On Monday, the final episode of the sixth season of Game of Thrones aired. One of the many virtues of the TV series has been the final rehabilitation of the previously patronised genre of fantasy in the eyes of the cultural elite. Though Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of Lord of the Rings (and the subsequent, interminable Hobbits) were magnificent, they left many feeling that even Tolkien’s masterpiece of the genre, for all its linguistic erudition and deep roots in Northern European myth, was at heart a jejune taste. Dwarves and elves and walking, talking trees were something for adolescents who with luck should grow out of it and move on to more sophisticated fare.
Back in the 1970s when I was an adolescent, I was very keen on Tolkien—it was hard not to be, if you wanted to be taken seriously in my school’s arty (as opposed to hearty) circles. Carrying around the fat yellow paperback of Lord of the Rings was the pre-eminent badge of intellectual respectability. (Jonathan Coe’s novel, The Rotters’ Club, has an excellent, and very funny, account of this cultural moment. His 1970s’ schoolboy hero forms a band and considers various names: “Minas Tirath” eventually being dropped in favour of “Gandalf’s Pikestaff”.)
I used to buy Tolkien posters and calendars for my bedroom walls and transliterated my name into Elvish characters and wrote it on all my jotters. These were the early days of merchandising (before Star Wars transformed it into big business), but I’m sure that the very fact of such frivolous products and fan behaviour encouraged elite disdain. It did for Tolkien himself. Though appreciative of his vast royalties, he disliked having become a cult author and deplored his inclusion in the pantheon of the Sixties’ counterculture.
However it was in that rich stew of popular culture which George R R Martin (born in 1948), the author of the Game of Thrones novels, early on found inspiration. Fandom has played a major part in his life. He grew up an avid fan of superhero comics and his first writing was for comic-book fanzines. When he became a professional writer, he became part of the large US science-fiction and fantasy community and a regular attender of its many conventions (which had begun before the Second World War). He observed to the New Yorker that, since college, "virtually all the women in my life, including my wife, were people I met at science-fiction conventions". Even today, he still attends about half a dozen a year.
His prose is a pleasure, unlike the clunkiness of many other fantasy writers, and his plotting masterly. His early creative life as a screenwriter for television and film has given him a considerable ability to invent intense and satisfying episodes which drive on his compelling larger narrative. Over the last century cinema, and later TV, have exercised an increasing influence on literature—from the rapid cross-cutting of scenes in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies to the deliberate closes-ups and scene-setting wide-shots of Christopher Logue’s reworking of Homer’s Iliad, War Music.
And over the last two decades the mainstream literary world has become increasingly reconciled to fandom and its extra-literary activities. Led by publishers, it has adopted many of them. The astonishing rise of literary festivals, now over 300 in the UK, has been crucial to the creation of a connected book-reading an—buying community, as has the grassroots burgeoning of bookgroups. And the primacy of the solitary act of reading—a single reader connected to an author by means of a book—is now rivalled by these Glastonburies of literature and the creation of a communal experience.
Back in the 1970s when I was an adolescent, I was very keen on Tolkien—it was hard not to be, if you wanted to be taken seriously in my school’s arty (as opposed to hearty) circles. Carrying around the fat yellow paperback of Lord of the Rings was the pre-eminent badge of intellectual respectability. (Jonathan Coe’s novel, The Rotters’ Club, has an excellent, and very funny, account of this cultural moment. His 1970s’ schoolboy hero forms a band and considers various names: “Minas Tirath” eventually being dropped in favour of “Gandalf’s Pikestaff”.)
I used to buy Tolkien posters and calendars for my bedroom walls and transliterated my name into Elvish characters and wrote it on all my jotters. These were the early days of merchandising (before Star Wars transformed it into big business), but I’m sure that the very fact of such frivolous products and fan behaviour encouraged elite disdain. It did for Tolkien himself. Though appreciative of his vast royalties, he disliked having become a cult author and deplored his inclusion in the pantheon of the Sixties’ counterculture.
However it was in that rich stew of popular culture which George R R Martin (born in 1948), the author of the Game of Thrones novels, early on found inspiration. Fandom has played a major part in his life. He grew up an avid fan of superhero comics and his first writing was for comic-book fanzines. When he became a professional writer, he became part of the large US science-fiction and fantasy community and a regular attender of its many conventions (which had begun before the Second World War). He observed to the New Yorker that, since college, "virtually all the women in my life, including my wife, were people I met at science-fiction conventions". Even today, he still attends about half a dozen a year.
His prose is a pleasure, unlike the clunkiness of many other fantasy writers, and his plotting masterly. His early creative life as a screenwriter for television and film has given him a considerable ability to invent intense and satisfying episodes which drive on his compelling larger narrative. Over the last century cinema, and later TV, have exercised an increasing influence on literature—from the rapid cross-cutting of scenes in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies to the deliberate closes-ups and scene-setting wide-shots of Christopher Logue’s reworking of Homer’s Iliad, War Music.
And over the last two decades the mainstream literary world has become increasingly reconciled to fandom and its extra-literary activities. Led by publishers, it has adopted many of them. The astonishing rise of literary festivals, now over 300 in the UK, has been crucial to the creation of a connected book-reading an—buying community, as has the grassroots burgeoning of bookgroups. And the primacy of the solitary act of reading—a single reader connected to an author by means of a book—is now rivalled by these Glastonburies of literature and the creation of a communal experience.
