Interview with Helen Keen, author of “The Science of Game of Thrones”

Did you ever wonder if you could actually crush another human being’s skull with you bare hands? Game of Thrones is a fantasy world, but does it have roots in reality? Award winning comedian and popular-science writer Helen Keen has written a new book, The Science of Game of Thrones, to explore those questions.

From the genetics of royal incest to the chemistry of death by molten gold – sifting fact from fantasy in the Seven Kingdoms

Keen sat down with Entertainment Weekly to talk about her new book and discuss just how anchored in real science some of George R.R. Martin’s creations are. The book, divided into three parts (Fire, Ice and Magic), covers a lot of ground , including the medical disorders afflicting Cersei and Hodor, the requirements for smelting Valyrian steel, and the physics behind giant ice walls, wildfire and face transplants. Keen became interested in her subject by watching the show like the rest of us:

"A lot of the people who work on the show really talk about how it was to get the dragons looking realistic, the way animals, lizards and even bats move. Obviously in order to make this beautiful fantasy world that looks really believable, you have to have so many elements from our world in it. Then you start thinking, “We don’t have any animals that breathe fire.” It’s this really cool trait that dragons have, but we don’t see that anywhere in the actual world. So where is that coming from? You just start having these questions and thinking about how much of this is possible."

Keen also discussed her approach to tackling the book, using the direwolves—which were an actual thing at one point—as an example:

"I started by making a list of all the things that interested me in the show, like dire wolves. The La Brea Tar Pits are full of dire wolves … they’re not quite as huge as the ones in the book, which are about the size of ponies. Robb is supposed to be riding into battle on the back of his. When you start looking at this stuff you think our world is a bit more fantastical than you thought as well. You escape into this fantasy world in Game of Thrones, but there’s also this element of actually weird and wonderful things in our world that you wouldn’t have necessarily known."

There’s also precedent for making swords out of meteorites, as the Dayne family did with Dawn:

"Yes. The Egyptians. They didn’t have the technology to smelt iron and steel. They didn’t have furnaces to do that. They were like, “There’s this interesting stuff that keeps falling in the desert. Let’s use that.” Tutankhamen had all these things in his tomb made out of meteorite."

Now, at the end of the day, we know that much of Game of Thrones isn’t plausible. Dragons just aren’t real, period. However, Keen said that she isn’t looking to explain GRRM’s magic, but rather to dig deep and find the possible scientific roots of the fantastical elements of his world:

"Some of the stuff seems like it’s mostly magic. Like with the season change, George R. R. Martin says that’s kind of magic, but you [can] also say it’s about global warming, which isn’t magic. You can’t map an exact scientific explanation onto the phenomena on Game of Thrones but you can still find stuff that’s really interesting to use as a jumping off point."

The Science of Game of Thrones is available now.