George Raymond Richard Martin (born September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey) is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, and also a screenwriter and producer. He has been an instructor in journalism (in which he holds a master's degree) and a chess tournament director.
Martin was a prolific author of short fiction in the 1970s, and won several Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards before he started to turn his attention to novels late in the decade. Although much of his work is fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction occurring in a loosely-defined future history.
Martin's short story of the same name was adapted into the feature film Nightflyers (1987).
In 1996 Martin returned to writing novel-length stories, beginning his lengthy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire (ostensibly inspired by the success of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time cycle), to great critical acclaim. These are the books for which he is best known today.
Themes
Martin's work is rarely cheerful. His first novel, Dying of the Light, sets the tone for his future work; it is set on a mostly abandoned world that is slowly becoming uninhabitable as it moves away from its sun. This story, and many of Martin's others, have a strong sense of melancholy. His characters are often unhappy, or at least unsatisfied.
His characters are also prone to die, sometimes gruesomely. In A Song of Ice and Fire, so many sympathetic characters die within the first two books that by the third, Martin has begun using the perspectives of characters who were previously viewed as villains.
Martin was a prolific author of short fiction in the 1970s, and won several HugoAwards and Nebula Awards before he started to turn his attention to novels late in the decade.
Martin is opposed to fan fiction, to the extent that mentioning one has written it in his universe is a potentially bannable offense on the Song of Ice and Fire message board.
Martin's work is rarely cheerful; critics have described it as "dark" and "cynical." His first novel, Dying of the Light, set the tone for most of his future work; it is set on a mostly abandoned world that is slowly becoming uninhabitable as it moves away from its sun.
Martin is, by his own account, an artist of sunsets; his fin de siecle canvas may variously take in dying planets, the death of the modern age, or the long decline of chivalry, but loss is always the keynote, and the mood is ever a frenzied celebration of a glory that is passing.
Martin relates a grand adventure, but his true subject is the anatomy of the tomb, whether the entombment is that of an individual, a way of life, a nation, or a species--all of which extinctions are mooted here.
Martin has a taste for larger-than-life protagonists, and his chief viewpoint character in Fevre Dream is one Cap'n Abner Marsh, a massive, big-drinking, big-eating, large-hearted and large-fisted sort of fellow, who speaks plainly and acts with impulsive celerity.
Feeds |
Contact