He gets plenty of feedback from his fans. ‘Some women hate the female characters,' he says. 'But importantly they hate them as people, because of things that they've done, not because the character is underdeveloped.' The pitfalls of lots of other fantasy texts, he says is when writers stray into writing in sterotypes. But because Martin has a sprawling world with thousands of characters (and five books to do it in), he has the luxury of developing each one fully. 'Male or female, I believe in painting in shades of grey,' he says. 'All of the characters should be flawed; they should all have good and bad, because that's what I see. Yes, it’s fantasy, but the characters still need to be real.’