Greats of Science Fiction

Martin, George R. R.

According to George R. R. Martin "Fiction is lies; we are writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. However, it has to have a truth at the core of it." Moreover, according to his saying, he has successfully embodied what he preaches with his unbelievable works, both science fiction and fantasy. Putting our feelings aside on how Game of Thrones should have ended or the uncertainties that come with GRRM's publishing timeline, one thing is clear, the impact he has made in the world with his creation is transcendent and will live on long after he is gone.

George Raymond Martin was born on September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey the son of longshoreman Raymond Collins Martin and his wife, Margaret Brady Martin. He has two younger sisters, Darleen and Janet. During Martin's childhood, his world was limited, and that made him want to travel and experience other places, but the only way of doing so was through his imagination, and he became a voracious reader. Martin began writing and selling monster stories for pennies to other neighborhood children, dramatic readings included. He also wrote stories about a mythical kingdom populated by his pet turtles; the turtles frequently died in their toy castle, so he decided they were killing each other off in "sinister plots" signs of what to be. Martin earned a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University's School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois in 1970, graduating summa cum laude and completed his M.S. in Journalism in 1971.

Before A Game of Thrones took off and the Song of Ice and Fire series became his life's work, George R.R. Martin was known primarily as a science fiction writer and is still known as one of the greats ever to walk the planet. At age 21 Martin began to publish work of genre interest with "The Hero" for Galaxy in February 1971, and his success was after that hurried. Initially released in 1985, the recently rereleased Nightflyers collects four short stories and two novellas, all of which were initially published between 1973 and 1980. However, the cover text is quick to remind readers that these decades-old stories are still relevant: "Nightflyers," which pits a starship crew against an evil force, has already been adapted once with an all-but-forgotten film from 1987. The best thing about that Nightflyers is Caryn James' review in The New York Times, in which she called it "the talkingest movie ever to pose as a science-fiction adventure" before pointing out that "the ship resembles a big blob of chocolate pudding." While "Nightflyers" is well-suited for modern TV—with an ensemble cast, grotesque visuals, and a creepy mystery—it is also the weakest story in this collection.

"A Song for Lya." Taking place long after humanity has colonized the stars, it is set on a planet where an ancient but seemingly primitive race, the Shkeen, are devoted to a horrifying, bewildering religion. For all its far-out visuals and evocative lyricism ("The cities of the Shkeen are old, older far than man's, and the great rust-red metropolis that rose from their sacred hill-country had proved to be the oldest of them all." The story begins), "A Song for Lya" is ultimately about stuff that's much more relatable: The thin line between cynicism and hope; the unbridgeable gaps in lived experience; the knowledge, hard-won by anyone who's ever been in love, that no matter how close we are to a person, we can never honestly know them—not as they know themselves. That goes the other way, too: No matter how much we open ourselves to someone, they can never honestly know us. Stories about this kind of painful, fundamental stuff are usually more at home in literary fiction. However, in digging into the Shkeen's horrific symbiosis in which they happily choose death over life, anonymity over identity, Martin twists apart the ideals most of us hold dear. Part of why "A Song for Lya" works is because Martin gets gleefully weird examining big, complicated ideas in bizarre, fantastical ways. However, even as Martin masterfully envisions a jarringly unfamiliar world, he never forgets that Robb and Lyanna give the novella its emotional punch. "A Song for Lya" closes out Nightflyers, and it hits hard 44 years after it was written, it is still heartbreaking and beautiful. It also serves as proof that the George R.R. Martin of the 1970s captured both the alien and the humane as few writers have before or since. That is something pretty great and pretty strange to behold.

Furthermore, Martin is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA); he served as the organization's Southwest Regional Director from 1977 to 1979, and as its vice-president from 1996 to 1998.

In 2017, Martin recalled that he had started writing science fiction-horror hybrids in the late 1970s to disprove a statement from a critic claiming that science fiction and horror were opposites and therefore incompatible.

Now that GRRM has made his point and will forever be synonymous with Fire and Ice and Game of Thrones, his Nightflyers — while not a hit at theatres when it was first released — GRRM believes saved his career, and that everything he has written since exists in large part because of it. Before Arya or Tyrion, GRRM was writing stories for sci-fi. In many ways, these old-school stories — short and sharp, weird and melancholy according to some — are Martin's best work. And with full artistic control on what stays or goes, the rest of the world will come to enjoy his science fiction books as they do his other renowned works. 

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