Saturday, August 1 is the 30th anniversary of A Game of Thrones, the first novel in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series and the world's first glimpse of a global sensation.
The world of Westeros has had such a massive impact on the fantasy genre — and on pop culture in general — that it's easy to forget some of the smaller ways it broke the mold. It also set up mysteries that haven't been solved to this day, either by the TV adaptations or the subsequent novels. After years of over-analyzing the lore and chasing fan theories down ever-deepening rabbit-holes, now is a perfect time to cast our minds back to 1996 and revisit A Game of Thrones on its own terms.
Martin was 47 years old when A Game of Thrones first hit shelves, and although he was a successful writer with a career spanning decades, he had still only written (and co-written) a few novels. Martin made a living selling short stories to magazines early in his career, in addition to teaching. He saw some success with his first novel, Dying of the Light in 1977, and his follow-up, Fevre Dream in 1982, but his 1983 book The Armageddon Rag was a commercial failure. After that, Martin worked primarily as a TV writer for several years leading up to A Game of Thrones.
Although Martin made a living writing for TV shows, he was frustrated by the limitations of the medium. This gradually led him back to writing prose, as he craved the freedom to craft a world and story on his terms without worrying about special effects, actors, or filming schedules. That is clearly reflected in A Game of Thrones — from the 700-foot ice wall to the throne of swords forged in dragon-fire. It's almost like Martin created Westeros to be unfilmable, which makes its success on HBO kind of ironic.
A Game of Thrones reached a much different audience than Game of Thrones
Martin was an established author with friends in the industry when A Game of Thrones debuted, and he had a clear understanding of the audience the book would reach. After years of attending conventions and hosting his famous Hugo Awards "Losers Party," he knew the fantasy genre inside and out. That's not to say he played to his readers' expectations, however. Many early readers found A Game of Thrones' massive scale intimidating and hard to follow, with the constantly-shifting perspectives throwing them all over the map.
Interestingly, the early reviews for A Game of Thrones are vastly different from the early review of HBO's Game of Thrones. The TV series was often described as "fantasy for people who don't read fantasy," with critics claiming that its grim realism and limited use of magic was different from the rest of the genre. In 1996, most readers didn't seem to feel this way. Several publications noted the densely-packed worldbuilding and fantastical twists on real historical landmarks, from Hadrian's Wall to the Mongol conquest.
One criticism that has held true since the very beginning of this series is the question of completion. The Albuquerque Journal found the ending of A Game of Thrones to be a little incomplete, leaving fans hanging until the next installment could be published. We all know how this issue has expanded in the years since, though the factors holding Martin back from finishing The Winds of Winter are far different from those that slowed him down in the 1990s and early 2000s.
A Game of Thrones was not quite an instant bestseller, but it was very successful in its time, even without the help of a TV adaptation. The book was buoyed by word-of-mouth recommendations from fans and booksellers, as well as several awards and nominations. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 1997, and a portion of the book published in a sci-fi magazine won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
A Game of Thrones still contains unsolved mysteries
To this day, no one can say they've untangled all the mysteries in A Game of Thrones, despite all the sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations. The novel was meant to set up a trilogy which as since ballooned into a series of five published books (with two more supposedly on the way), and a re-read can leave even a seasoned fan scratching their head. The sequels tend to stretch out the best mysteries, implying that their answers will come later, while the TV adaptation skipped over many complicated issues and left others unanswered.
A great example is the Green Men of the Isle of Faces, who are mentioned in just the second chapter of the novel when Catelyn and Ned are speaking in the Godswood. The books draw our attention to these half-mythical figures time and time again, but we still don't know much about them. They've become a popular topic of speculation this summer thanks to House of the Dragon, which gave us another tantalizing glimpse of a person with antlers near the God's Eye lake. Still, since Game of Thrones never introduced us to a Green Man, we should expect major revelations to come from The Winds of Winter or A Dream of Spring, not the TV shows.
There are other foundational questions about Westeros raised in 1996 that Martin hasn't answered yet, though impatient fans may have built some of these mysteries up in theories over the years while waiting for Martin to answer them. It seems likely that there are significant discoveries to be made in the deepest sections of the Winterfell crypts, for example, but this may be a seed Martin planted that will never sprout. The author has described his writing style as that of a "gardener," scattering ideas throughout the story and waiting to see what is worth paying off.
A Game of Thrones has attained a pop cultural status that Martin could never have predicted while writing it, and it remains one of the greatest novels of our time. Despite the series being unfinished and the TV adaptation rushing to a disappointing ending, I still recommend that everyone read A Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, and enjoy it for what it is. The novel is available now in print, digital, and audiobook formats.
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