Speaking with George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin, Darrell Schweitzer, Wildside Press

• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781667616728
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This classic interview with George R.R. Martin, conducted by World Fantasy Award-winning editor Darrell Schweitzer, originally appeared in Science Fiction Review #17, May 1976.

SPEAKING WITH GEORGE R.R. MARTIN,
an interview by Darrell Schweitzer

Q: How does one go about constructing an alien world How do you do it?

Martin: Well, I just wrote an article on constructing aliens for Charlie Grant’s Writing and Selling Science Fiction, which SFWA1 and the Writer’s Digest are doing, so in some ways I had to think about that much more analytically than I ever had to before Up to the present, up to writing that article, I had always not thought about how I did it. I just did it intuitively. I do not use the Hal Clement/Poul Anderson world building method where they essentially start from a planet a certain distance from a sun, and they give it certain climatic features, and then they work out what the ecology would be like from there, what sort of people would develop on the planet. They’d have aliens at the end, and perhaps the planet would suggest some story lines.

I work it the opposite. For me the story comes first, and the characters, and I start with that. Then I design the alien world to make the points that I wanted to make in the story. Like, “A Song for Lya” was simply a story about love and religion and loneliness and things like that, and there were things I wanted to say about those issues. So, the world was designed to enable me to make the statements I wanted to make most effectively.

Q: I think there’ s a problem in many stories of this type, including “A Song for Lya,” and that is that the alien world comes off not as a society of another species but just as a foreign country. Would you agree?

Martin: That’s true about the Shkeen, I think, to an extent. But that again was the requirement of the story. It was necessary for them to be mentally very close to humans, so they could feel the same need for love, the same need for religious background that humans feel, so that humans would be susceptible to the Greeshka, the mass mind. My protagonist refers to that in the story when he names other alien races and says, “This one feels no emotions at all,” and of another one, “I feel their emotions very strongly, but they’re alien emotions,” but the Shkeen are very close to humanity. So in that case, yeah, I do think a certain amount of that is true, but it was deliberate. That was what I was getting at.

Q: Do you think it is safe to assume that the products of a completely independent evolution would have things so anthropomorphic as cities and religion?

Martin: I think you can get things going both ways. There’s a lot of space out there and really anything may happ...

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• SPEAKING WITH GEORGE R.R. MARTIN, an interview by Darrell Schweitzer