Behind the Creation： From fire and ice to Game of Thrones
"The smell of people is floating in the night wind. The wolf spirit stopped under a tree and sniffed, and the gray-brown fur was covered with mottled shadows … …” This is the beginning written by george martin, an American writer, in the fifth volume of the series fire and ice, The Dance of the Magic Dragon. The fifth volume is the latest volume of this series of novels, published in 2011. "fire and ice" tells the story of the power struggle of lords and the invasion of human beings by aliens on an imaginary continent called Westeros.
On May 20th, the last episode of the TV series Game of Thrones, which was adapted from the series novel fire and ice, officially ended. The story of ice and fire is still in Martin’s mind, in the crazy expectation of hundreds of millions of readers around the world.
The Far Country
As a kind of fantasy novels, serious fantasy novels are widely welcomed by readers. The content of this kind of novels is built in an overhead world, some of which are different from the real world in terms of things and rules. Some of the overhead worlds are completely overhead, such as fire and ice and terry pratchett’s Dish World. Others are based on the real world, such as Rowling’s Harry Potter and Lewis’s The Legend of Narnia. These novels not only have great influence in the field of literature, but also their stories are widely circulated through film and television dramas.
In fact, Martin’s first famous works were not fantasy novels, but science fiction. He was born in a dockworker’s family in New Jersey. In such a growing environment, he saw ships of various countries flying flags in the harbor every day, which made Martin dream of going to distant countries when he was a child.
Martin was born in 1948 after World War II. At that time, Jack Kerouac, an American writer, put forward a literary concept, that is, the "beat generation", which questioned the old literary "routine" at that time. After World War II, great changes have taken place in the field of traditional literature, and literary forms have been constantly innovated. Superhero comics have also influenced Martin’s childhood. His earliest debut was related to comics, and he won the Avery Award in 1965 — — An award that is very important in the minds of comic book fans.
But like Martin’s characters, the author’s life has not followed the rules. After that, he began to write science fiction, and was nominated for Hugo Award and nebula Award. By 1975, Martin was already a well-known science fiction writer, and won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Song of Leona.
"The oldest of them is undoubtedly the solemn giant city built on the sacred mountain and rusty red." This is not the red castle in the palace in fire and ice, but the "Rome" of the Saint Croats in Song of Leona. Nowadays, when many readers find this book because of fire and ice, they will find many amazing contents, not only the names of Rob and Leona, but also the characters named after these two names have played an important role in the story of fire and ice. More importantly, the attitudes of different characters in the story towards death are amazing.
Finally, The Game of Thrones, the first volume of the fire and ice series, released in 1996, won Martin the Hugo Award for novella and the World Fantasy Award for its "Dragon Blood" chapter, which is the highest award in fantasy literature. Then several other volumes published in succession also won the literary award. The second volume "The Disputes of Kings" and the third volume "The Storm of Snow and Ice" all won the track award for best fantasy novel.
The blueprint of history
In the novel fire and ice, it is common for the main characters in a certain chapter to die in the plot, even including the POV characters from the perspective of the chapter. In TV series, the total number of dead characters even exceeds the detective cartoon "Detective Conan", which makes readers worry about it, so that technical university of munich even developed a set of computer algorithms to predict the chances of each character’s survival.
The death of the main character is the difference between fire and ice and the past fantasy novels, and the main character no longer has the so-called "protagonist aura". There are eight Duke Starks in the beginning of fire and ice. By the fifth episode of the eighth season of the TV series, only four people have survived. Even the survivors have experienced all kinds of pains and even disabilities. This kind of writing, which is different from the heroic storyline and happy ending of fantasy novels in the past, has attracted more readers and made the story more possible.
In 1990, Martin, who was unhappy as a screenwriter in Hollywood, began to write novels again. Now people know the story that a picture suddenly appeared in his mind: "A direwolf was stabbed to death by antlers, leaving a few little wolves, which were later taken to be raised by a group of children". This picture is also the plot in Game of Thrones, the first volume of fire and ice.
What many people don’t know is that literary creation needs not only a flash of creativity, but also a lot of accumulation. As a teenager, Martin, who was addicted to books, read a lot of historical and literary books, which is very similar to his idol Tolkien. Martin was also called "Tolkien of America" by literary circles. Many fantasy stories have realistic historical blueprints. People can find the plots in Nordic and Germanic myths from Tolkien’s novels, while what readers read from fire and ice is wars of the roses.
In a sense, many contents in fire and ice can be found in the history of wars of the roses. For example, the York family and house of lancaster, both sides of wars of the roses, can correspond to the Stark family and the Lannister family who fought against each other in the novel. The badges of the two families are similar to those in the novel, and the color is also one white and one red. In the civil war that lasted for 30 years in history, a large number of nobles were killed, and some families even lost their children.
In 2011, Martin was named one of the top 100 people of the time by Time magazine, and Steve Jobs was on the list in the same year.
Future highlights
The story of "fire and ice" is also based on the land of the seven kingdoms on the continent of Westeros. From the king to the lords of various families, a power struggle is staged. In the story, even ordinary people staged the plot of the power struggle between the king and the lords abroad on the stage, which is quite interesting. The frozen Great Wall in the north can not help but remind people of the famous Great Wall of Hadrian in Britain. The motto of the Iron Islands is "Forcible is better than hard work", and there is also the shadow of Viking.
Before fire and ice, The Lord of the Rings’s The Legend of Narnia and Harry Potter were considered as the three classics in fantasy literature. The authors of all three novels were British, and the last two novels related to the real world all took place in Britain. Although fire and ice has the shadow of British history, the author has become an American, and the depth of discussion goes beyond the British background itself, such as the controversy caused by Queen Daenerys’ abolition of slavery in Miriam City.
After the TV series Game of Thrones is over, enthusiastic readers expect the sixth and seventh volumes of the novel to come out as soon as possible, and there is a new worry. What should they look forward to in the future?
From the release of the first film in The Lord of the Rings in 2001 to the end of the TV series Game of Thrones today, in the past 19 years, film and TV technology have promoted the development and popularization of serious fantasy novels, and even started to influence the story process of fantasy novels. Now, when these classic fantasy novels have been put on the screen, whether people will continue to pay attention to fantasy novels in the future and whether there will be world-class fantasy writers who are not native English speakers in the future will be the next literary highlights.