‘Game of Thrones’ journey is far from over

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Mark Addy is one of the stars of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” which is based on George R.R. Martin’s book series and recently earned 13 Emmy nominations.

George R.R. Martin by the numbers

8.5 million — Number of copies in the USA of his A Song of Ice and Fire books.

4 million — Number of books printed since January, when HBO started promoting its “Game of Thrones” series.

5 — Number of books in the series.

15 — Current ranking of book 1, A Game of Thrones , on USA Today’s best-seller list.

2 — Highest all-time ranking on the list (Nov. 17, 2005, debut for book 4, A Feast for Crows ).

96 — Weeks books in the series have spent on the list.

4,197 — Total number of pages in the series so far.

Gannett News Service

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Updated: October 23, 2011 12:22AM

In a century past, an obscure fantasy novel emerged from the ever-churning seas of book publishing where an infinity of stories drown unread. But championed by an army of obsessed fans, primarily young and masculine, this 1996 tale of dynastic warfare on a medieval-meets-magical alternative continent named Westeros evolved from cult favorite to best-selling series to this year’s hit HBO show “Game of Thrones.”

Behold George R.R. Martin and his A Song of Ice and Fire cycle. More than 650,000 hardcover copies of A Dance With Dragons (Bantam, $35) were released this month in the U.S., with translators in more than 40 languages standing by.

The HBO series, based on the first book and starring Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke, just received a whopping 13 Emmy nominations. But the show is a mere sampling in terms of the plot, compared to the addictive and intricate series. Imagine what would emerge if J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) were locked in a room with the writing staff of “The Sopranos,” Niccolo Machiavelli, horrormeister H.P. Lovecraft and a gaggle of experts in Mongolian and medieval British history.

In Martin’s latest, A Dance with Dragons, Daenerys rules in the East, aided by her trio of dragons, the big hearted dwarf Tyrion goes questing, and Winterfell’s own Jon Snow, reared in House Stark despite his bastard birth, get big air time.

Things have certainly changed for Martin, 62, since his book tour for A Game of Thrones in 1996. At a Dallas bookstore, he was thrilled to see hundreds of people until he realized they were parents and kids. “Clifford the Big Red Dog crushed me,” he recalls. “There were like 12 people to see me. It was humbling.”

On a recent visit to Slovenia, 2,000 fans stood in line to meet Martin who now gets recognized in airports. “It’s flattering if a little disconcerting,” he says.

The Santa Fe, N.M., author writes about war, ambition, money and magic, as well as the hunger for love and power. Most all, Martin says, he writes about what William Faulkner famously said was the only thing worth writing about: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

But one of the most fascinating aspects of the series is the pull it exerts over young men, a group associated with Playstations, not the Plantagents. (The series includes elements of England’s 15th century War of Roses.)

Ladies! Put down that web flamethrower; older fans, step away from the vitriol button on your laptop. Few things enrage Martin’s fans more than the stereotype that the only people who love fantasy fiction are nerd boys.

In fact, Song is traditionally described as a fantasy series for people who hate fantasy. “It’s got great characters, great storytelling — the fact that it’s fantasy is almost besides the point,” says Martin’s publisher Scott Shannon.

Martin disputes he’s somehow a niche writer for the “Halo” set. He points out that at signings, he’s had fans as young as 11 (“that’s too young”) and readers in their 80s. “They tell me to write faster because ‘I’m very old,’ ” he says. (He intends to write two more books in the series.)

Martin prefers being compared to Larry McMurty, whose 1985 Western novel Lonesome Dove drew millions of readers, the majority of whom never before or after read a word about cowboys and cattle drives.

Nonetheless, while many authors have admirers who might come out for a bookstore reading, Martin has a committed fan base to rival J.K. Rowling’s.

One such group is “Brotherhood without Banners,” an informal community with tens of thousands of members worldwide. “It is similar to being a Trekkie in that it is not so much asking someone to be included, but deciding you are one,” explains founder David McCaman.

Now 38, McCaman discovered Game of Thrones 15 years ago when his wife urged him to buy it in a Menlo Park, Calif., bookstore. “If she hadn’t done that my life would be much different, for the worse,” he says.

The series’ appeal: “Turns fantasy upside down on its head. Epic in scope and personal in narrative . . . It’s gritty, it is harsh, it is a play-for-keeps epic . . . where it is the people that drive the emotional connection, not the magic things and creatures.”

Across the ocean in Sweden, another Martin fan, Elio M. GarcÌa, Jr., 33, known as “Ran,” runs Westeros.org with his girlfriend of almost 13 years, Linda Antonsson, 36. Garcia, an American Ph.D. candidate in English Literature and Antonsson, 36, a translator, both read Game of Thrones in 1997. They are collaborating with Martin on an upcoming guidebook called The World of Ice and Fire.

“There’s a number of things that sets George apart from many of his contemporaries,” Garcia writes in an email. “Despite the merciless way he has with his characters, at heart he is a capital-R Romantic, in the old sense, and it shows in the way he can build atmosphere and delve into the psyches of his characters.”

The couple launched their website in 1997 as a “labor of love.” Today they estimate 50 percent of their traffic is from outside the States. Overall, it is about 70 percent male, but Antonsson notes there is “a female readership who enjoy the series intensely.”

Last month, westeros.org got more than 13 million page views and 600,000 unique visitors, a fivefold increase in traffic, thanks to the HBO series.

“Game of Thrones” is HBO’s third-highest rated show after “True Blood” and “Boardwalk Empire,” says Sue Naegle, president HBO Entertainment. With a cumulative viewership of 8.9 million per episode, “It’s been a huge success.”

Naegle says the series was a natural for HBO: “Dynastic families at war, the thirst for power, greed, the human condition, these are very relatable themes.”

While the series has received critical praise, HBO took certain, um, liberties with the book, adding so many buxom, naked prostitutes that TV’s Westeros made Vegas look like a convent. Naegle says of HBO’s version: “It’s fun and a little saucy and that’s part of the world of paid cable.”

Co-executive producer Martin isn’t complaining. “Well, there were a lot of brothels in the Middle Ages,” he says. Martin has written two scripts.

But in order to create his epic series, Martin first had to leave Hollywood. Martin grew up in a working-class family in Bayonne, N.J. (His father was a longshoreman.) A writer from age 21 when he published his first short story, Martin from the mid-1980s through the mid-’90s worked in Hollywood as a TV writer and producer on “The Twilight Zone” and “Beauty and the Beast,” as well as the pilot “Doorways.” He also wrote a lot of scripts “no one got to see.” Yes, he says, “they give you dump trucks of money, but I wanted the audience, I wanted to take the curtain call. I wanted people to tell me they love my books.”

Although Time has dubbed Martin the “American Tolkien,” Martin’s approach to the world is very different from the Rings creator’s. Unlike the traditional fantasy narrative of a brave young hero who triumphs over evil, Martin’s Westeros teems with moral ambiguity.

Noble characters doom the ones they love best, the innocent often suffer horribly and evil-doers flourish.

“I’ve always been attracted by gray characters,” says Martin. “I don’t see Orcs and I don’t see angels. . . . The hero is the villain on the other side.”

Gannett News Service