A Conversation with George R R Martin | A Celebration of the Targaryen Dynasty

[Music] thank you welcome and thank you for joining us uh here tonight I am Dave and Anthony Durham I've been instructed to pause at this point [Laughter] David is my partner in crime and our host for tonight I'm George Martin of course R.R Martin I should always include that yeah uh Dave and I have known each other a few years um I think I met him first at the world fantasy convention in Saratoga exactly where he displayed his courage because we were doing the mass autographing where all the authors sit all around the ballroom and

people line up to do them and he was told by all his friends not to sit beside me but he did sit beside me anyway a Fearless fellow and then we got to talking but uh David is one of the rising stars in uh Science Fiction and Fantasy uh and other things he's written western novels he's written uh of course fantasy The Acacia Trilogy which is an Epic Fantasy he's written uh historical fiction uh novel about Spartacus a novel about Hannibal um and he won a few years after Saratoga he won the award for the

best new writer in science fiction the John W Campbell award and got a handsome Tiara which uh I think he wore for a year and and no longer wears had to pass it on um and at some point I was so impressed by his stuff that I invited him to my Wild Card shared World superhero Anthology uh and he accepted that without telling me that he'd never written any short fiction before but uh he he learned on the job and came up with some some great characters for us aided by his uh his son uh

but we won't talk about that um and we've been working together on that ever since and on on various other things David has also been um working on various aspects of uh the television show um Game of Thrones House of dragon the various other Spinners were developing he was uh he was in The Writer's room for the uh the long night show which did not go forward but he was one of the people who was there he's been in some of the other writers rooms for some of the successor shows that we're uh we're developing

and um yeah so we we doing a lot of stuff together uh you know wild cards and Westeros and uh this that and the other thing so it's great to be here doing this with you absolutely uh I am thrilled to be here really glad that I sat down um and didn't listen to my friends um because yeah it's been been a great uh working and friendship um since then thanks for that introduction too okay so we're here with George who needs no introduction obviously and um we're in New York City here at random house

and we have a great program with various segments we'll hear clips of the Fire and Blood audiobook and accompanied by illustrations from the rise of the Dragon George and I will discuss last night's explosive season finale for House of the dragon and talk about all things Targaryen including a round of westerosi would you rather lastly we'll listen to George after as many burning fan questions as he can that's what we're doing and we have to have commercials for these books at various points these are books that we're hosting here and you notice there's two of

them uh Fire and Blood uh came out in in 2018 and as the first volume of a two volume history of House Targaryen from uh pretty much from aegon's Conquest to um the end of the Regency of King aegon III there will be a second book uh fire and blood volume two um or maybe blood and fire um when when I get around to writing it in my copious for a time um this is the and that book or part of that book is what house of dragons based on this book is the new book

rise of the Dragon that's uh just coming out um in um tomorrow it's coming out tomorrow I believe yes uh and it should be available in your favorite local bookstore from your onside Bookseller this has the same text kind of as that but uh much Abridged because this is mostly as you see a beautiful large coffee table art book has 150 original pieces of art by some of the best fantasy illustrators in the world and we're going to show that some of them to you during the course of the evening and talk about them but

um with all that art we couldn't fit in the whole gigantic thick uh so we we uh Abridged it and uh you know did a just the facts version um so rise of the Dragon Fire and Blood um buy them both but don't don't read them right away because they have the whole story of where where the show ends and you just want to read to the point where it ended and then otherwise you'll be uh spoiled I have some thoughts on that but we'll get we'll get to those okay get to those um so

first up on on the agenda is House of the Dragon um season season one the finale last night um what did you think of that um and two that's one and the part two of that is that I know you had seen a rough cut before but not the finished version right and I'm wondering how different are those considerably different I mean I've worked in television film quite a while so it's not I've seen rough Cuts before but um you know if uh the special effects color timing sound adjustment all of these things make a

huge difference so you know seeing the big dragon battle that was the highlight of last night's thing in a rough cut is kind of uh yeah not not quite the same right that's an amazing sequence they did last night with the storm and the you know the dragons appearing and disappearing in the clouds and uh you know that that's the magic of special effects the magic of cinematography and it it's uh considerably considerably different yeah although my favorite um I saw many of the episodes in a rough cut ahead of time do you remember the

uh um I think it was episode three with a king went hunting and he was hunting for a a white heart and uh they find a heart which is not actually white um but he he deals with that heart um well in the rough cut the part of the heart was played by two stuntmen in in uh bright blue costumes the Blue Man Group uh sort of one of them was uh holding the other one around the waist and uh you know the king is stabbing at them with us so the king is hunting the

Blue Man Group um it was hilarious when you saw it but of course by the time it was finished it was a beautiful realistic looking art so you have to get used to if you work in this business to know what uh what a rough cut is and being able to visualize what the final version would be amazing I mean do you ever think we could there could be a special where we get to see some of these rough Cuts like they did for Lord of the Rings and stuff like that I don't know I

don't know I think they may um at some point do uh you know a Blu-ray a DVD and when they do that they often add special features now what kind of special features they add well they there are deleted scenes in many of the episodes so we could add back to deleted scenes and that's something that they frequently like to do sometimes there are blooper reels where actors walk into a wall or they forget to line or they do something uh similar um you know you could add something like that I don't know they would

do the Blue Man Group though I think the sprinkle effects Wizards like to like magicians like I don't want to reveal these things yeah they like to like to keep that secret right and the the episode itself and and how it wraps up the first season oh I just saw we've been working this for on on a long time so I knew where we were going we would wrap up the season yeah I think it did it very powerfully uh very powerfully and uh now we just have to do it again for season two which

is uh also a challenge because everything gets bigger and more characters come into play and um we we switched to more locations I mean the first season we were pretty much King's Landing yeah Dragonstone driftmark were the main locations occasionally we went to the stepstones for a little battle and Dragon action or to Storm's end but mostly it was centered on that but now as things get serious you'll be going to uh you know other locations uh um Winterfell and the Starks and uh you know possibly um the riverlands harrenhal all of these places will

be seen more families and Dragons will come into it and it just gets bigger so and you're saying all this we have to wait wait to see that sadly yes you have to wait you have to probably have to wait until uh 2024. because I don't think this show is so big I don't think we can have it ready uh next year in 2023 you know came on in August so ideally we would the new season would come on in August of a year later but it's too big we can't do it that now it

may not be a full two years maybe it come 2024 we'll be able to bring it on in like April or May instead of August but I don't think it's much chance it's going to be before that right well I thoroughly enjoyed the show and watched a number of episodes twice and and then just just the other day my wife and I went back to um to the to the first season uh to the first episode um and I felt like wow we have been through a lot I mean I guess it's the years passing

and all the events it was almost like I was being reminded that this journey it had been quite a journey basically even though it's not it's not particularly far flown um but in re-watching them I recommend it to folks um the the episodes I think each one gets gets better as I rewatch it um were you uh troubled by the time jumps and the the castings as some people say they were I wouldn't say troubled um it the feeling is this that I wish that we could have spent more time with everything um and and

yeah and seeing some of the the relationships develop there um so I would love for it to be to be slower but that's not like I'm not really troubled because I also respect and understand can see the decision-making process that went into into those choices how about you it's always an interesting uh question I mean you know maybe you may have to deal with it yourself someday I mean your Hannibal novel for example what if they made a feature film of Hannibal or a TV series it's in development he has a long life where do

you begin it did you have a little child Hannibal does he grow up or do you already have him being fully fleshed going forth to battle in I guess Spain initially and winning that invading Italy but that took years he campaigned in Italy for like a decade or something like that right oh yeah yeah and long time periods then he got called back to to fight the Battle of Zama and then he had to run away and he lived in exile for a while how do you present all that what format do you uh do

you do and it's a challenge um so anything that's a lengthy period of time I think you have your your choice where to begin it and uh if there are things that come before it do you present them in dialogue do you present them in terms of flashbacks or dreams or do you do the chronological thing and let the years pass and which does occasionally call for recasting yeah yeah as I watched watch the show um I was impressed again and again by when a decision by by the decisions that needed to be made I

could kind of again and again each episode um I could see that it was all quite deliberate you might lose something over here but but you're gaining something over there what do you think you know maybe time jumps aside were some of the hardest decisions to make and and approaching the show well I mean the hardest decision uh to to make was uh the one I've just alluded to is is where to begin I mean history is continuous A Fire and Blood well both books actually and this one longer than that one um present the

history of Targaryen Dynasty largely starting with any detail in aegon's Conquest um which is when aegon the conquer and his two sisters started taking over Westeros now actually there's history before that um you know Anar the Exile and his daughter Danny's the dreamer who for slow the Doom of Valeria came to Westeros and and moved into Dragon so I'm like a century earlier and then they they had children and they died and the children became the Lords and you know there was a number of generations that are listed there but I don't go into any

detail about them until I get to aegon and vicenya and rhaenys and their Three Dragons um and then there's you know there's aegon's Conquest you know we could have began then we could have begun uh you know with with aegon and not even reached the dance of the dragons for you know Five Seasons or something because you there's a lot of history is continuous one of the things that uh inspired uh me to do Fire and Blood um was a a popular history book that I read way back in the 50s by Thomas B castain

uh who was a very popular historical novelist of the period um and he mostly wrote historical fiction but he did write a four volume history of the plantagenets and uh it it starts from the beginning in a plantagenet family and it goes all the way through the uh the end of the plantation which was the worst of the Roses when they were exterminated by the uh the Tudors um so that's one way to do things I mean history just goes on and on we we see these uh these shows um movies television shows books that

have a have a beginning a middle and end okay here's a book about William the Conqueror and that's right William the conquer was born William the Conqueror dies but no he's part of a you know there was someone before William the Conqueror he had a father he had a mother where did they come from me he had a father and mother and after William mccawker died there are more things there's all the stories of his children so and who gets to be king after him um so that was the big challenge now we knew around

2016 it became clear that uh Game of Thrones was was going to end um probably with seven seasons as it happened at seven grew and it became eight but at that point HBO started said well what do we we need a a new show and I pitched him two shows one of them was uh the Duncan egg show which uh they didn't didn't pick up on but I pitched them to dance to the dragons which I already knew about I'd already written about to some extent um in some novellas and in the world of ice

and fire history book another Illustrated coffee table like that and they like that so uh we were we were going with uh the dance of the dragons and we've been developing it um you know since 2016. in one form or another um there were a couple other writers on the show before Ryan Condell um came on and Ryan of course has done a amazing job but one of the big issues with all of these writers was where to begin yeah where to begin do you begin with aegon's Conquest that's a long time ago do you

begin with uh well you saw the show you saw where Ryan began and I think he made a great choice he began in 101 with the great Council where the Lord's vote that your Harris's Heir he's just lost his son Balon who has died of appendicitis so who is his Heir now and they choose the Lord's vote to choose viserys over rainey's um and then you immediately skip forward it's just that one prologue scene and then you skip forward to skip over to Harris's death skip over all that viserys has been in power for a

number of years and you pick it up with the tournament the conflict with Damon that the birth of his male Heir and of course it turns into a horror when his wife Emma Queen Emma dies and the child dies a day later and raniera is declared air you you recall all of that to him I do indeed but I don't know if I should reveal this maybe I should wait for a Blu-ray or something after the show but that was not you know handed down by uh some some muse from ancient Greece we myself and

the other writers had a lot of Spirited discussions about where to uh where to begin that story one of the writers wanted to be in it uh later wanted to begin it essentially with Emma dying so skip the great Council skip the tournament a scream sounds out Emma is dead that's where you begin um so that was one possibility uh and another uh of the writers wanted to be an even later than that to begin with viserystein so you open act one scene one viserys's uh and what happens there well then you have to present

all that material in flashbacks or dialogue that becomes challenging too um but we discussed all these possibilities and the other possibility we discussed which is actually my favorite possibility but nobody liked it except me um I would have began it much earlier I would have began it like 40 years earlier with an episode I would have called the air and the spare in which Harris's two sons Eamonn and Balon are alive and we see the friendship but also the Rivalry between the two sides of the of the great house and then you know amen dies

accidentally when a door a mirish crossbowman shoots him by accident um on Tarth and then Harris has a side who becomes the new Air is it the daughter of the older son who's just died or is it the second Son who's only you know has children of his own and is a man and she's just a teenage girl you know all of that stuff so you could have presented all of that stuff but then you would have had 40 more years and you would have even more time jumps and you would have even more recastings

and uh yeah I was the only one who was really enthused about that so I don't know but I I I've always loved poetry of Roderick Kipling and I I love his uh poem in the Neolithic age where the refrain is there there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right and I think that's true for writing books or television shows there are many ways you can approach these things and if you do it well it it can work well throughout all this we're kind of indirectly

indirectly talking about Fire and Blood and there's so much material in this about the targaryens but could you just introduce introduce the book and and your approach to it it's a history book but there's a lot of different versions of things and you know yes well of course as you know I'm writing and have been writing for many decades now A Song of Ice and Fire which is uh the the series of books that was the basis of Game of Thrones uh and there's still two more books to do and those are you know conventional

novels so they're very very ambitious and complex novels because they have multiple Viewpoint characters I'm interweaving all of the different stories essentially I'm writing you know 7 9 12 novels and interweaving them together but they are conventional novels each chapter has a Viewpoint character and you you see it through that when it became clear that uh we were going to do the Dance of the dragon show but that ultimately became House of the Dragon but initially we called it Dance with Dragons um we wanted a book to go with that and I already had the

seeds of the book from material that was in the world of Ice and Fire and from the novellas I'd written for my friend Garden Princess and the queen and the Rogue Prince and so forth um so I actually asked we're in the the random house Offices here and I'm I'm about to get them in terrible trouble but I asked them well what to do you want me to just ignore the new show that's coming down the pike or should I finish that book so you can get it out and then go back to and they

said yeah give us the the new book that's closer to being done you should have two more books so I I put Winds of Winter aside for a while and I concentrated on finishing Fire and Blood there was a lot of it already there but I had to expand it and polish it and particularly I had to fill in the reign of joharis because if you look at the earlier versions he was reigned for 55 years but he was a good King and so pretty much all I said well he was a good King and

they were half a century of peace and prosperity well nobody wants to read that that's boring so I had to uh I had to you know flesh all that out and write a material under Harris and I did and that came out in uh in in 2018 uh and then I switched immediately back to uh you know when when's winter right you mentioned 2018 I I read it in 2018 shortly after it came out and it was you know quite an experience um so much history so many names so many births and deaths and um

and betrayals and every now and then someone does something nice I guess it was an awful lot of it and I loved it but it was also kind of overwhelming thing is that that really kind of set me up to enjoy watching House of the Dragon um because all this name or some of those names became actual you know people actors who did amazing jobs and you know I could connect with them yeah I love our actors yeah so so for me having read it um ahead of time was kind of a pleasure because every

now and then I would go oh I I know that just set up something that's going to happen later on and I was kind of being reminded of it um and I feel like it's yes you could you could like not read Fire and Blood but I think you don't lose anything because you're also there are various versions of a lot of events um in the book but you still don't know what what's what's going to be on the show yes and but I had a lot of fun writing that book um I hope it

was fun for the readers too I think it was fun for many of the readers but not all there are people who wanted a conventional model oh sure but um you know if you look at A Song of Ice and Fire the main series that I'm writing um I still have two more books to write and the series is only covering a handful of years the events of a handful of years to cover two and a half centuries I would have had to write 20 novels of you know aegon the Conqueror and his two sons

and major the cruel and this revolt and that Revolt um it would have taken me a long time I'm not the fastest writer in the world um so I decided to do it um as a as a fake history you know model to a great degree on what Thomas B costain did with his plantagenist history and then the other thing that got me going was the thought of of history and how history is uh is recorded to us and the thing is we don't you know we think we know history but we don't we don't

have time machines we rely on the people who pass it down to us and there are often contradictions um I I that was really brought home to me many decades ago when I was writing uh a novel never published about the yellow journalism in New York City in in the 1890s and it was uh you know it was a great era there were 14 daily newspapers in New York I was writing a story sort of a historical horror novel about three reporters competing for uh for a big story tracking down a killer and one of

them was a reporter for the New York world Joseph pulitzer's New York World which was one of the dominant papers of the time and the world was down on newspaper row all of the newspapers were on like the same block but Pulitzer built the tallest building in the world time and he topped it with a golden dome and it stood right next to the sun which was a rival paper and uh the editors didn't like each other so people joked it from his golden dome Pulitzer could spit down on the sun um but the thing

is when I'm researching this book and I there was no internet then so I had I had gathered every book I could do about journalism the period and life of Pulitzer and life of everything and I'm researching it a very simple question how many stories was the World building it's the tallest building in the world it's a famous building and I encounter two different versions it had 15 stories it had 14 stories and then I tried to dig more into some 14 to some 50 and then I encounter one that said at 20 stories say

what the hell the building doesn't exist anymore I don't have a time Travel how many store stories did it have it's a simple fact and then you go from that and you you look at the history and history is full of wonderful stories you know I draw a lot in evil history but you know Edward the second um deposed as king of England by his own son and imprisoned and then murdered supposedly by having a red hot poker thrust up his ass or really or did someone invent that story later it's very colorful but the

things are that is probably invented later and then the uh the black dinner Scotland which was one of the sources for the the Red Wedding you know that the King of Scotland invites the Earl of Douglas to Black Douglas and his son his brother who had two teenagers one of them is like 18 one of them is like 16 to a dinner at uh at his castle and they have a lavish dinner and then at the end they bring out a big covered plate silver platter and a a gloomy sonorous song begins to do when

they lift the they lift a plate and it's a black Boar's Head which is the symbol of death and then they take out the two douglases and murder them um great story very much inspired you know the red wedding or they did it but did it ever happen probably not uh yes the douglasses were certainly killed but was there any was there a song was there but they made it better you know some later thing made it better so that got me all thinking all of this stuff got me thinking about history and saying I'm

not just going to do a history I'm going to do a history written a couple hundred years later and you know when you're writing a book I'm sure you you do this with yours work too you know you have an idea for a scene have a different idea for saying oh which one should I go with I'll go with this one I'll go with that one well that one's too wild people never believed I'll go with that you tend to go with the conservative scene but with that kind of thing I could have it both

ways I could say this is how septon Eustis said it went and this is how Grandmaster Orwell said it went and this is how mushroom said it went and you pick which one because we don't know yeah exactly gildane doesn't know and we don't know you don't know really the truth about Hannibal or Spartacus in the books you've written about them how much how much of your historical fiction is in fact made up compared to your fantasy it's it's kind of amazing that I can feel very proud um let's say of um pridal Carthage the

Hannibal novel and also know know that he probably didn't speak one complete sentence of the dialogue that I I gave him right like it's it's and yet I'm hoping that it still captures the story and speaks to readers but that the inter the way that fantasy and history um intermingle and inform each other I think is is amazing when I was writing that book um I was trying to I was driving around Spain um with my wife and my kids we're camping a lot I was drinking a lot a lot of nice wine and we're

taking in um you know ruins and yeah we were doing research um but I kept realizing that the place that I needed to write about it wasn't there anymore like I'd go to a room go to a ruin and it was you know it was the Roman ruin but then it was like medieval ruin and it was it was a modern City built on it and everything so it kind of had to to you know lean in to using my imagination and I think that happened happening with with pride of Carthage is probably kind of

opened some doors that led me to inevitably toward fantasy um I love historical fiction uh as well as science fiction fantasy and I read a lot of historical fiction but there's a line and I would be very hard-pressed to Define it I mean sometimes I pick up a a novel of historical fiction and there's something in it that I just know is wrong it just jars me right from the beginning and it you know it gets me it puts me right out of it you know I'm reading a Julius Caesar novel and it turns out

he has a twin brother well so I don't want to read about that nothing more um but other things I'll I'll let people get away with um you know frequently I don't know but I mean I love I love one of my great influences um in television is I Claudius which of course is based on the I Claudius BBC series is based on the uh Robert Graves novels I Claudius and Claudius de God which in turn is based on the history of swetonius and swartonius lived hundreds of years after the events he was recording he

was just and he was the mushroom of his time and he never nobody ever died in swetonius of natural causes everybody was poisoned or murdered or something like that but it certainly makes her a lively uh read yeah okay um we could keep talking but now let's do something silly oh dear um I have a few questions here of the would you rather um variety so let's play that would you rather be a maester or join the kingsguard I would rather be a maester of course I mean uh they're at the city of books I

could read all day and write all day history which is pretty much what I like and the kingsguard I would have to address an armor it's very hot and uncomfortable and wear white all the time it really gets dirty uh very hard to keep that white armor and the white cloak clean and both of them take vows of Chastity so I I wouldn't get any wives or girlfriends in either case so might as well go with the maester okay I think I know what you'll what you'll see about this one but then again these two

things are actually quite different would you rather have a dragon or a direwolf well that's an interesting that's an interesting question too um the dragon has certain advantages number one it is you can fly and I would love to uh be able to fly as a kid you know I read superhero comics I I I didn't want to be Batman swinging on a rope by wanted to be Superman and flying through the skies and all of that stuff flying is a primal dream so yeah flying on a dragon and being able to burn the hell

out of my enemies that's useful too um on the other hand uh the direwolves are friendlier than the dragons and uh you know they're they're you know like big Shaggy dogs and uh there was probably more of a close and affectionate um bond between them and uh I would like to have a direwolf right now at my house in in Santa Fe we moved into a new house a while ago it's a beautiful house and it has a little kind of waterfall in the back and a whale and has a couple pools beautiful pools and

uh I stock those pools with koi because I thought that would be cool and the raccoons ate all of my koi but if I had a direwolf those damn raccoons would stay the hell away they would indeed would you rather have the Hound or the mountain play defense for the New York Giants uh you got to go with the Hound I mean a mountain is bigger and he's fierceo but he would get constant penalties for on sportsmanlike conduct and uh you know terrible things like that you're not allowed to rip the head off opponents or

pop their eyes out with your thumbs that's definite no no in in the National Football League we have progressed in some ways over here um would you rather have Tywin Lannister or Otto Hightower as your hand oh boy I don't know I can't have Tyrion on this that was not one of the options um I think Tywin but it's hard they're similar types they're both pretty smart but yeah okay would you rather freeze to death be on the wall or burn it alive in dragon fire Ah that's another tough one um can I just live

forever I can't die the way Tyrion wanted to die oh that's a Pity uh I can't say how he wanted to die but it's in the books read the books he's asked that question uh by Shaka son of Dolph um I think freezing fire is supposed to be a really really painful way to die yeah I've always heard yeah and that that brings me back slightly to the the dragon or direwolf question do you think it's possible to have to have a dragon and and live a benevolent life like would you inherently get pulled into

using that power well that's an interesting question too and uh it's a question if I may Verge away from medieval history and metaphor to the current reality we we live in uh you know it's often been said that the dragons are the nuclear weapons of my imaginary world they are the most devastating weapon and they cause great destruction uh massive loss of life um but they're not necessarily you know I mean this is part of Danny's storyline and the original novels I mean Danny Danny has three dragons and she can destroy these cities like Marine

where she finds herself Queen but doesn't mean she can necessarily rule them easily without destroying them so when do you do that and we I grew up I'm a I'm a baby boomer born in 1948 and growing up in the 50s there was always the the Specter of nuclear war I mean I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev and uh you know saber rattling and you know all of the books about the nuclear Holocaust about Armageddon um you know what would what was going to happen we we were worried about that actually there's

nuclear weapons have only been used twice in all of history um and they've been used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki um afterwards there was a long period where only America had uh nuclear weapons nobody else in the world had them um and there were people believe it or not like your science fiction fan you know who Robert a Heinlein was yep Heinlein the the dean of Science Fiction a fascinating guy because his his politics a lot of people think of him as conservative because of where he got in the end of his life but earlier when

he was a young man he he ran he was sort of a socialist he ran there for office in California on up in Sinclair's platform and he actually advocated in letters that you can find that uh at the end of at the end of World War II when only America had the atomic bomb he said America should give the atomic bomb to the newly formed United Nations and it should be prohibited to all other countries so we would have a world government and only the United Nations would be able to uh enforcing and can you

imagine if that had actually been done what a very very different world that we would live in maybe not one that we would like but is there and thereafter there was always these concerns about uh you know well we can win any of these wars you know why did I mean MacArthur and some other people wanted to use the atomic bomb in in Korea in the Korean War um you know and when China invaded uh well that's why are we letting them do that we could win the war of course by the end of the

Russians I think had a tube or Barry Goldwater in 1964 election way why are we you know why we fighting this war in Vietnam let's just drop a nuke on uh Hanoi or at least that was the charge but we we never did it we always refrained we were we were the the dragon writers who would not use our dragons although we would kind of use them to intimidate them except now more and more countries have that we've tried a nuclear non-proliferation but you know Britain got them Soviet Union got them Britain got them France

got them um then it went to India and Pakistan and uh North Korea for God's sakes and uh Iran is trying to get them and there's always the rumors that Israel has them that's more of our countries get this I I think the danger becomes greater and greater someday someone is going to use them and right now the danger is very high I mean you can turn on the news every day is Putin losing the war in Ukraine is he going to resort to nukes and then the question becomes what if he does Putin resorts

to nukes does America unleash its dragons or do we not and let him get away from it these are these are profound questions we could debate this for an hour with a panel of political scientists and things like that and it's not a not an easy answer to yeah okay yeah we're not gonna come up with the answer um we can talk about rise of the Dragon though sure um and in particular uh the visuals the artwork in it we're gonna we're gonna take a look at some um but there are quite a number of

of artists um who contribute to it right like how many or well it's 150 illustrations um not 150 different artists but many many different artists from all around the world um very well known fantasy artists and and artists you've never heard of before right uh but my my uh Team here at random house and 10 speed press which is a um a imprint help put them together in consultation with Ray golden who is my own one of my assistants and my art director and there's some spectacular work there absolutely I've always loved um you know

I'm I'm again a baby boomer and some of the books that I had when I was quite young were Illustrated books um I'm particularly thinking of things like Treasure Island and um King Arthur and his Knights they were illustrated by amazing artists like NC Wyeth and Howard Pyle men of iron Howard Pyle gorgeous books and I they imprinted on me at an early age and I always loved Illustrated books by the time I started publishing my own books though nobody was doing Illustrated books anymore they were too especially the big fancy ones with the color

plates they were too expensive um and it was felt they wanted to keep prices down but fortunately as the years went by my books became more popular suddenly small presses began to appear and saying well we'd like to do a small limited edition and I said well I want I want to illustrate it so we started doing more and more Illustrated books and now even we're having the the you know Maine this this book is is full of uh tons of black and white illustrations by Douglas Wheatley and this one has uh as I have

many different artists 150 illustrations many in color um and I I love it and we also do an annual uh ice and fire calendar um that is uh usually one artist doing 12 or 13 pictures sometimes uh multiple artists right each doing one okay well let's take a look at some of these images I believe I can present a field of fire Conquest and we can take a look at it here and the visual will come up for people so Field of Fire um what can you say about this and well the field and fire

of course was one of the major battles of aegon's Conquest and uh you know aegon the Conqueror had a Dragon balerion the black dread and his two sisters were also his wives also had dragons and when the conquest was on they largely split up and they went to different places and fought different battles subduing Lords but in the field of fire the the king in the west and the king of the reach joined forces and those are two very rich and populist things so they assembled a vast Army and they marched to meet aegon um

and wiped him out his army was many many times smaller he'd he'd conquered a few of the Lesser Lords and who would then bent the knee and joined him but he could not match the number of nights and all that that they had but he did have the Three Dragons yeah and even that is uh you know nuclear metaphors aside even that might not have been sufficient because you know that dragon is like a giant flamethrower they can you know shoot out a bolt of fire but if you have 50 000 people how many can

one bolt of fire pit you know but the big factor and the big mistake that the uh the Lords the kings of the region Iraq made was uh it was a dry period they were crossing grasslands with tall grasses on either side they were of course their horses were trampling down them but they were surrounded by this tall very dry grass and aegon and his sisters not only burn the knights but they set fire to the grass behind them and on either side of them and the whole field went up in you know walls of

flame there was no way out or very hard way out um so it was a total route and a victory wiped out the gardeners entirely who were the kings of the reach and the Lannisters some of them survived and had to bend the knee all right so reflective of history as well and warfare and how much the use of of the of the of the landscape and well yes that's the landscape is very important and you know I do love uh as I say I love reading history I love reading historical fiction um and real

medieval battles um the military history is also fascinating to me um you know a movie like a Braveheart um I enjoyed Braveheart but you know historically it's it's um they're taking stuff from that centuries apart and putting in together um what to really want the thing in Braveheart that really got me and practically had me foaming in the aisles is when they did the Battle of Sterling which of course was the Battle of Sterling bridge bridge was absolutely essential to the Battle of Sterling and the whole strategy and the Victory uh depended on this bridge

and the river and they took all that out and it was just a lot of guys in a field running at each other and that's what was not right right so you have to take the ground you know I don't care if you're talking you know Gettysburg or uh Zama or Kanai or any of these Great Battles of History the the uh Battle of Hastings uh yeah you've got to know the landscape okay let's take a look at another one not a landscape but aegon the second and the iron throne that is an amazing Iron

Throne yes it is although I'm not quite sure what the there seems to be a second iron throne off to the off to the side of it um but yes that is a very large Iron Throne um there is one that I like even better which is the the mark Simonetti Iron Throne that he did um I I believe for the world of Ice and Fire I work with him and uh we consulted a lot on that you know they've been obviously no Iron Throne exists uh I made it up um but the the version

that HBO did became very iconic and you know was used in the show for many years and there were many replicas about it that showed up at uh various conventions and promotional events I've sat in it right right and and I have one in my backyard um but it's much smaller than the one in the books the one in the book says not symmetrical and it's it's huge it's described as a giant special thing not built by furniture designers but by blacksmiths just hammering swords together with dragon fire um and there's steep steps that go

up to it so the King has to climb all the way up he's sitting like 10 feet above everybody else looking down on it which the symbolism of that is very powerful um but when you make a a motion picture or a television show there are practicalities and that was what uh you know HBO encountered very early back in 2010-2011 you know they had a a throne room in Ireland which they had uh gotten from actually a previous movie it was a very nice large throne room but it didn't have a ceiling big enough for

a like a 20-foot tall throne and even if it had you know you wouldn't need it a a Sound Stage as big as Saint Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey which we didn't have um and then how do you shoot the King on top of the throne you would need a be angling up all the time or put a camera angle down you would have needed a crane would have made the whole thing much more complex um when we did House of dragon though Ryan Condell and his people tried to get closer to the conception of

the throne and they designed the uh the one that you're seeing which has all the spikes on the other side it's considerably more intimidating but it's not it doesn't have the the height thing now this version of the iron throne has uh has the height um it's kind of crooked rather than being a straight Link in some others but it's a pretty cool Iron Throne I think with with the hundreds if not thousands of swords in it and it's had a baby well that's certainly one of the great things about these these illustrations that uh

it can be reimagined in in this so many different ways um right and that's that's pretty cool um one more um the tourney of 111 AC the green and the blacks all right well in this case it's the white it's a you know we're showing uh what is I presume a kingsguard night um who who wore white cloaks and uh pure white armor and he's uh you know on this uh magnificent horse you see the heraldry behind them many of the competing houses um I love Harold green I I work uh yeah I I work

when we were doing the first books and I I first had contact with Elio Garcia of Westeros we we spent years uh trying to do designs for heraldry some of you could find in old books of heraldry some of it we had to create whole cloth because there was no one no one to do that I mean I could talk for 20 minutes about Harold Reed but that would probably bore the hell out of your uh your people it's it it is interesting that uh Westeros heraldry is much cooler than real world Herobrine because um

everybody in the real world everybody liked lions and Eagles you never saw a hedgehog or a some of the other uh cool heraldic things but I I try to use it all in uh in Westeros and it's fun absolutely okay I could keep talking to you but um we need to move on to the next segment we're gonna see a video um for it wait let me make sure I'm getting this right a video and there's an excerpt from the audio of Fire and Blood so and then your your benefit and then I will have

to vanish yep all right well before you vanish and before we show this video I want to congratulate you and make a announcement that's very cool some of you may know that in a day I have other books I I occasionally wrote other books that were not part of Westeros or that and one of them uh that I wrote back in way back in 1978 was a short story uh about a dragon an ice dragon and it's called Uh the ice dragon um just a short story as I said it's uh primarily a kids story

but we are going to make that Warner Brothers animation has purchased the rights to it and we're going to expand it to a fully animated film from Warner Brothers animation a theatrical film we hope to be released in a motion picture Palace near you and David Anthony Durham will be writing the screenplay and he better do a good job [Laughter] um yes so pleased um to to get that assignment um and so daunted by actually having that assignment but I love the story um and um I'm starting to dig into making it into it into

a movie thanks for announcing it too oh my pleasure appreciate that and I should say that the the ice dragon is not part of the West Coast universe so some people seem to think so I wrote the ice dragon in 1978 I didn't mean think of Westeros until 1991 so there was a considerable you know 13 years in between there all right well thank you very much for that it's been a pleasure I will now bow out um thank you all as well the dying of the dragons the blacks and the greens the dance out

of the Dragons is the fiery name bestowed upon the Savage internation struggle for the Iron Throne of Westeros fought between two rival branches of House Targaryen during the years 129 to 131 AC to characterize the dark turbulent bloody doings of this period as a dance strikes us as grotesquely inappropriate no doubt the phrase originated with some singer the dying of the Dragons would be altogether more fitting that tradition time and Grand maester Monken have burned the more poetic usage into the pages of History so we must dance along with the rest there were two principal

claimants to the Iron Throne upon the death of King viserys the first Targaryen his daughter rhaenyra the only surviving child of his first marriage and aegon his eldest son by his second wife amidst the chaos and Carnage brought on by their rivalry other would-be kings would stake claims as well strutting about like Mummers on a stage for a fortnight or a Moon's turn only to fall as swiftly as they had written the dance split the Seven Kingdoms in two as Lords Knights and small folk declared for one side or the other and took up arms

against one another even House Targaryen itself was divided when the kith kin and children of each of the claimants became embroiled in the fighting over the two years of struggle a terrible toll was taken on the great Lords of Westeros and together with their Bannerman Knights and small Folk whilst the dynasty survived at the end of the fighting saw Targaryen power much diminished and the world's last dragons vastly reduced in number the dance was a war unlike any other ever fought in the long history of the Seven Kingdoms though armies marched and met in Savage

battle much of the slaughter took place on water and especially in the air as Dragon fought dragon with tooth and Claw and Flame it was a war marked by stealth murder and betrayal as well a war fought in Shadows and stairwells council chambers and Castle yards with knives and lies and poison along simmering the conflict burst into the open on the third day of the third Moon of 129 AC when the ailing bedridden King viserys the first Targaryen closed his eyes for a nap in the red keep of King's Landing and died without waking his

body was discovered by a serving man at the hour of the bat when it was the king's custom to take a cup of Hippocrates the servant ran to inform Queen Alison whose Apartments were on the floor below the Kings hi well I'm back uh with my friend uh and we're gonna answer a few fan questions that have been uh sent in here uh which of your characters would you most like to have dinner with uh well that would depend in part on the purpose of the dinner um if I wanted a wit and entertainment uh

Tyrion Lannister very few people as uh you know funny or witty as a Tyrion but he's also dangerous too if you uh annoy him he could uh you know send you to the dungeon or cut your head off um if I was simply looking for a wonderful meal uh go to Penthouse and eat with illyrio mopatas he uh he has some marvelous uh feasts uh set before him or I suppose you could go to the uh you know the Inn on the Trident and and see what hot pie was uh whipping up um another character

that might be fun to have dinner with would be uh Shea when she was alive but uh probably for reasons that I shouldn't go into um is there a character that you would have liked to explore and write more about but not able to in A Song of Ice and Fire or Fire and Blood uh well yes there are in fact a lot of characters um one of the things uh about fire and blood in particular is its nature as a history meant I was summarizing things and as I as I summarize those things and

characters appeared be they major a minored it was always part of me the the novelist part in the back of my mind said I could write a whole novel about that that character um boy I wish I had time to I could at least write a story about them um and I've been tempted to do that uh many times there are some characters it's hard to explain in some ways why some characters trigger something in me or or fascinate me and others maybe don't but uh um a character like us the the Dragon Knight um

this very Gallant one of the greatest knights in in the history of Westeros or um or Nettles um who you know is a is a dragon writer in the dance where does she come from where does she go to what is her life like what is her life like after she Fades from the public sphere um those are interesting um I have thought at various points of writing an entire novel about uh carrot we haven't gotten to you yet aegon the fourth aegon the Unworthy he's like the Henry the eighth of uh of Westeros except

worse he has all these Mr C's and he's he's not a nice guy but he's an interesting guy and that's that's something that uh you know fascinates me what makes a villain what makes a a hero um are there people who are all good and all evil I don't I don't know but there's a million characters I I just need to live to be you know 150 uh and I can write all of this uh what was one of your favorite scenes to write in a series and one of your least favorite um well one

scene I don't know if I could name one favorite scene and one least favorite scene I did generally always like writing about Tyrion the Tyrion chapter seemed to write themselves and I had a very hard time to struggle with writing from bran because bran of all the characters was the one who was most involved in Magic and I think magic and fantasy sorcery the supernatural all of these things have to be handled with a great deal of care or they can overwhelm the uh the story so um I rewrote some of those brand chapters over

and over again and I'm still struggling with the new ones that are in uh in The Winds of Winter but uh hopefully we're we're getting there um what's seen from Fire and Blood are you most excited is he brought to the screen uh well yeah the battle over to Garden time although that battle that they did in the season finale was pretty uh pretty amazing too um what is your favorite seemingly minor moment that changed the course of uh westeros's history um there are a couple of them I think uh in in the first in

the Hedge night the first Duncan egg story uh the death of Baylor breakspeare who was the uh the heir next in line to the throne and I think would have been a very strong and very competent King who who dies to defend the uh the honor of an insignificant hedge knight uh how is Westeros history different if Baylor does not die um that would be very significant and similarly the whole dance with the dragons I mentioned earlier the the air and this air in the spear I mean Harris the Old King had 13 children it

seemed a succession was very solid he had the proverbial air in the sphere and two very competent Sons Eamonn and Balon and Eamon was killed while flying on his Dragon to uh Tarth to help defend the Isle against some you know Pirates and mirish people and he was killed by a crossbow well it was not even meant for him there was you know the the even starve Tarth the the Lord was well known to the mirrish and they were determined to take him out and uh crossbow men didn't even recognize who was this new guy

who was walking alongside him but he just missed and suddenly the whole succession was thrown into doubt and in some ways you could say that was one of the first things that caused the dance of the dragons uh when you first imagined characters in A Song of Ice and Fire and Fire and Blood were there any that changed in unexpected ways as the story uh developed yes in fact there were so many that I couldn't even begin to tell you um it's the way I write I've I've talked about this in many interviews and many

blog posts two types of writers the architect and a gardener and um the architect plans everything ahead of time but the gardeners just starts to write the story and the characters come alive and they take him in unexpected directions so sometimes it's an unexpected character who pops up and uh captivates you and takes over the story and does take it in unexpected directions I remember one of the First characters to do that was Brawn you know Tyrion is on the road and he he meets at an end he runs into these two cell swords Brawn

and chicken and uh then he gets arrested by uh Catelyn Stark and um he has to travel to the irie and he's put on trial and and Braun steps forward uh to defend him um I needed someone it could have easily have been chigging at that stage but no I killed chicken I just just I like to name Braun bitter and the more time Tyrion spent with Braun the more interesting the character became to me I wanted to know who he was and what about him and I liked his dialogue I liked the sound of

him he played very well off Tyrion so but that's only one character there are many many other characters that have done the same thing to uh to a greater or less extent in uh in these books um if you could choose a time or place in westerosi history then you could revisit in future stories what would it be uh you know virtually everything in Fire and Blood all the histories there's part of me that would love to uh flesh them out a little more tell the tell the full story in the form of a novella

or a novel um and we saw even more of that in the in the TV show I mean it we had 10 episodes um people have said that time jumps were jarring to them and you know raniera's relationship with Harwin strong um she had three children by him but we never even you know we never see them get together for the first time or cast we never have a scene when they first slept with each other we don't know exactly what has happened and how he felt about that and how Lenor felt about him there's

a whole story there there's a at least a novella maybe a a novel but um we we simply did not have the time to tell it um and it did not fit the format of my history book so but it's a story and I would love to love to do that um Fire and Blood is strongly informed by the biases of watchmaster gildane and mushroom well mushroom is only one of gildane's sources there's also Eustis and uh or a while who recount these events do you consider House of dragon to be a companion piece of

the book that shows the true nature of events as they actually happened or will only you ever know the truth well how meta do you want to get I mean there is no truth I make all this stuff up uh Archer Mason gildane mushroom all of those things and uh what is the truth uh will we ever know the truth of uh Hannibal uh or Spartacus as in David's novel will we ever know the truth of what happened at the black dinner of Scotland um will we ever know the truth of any of these things

truth gets obscured um so I say with Kipling there are 9 and 20 ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is is right are you team black or Team Green well I don't know read the book you have to make your own mind up on that maybe I'm a bit of both teams um what smaller house in Westeros It's the Most Fascinating to you and why um again that's a that's a tough one um I do get interested in the history of uh many of these uh smaller houses obviously house valerion

which was largely very much in the background in A Song of Ice and Fire but is very much in the foreground of Fire and Blood and House of the Dragon um is a house that has engaged me and you know one of the successor shows we're working on is called Nine voyages it's the uh earlier Voyage of Corliss valerion who was the Sinbad the Sailor the Magellan um the Captain Kirk on the water of Westeros and he made these incredible mind voyages to the far ends of the Earth so house valerion is is uh one

that's interested in me I've always had a soft spot for house Blackwood which has an interesting history and they're one of the few houses south of the neck that still follows the old gods and has a weirwood tree and they they have not adopted the faith of the seven that's an interesting to me how did they uh how did they work out some of the houses in Doran interests me a great deal uh you know nymeria how she uh unified all of Dorne all of the petty kingdoms that's fascinating and I hope we hope to

tell that story too in one of the successor shows uh 10 000 ships but also how starful which is the ha uh the the house Dane which is headquarters at Starfall and they have the the sword Dawn which is even more potent than the Valerian steel swords it's forged from a full-length star and the man who Wheels it is called a sword of the morning and they have a at least in my head they have a very colorful Rich kind of mysterious interesting background that uh one day I would like to write about there just

need to be seven of me and they need to be 37 hours in a day and I need to be 35 years old again but sadly none of these things are likely to occur and finally you asked a question I knew I was going to get do you have an update on the Winds of Winter um you know it's the same update I've been giving for a long time I'm I continue to work on it it continues to get longer and longer I mean I was working on it the day before I flew back here

for three or four days but I was I was rereading some chapters that I'd written earlier and I didn't like them well enough and uh so I kind of ripped them apart and rewrote them um and I've had some ideas while I've been on this trip I got to get back and and hopefully get to it while the ideas are still fresh in my head um it's a big big book I've said that before it's a challenging book um it's probably going to be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series

The what the desert dragons and Storm of Swords are the two largest books in the series they were both about 1500 manuscript pages I think this one is going to be longer than that by the time I finish it and I think I'm about three quarters of the way done maybe um but that's not a hundred percent done so I I have to continue to work on it and of course then there's the issue here of my friends at random house when I deliver this monstrous book that will be as big of this Dragon are

they going to try to make me cut it in two or are they going to do something other horrible to me ah no we'll find out about that but first I have to finish it I I have to get it all done and uh I've given up making predictions because people press me and press me when's it going to be done and I make what I think is the best case estimate and then stuff happens and um yeah that's um then everybody gets mad that I lied I've never lied about these predictions they're the best

I can make but I guess I overestimate my ability to get stuff done and I underestimate the amount of interruptions and other projects and other demands that will distract me and so on and so on but it's in progress I'm working on it um creeping forward but uh one day it will be done and then it will come out and then the next day someone will tweet me when will we see a dream of spring so uh yes I I can see the future I'm a science fiction guy anyway that's all we have for you

tonight um so I hope you've enjoyed this talk it was great having David here um I think we could uh we could have talked for another two or three hours um but um he has to get home and get working on the ice dragon um so do um do pick up Fire and Blood do pick up this incredible art book that we have uh rise of the dragons and uh also please do pick up some of my Wild Card books David David is in those along with a lot of other marvelous writers and pick up

some of David's own novels his Acacia High fantasy series his books about Hannibal and pride of Carthage um terrific reads and I think you'll really enjoy them if you like historical fiction historical fantasy Epic Fantasy any of these things so thank you and good night