Loved Fevre Dream. Will you ever write a horror novel again? —Mark
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN:Anything is possible, but I have to finish Ice and Fire first. I love all of these genres. I love horror, I love science fiction, and I even love historical fiction and mysteries. I like to do different things, and when I finish Ice and Fire I think I'll look around and I'll see what I feel like writing then. But that's not likely to be for a number of years now, so who knows?
You have a significant number of early stories that take place in space. What led you to move away from that and into a high fantasy realm? Was it something you always wanted to do? —Katie
Horror, science fiction, fantasy — I grew up reading all these things. My father used to call it all ''weird stuff.'' I read Tolkien one week and then I read Robert A. Heinlein the next. Then I read H.P. Lovecraft the week after that. And today, we have these genre barriers, as if these were completely different things. But they're all stories that have an element of the weird in them. I might write a science fiction novel as my next major project after I finish Ice and Fire. I never left horror, I'm not going to leave fantasy. I try to do everything. I enjoy murder mysteries — maybe I'll write a murder mystery next. I just don't want to be told, ''Oh, you write this sort of thing, so please settle down and keep turning out the same thing forever.'' That would be boring.
A Song of Ice and Fire seems to be written from a politically progressive point of view (plenty of strong female characters, gay characters, etc.). How do you respond to claims that you've fallen into a stereotypically clichéd male-fantasy point of view by showing lots of explicit woman-woman sexual relationships but no explicit male-male sexual relationships? —Arya
[Long laugh] Well, ah, gosh. I don't know, I hadn't thought of that one!
Here's a really particular question (which I realize means it probably won't get asked in a general interview): In A Storm of Swords, there is a chapter early on where Sansa is thinking back to the scene at the end of A Clash of Kings when The Hound came into her room during the battle. She thinks in the chapter about how he kissed her, but in the scene in A Clash of Kings, this actually didn't happen. Was that a typo or something? —Valdora
It's not a typo. It is something! [Laughs] ''Unreliable narrator'' is the key phrase there. The second scene is from Sansa's thoughts. And what does that reveal about her psychologically? I try to be subtle about these things.
Will Arya get her wolf back? —E
You'll have to keep reading and find out!
