Happy Birthday, George R.R. Martin!
By Ani Bundel
LOS ANGELES, CA – SEPTEMBER 18: Author George R. R. Martin attends HBO’s Official 2016 Emmy After Party at The Plaza at the Pacific Design Center on September 18, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Today marks the 68th birthday of author George R.R. Martin. He’s already having a heck of a birthday week. As those who know the author’s history will recall, at one point, Martin wrote for television, working on shows like Beauty and the Beast in the late 80s/early 90s. Eventually, he quit the medium and returned to writing novels. At the time, when he first settled down to write the planned trilogy of A Song of Ice and Fire, one of his chief ideas was to design and build a world so large in breadth and scope that it would be “unfilmable.”
Now, as a gift for his 68th birthday, he gets to see the HBO series adapted from his novels grow to be the largest television show ever produced in breadth and scope, and correspondingly become the most awarded drama production in the history of the Emmys. That must be as bone-deep satisfying as it is ironic. Martin didn’t set out to change the medium of television. He walked away from it. That fate turned him back to it, and showed him that television could indeed be as wide and deep as his imagination, is a testament to the Golden Age of of entertainment that we’re living in today.
So on this momentous day, let us not ask where The Winds of Winter is, even though I know you’re all thinking it. Even if Martin never finishes his magnum opus story of the battle for the soul of mankind on Westeros, his imagination and his story has changed the world of entertainment, and whether a couple of novels ever get finished isn’t going to alter that.
Instead, let us all say thank you to Martin for creating this world that is so complex and deep that we can spend hours on the internet arguing over the finer points of fantasy history, like citadel scholars on their way to the library. Happy birthday, George R.R. Martin. We hope it’s a fabulous one.