Rachel Brown got to sit down with fantasy author George R.R. Martin to talk shop about the latest book in his fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, which is the basis for HBO’s Game of Thrones.
How do you view A Dance with Dragons‘s place within the larger narrative of A Song of Ice and Fire?
It’s a bit unusual because of what happened with the fourth book, A Feast for Crows. When I was writing that book, it became so large that in 2003 or 2004 my editors and I realized that it would have to be split into two books. It wasn’t finished at that point, but ultimately I made the decision to split the book geographically, since my characters were spread out across the world—to tell the story completely for some characters in A Feast for Crows, and to tell the story for some different characters, but within the same time frame, in A Dance with Dragons. In that sense, A Dance with Dragons is not the fifth book, but is more like four B. The two books run in parallel, and both begin five minutes after the end of A Storm of Swords.
By the way, the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons was just released yesterday.
