Happy Birthday, A Song of Ice and Fire
By Ani Bundel
Nineteen years ago today, a novel called A Game of Thrones was published. It was the week of August 4, 1996. The doldrums of August meant that there wasn’t a lot of historical news going on in the world. Bob Dole was running against Bill Clinton, MTV was first attempting expansion with MTV2, and NASA was still trying to research life on Mars. On Tuesday, August 6 of that week, when new releases dropped, a fairly large tome with a blue and silver dust jacket arrived on the new release tables of Borders Book Sellers and Barnes and Nobles. It was the opening salvo in a series that is now known as A Song of Ice and Fire.
The first time I saw A Game of Thrones in the book store, I was looking around the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section for something to tide me over, having just finished Robert Jordan’s A Crown of Swords. I probably wouldn’t have looked twice at it, with the relatively conservative and staid cover, since I was used to the Michael Whelan-style of dramatic and boldly colored images that graced many of the fantasy books I read. In fact, I might never have picked up Martin’s first book at all, if it hadn’t been for the blurb by Jordan himself, stating that he thought it was worth reading. (Proof that marketing works, at least on high schoolers.)
I wasn’t the only one who picked up A Game of Thrones. The first installment of A Song of Ice and Fire received critical acclaim, and won two out of the four awards it was nominated for the next year. Even so, sales weren’t as high as initially expected, and it took a few years of word of mouth before people started reading it in earnest. (I know I personally probably bought somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen copies over the period of 1997-2007 and gave them as birthday and holiday presents to unsuspecting friends, all of whom called to yell at me upon reaching the death of Ned Stark.) But as A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords were released, the popularity of the series skyrocketed. Even before Benioff and Weiss’ production first aired on HBO in April of 2011, more than 15 million books had been sold in the series.
So Happy Birthday, A Song of Ice and Fire. You were the original novel of our time to turn the fantasy trope of “the hero always survives” on its head, and the world is a better place for you because of it.