and, of course, the wonders of other worlds. Science fiction could take you to different planets and other periods of time. It was so much more expansive than just those five blocks where I lived my life, and I loved that sense of wonder that the great science-fiction stories had, and still have.”

Update: The Guardian has another interview with Martin, with more discussion of Game of Thrones and the effect it's had on his life.