George R.R. Martin shares which fictional characters he'd want on his Small Council (Exclusive)

It's all A Song of Ice and Fire all the time here at Winter Is Coming, and today we've got a treat. Last month, we had the honor of interviewing author George R.R. Martin himself while he was in Glasgow for the 82nd annual World Science Fiction Convention, also known as Worldcon. We've been sharing previews throughout this week, including Martin's hopes to see his vampire novel Fevre Dream brought to the big screen by Guillermo del Toro and his thoughts on the state of AI in book publishing. This weekend, we'll be sharing our full interview with him...but for today, we've got one last teaser to whet the appetites.

In Martin's fantasy world of Westeros, the rulers of the Seven Kingdoms typically rule with a Small Council at their side to help them make the best decisions for the realm. At least in theory. As anyone who's read Martin's books or seen the television adaptations Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon could tell you, that idealized vision of the Small Council rarely works out.

During our interview, Martin spoke on a large range of topics, some of which were serious. But you've always got to sneak a fun, off-the-wall question into these sorts of things! And for this one, my question for Martin was this: if you were ruling your own fantasy kingdom, which characters from other creators' stories would you want on your Small Council? No one from Westeros, Essos, or the Thousand Worlds allowed.

Who would George R.R. Martin want on his Small Council?

Martin had a chance to look over the questions I was planning to ask him ahead of the interview, and it was obvious he'd been having fun thinking about this one. "Yes," he said, steepling his fingers in front of him. "Well...do I want to actually rule the realm well, or do I want to have fun? You know? [Laughs] I mean, obviously, Tolkien says Aragorn was king, he rules wisely and well for 100 years. So sure, you'd want Aragorn on, and you'd want Gandalf. He's a wizard, he's a Maia, he's sort of a god."

"You've gotta go with some of Tolkien's people. If you want an Elf on the council, you can get Galadriel representing the Elf people. I suppose you could put a dwarf on the council, too, just to balance it."

- George R.R. Martin

And for a more chaotic Small Council? "If you want a council that would be more fun to write about, you put like Jack Vance's Cugel the Clever," he said. "Oh, Cugel the Clever would be like Littlefinger times 10. Except his plots never work out, they're very amusing so you'd have a lot of conflict, and fun like that there."

Like Tolkien, Jack Vance had an immense influence on Martin's writing. Cugel features in Vance's science fiction saga The Dying Earth, which was beloved enough by Martin that he and his longtime friend and legendary sci-fi editor Gardner Dozois compiled a tribute anthology which came out a few years before Vance's passing in 2013. Titled Songs of the Dying Earth, it won the Locus Award for Best Anthology in 2010. "Needless to say, Gardner and I are thrilled by the news," Martin wrote on his blog at the time. "It’s a great honor for us, and for Jack Vance, without whose seminal work modern fantasy would look very, very different,"

Martin still had a couple more seats on his Small Council to fill, and those came less easily. "Who would you want to be like...the master of armies?" he wondered. "Who would you want to come and defend? Who's a great warrior? Well, you could go to King Arthur...I don't know..."

Raya Golden, the artist behind Martin's Voyaging graphic novel as well as the art director for his Fevre River Packet Company, was also present for this interview and suggested Lancelot as an alternative to Arthur. Martin hesitated. "Well, Lancelot's a great knight, but..."

"Not necessarily a leader," Golden said.

"And he's likely to fuck your queen," Martin added, laughing. "There's a lot of interesting characters that you could draw on. Ursula K. LeGuin, one of her characters, too."

Winter Is Coming's full interview with George R.R. Martin drops THIS WEEKEND! Come back then to check out our full conversation with the author of A Song of Ice and Fire.

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