George R.R. Martin contemplates literary form, the Hugos, and the final two Song of Ice and Fire books
By Dan Selcke
Nominations are now open for the Hugo Awards, which are given out each year to the best works of science fiction and fantasy. The Hugos have been running since 1953. They’re prestigious in their field, although I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a lot of people don’t give them much thought.
A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin is not one of those people. “I value the Hugo more than any other award,” he writes on his Not a Blog. At the moment, he’s wondering where his most recent book, the Targaryen history tome Fire & Blood, will fit in at the 2019 ceremony. He’s stressed multiple times that the book isn’t a novel (“I did not want anyone buying the book under the misapprehension that it was the latest volume in A SONG OF ICE & FIRE“), so the “Best Novel” category is out.
Martin doesn’t think it belongs in “Best Series,” either. His reasoning gives some insight into how he thinks of literary form, and of where A Song of Ice and Fire fits in. “Many SF writers have set their stories against a common background or ‘future history,'” he writes. “My own Thousand Worlds stories fit that template, but I don’t consider them a series. They share a background, but that’s all…At the other extreme, you have what I’ll call “mega-novels,” stories spread across many books because of length. Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS was not a series, as I see it, but one long novel published in three volumes.”
"For what it’s worth, I do not consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE to be a series. It’s one story. A huge complicated story, admittedly, one that will take seven volumes to tell (once I finish the last two). And in any case, FIRE & BLOOD is not strictly speaking a part of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. It’s imaginary history set hundreds of years before any of the characters in SONG were born. Yes, I suppose if you bundle FIRE & BLOOD, the five ASOI&F novels, and the three Dunk & Egg novellas (collected as A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS) together, you have a series of sorts. I wouldn’t even know what to call it. The Westeros series? The Seven Kingdoms series? Not GAME OF THRONES or ICE & FIRE, certainly."
He doesn’t nail anything down, but under these definitions, it sounds like Martin thinks of A Song of Ice and Fire as a “mega-novel.” It’s also good to once again hear that he still thinks he can finish Song with two more books, although he’s not ruling out the possibility of it expanding beyond that.
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But we can cross that bridge when we come to it…if we come to it. For now, Martin has a solution to his Fire & Blood problem: put it in the “Best Related Work” category. That’s where his World of Ice and Fire — another book of imaginary history — was nominated some years back, and Fire & Blood grew out of sidebars Martin wrote for World. Problem solved.
The Hugos will be given out at the World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) in August, at the Convention Centre Dublin in Ireland. If you want to nominate something, find out how here.
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