George RR Martin doesn’t, revealed the actor Peter Dinklage this week, tend to stop by the set of Game of Thrones any more.

“He used to. He’s busy lately. He’s writing those books,” Dinklage, who plays the Machiavellian Tyrion Lannister in the hit television series based on Martin’s epic fantasy novels, told Jon Stewart. The pair were discussing the imminent premiere of the fifth series of the HBO show, which airs in Britain on Monday. “My heart goes out to George because, boy oh boy, they’re hard on him, the fans. I mean it’s lovely, because they want those books, but hey, they’ve got to ease up.”

The sight of Dinklage and Stewart discussing the writing speed of an author who has been beloved in the science fiction and fantasy community for decades but who only broke out into the mainstream relatively recently, is surreal, to say the least, for those who have known Martin for years.

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Lisa Tuttle, who has been a close friend of the writer since the early 1970s, collaborating with him on one of his earliest novels, remembers travelling to London for the launch of his latest book, A Dance with Dragons, in 2011. Waiting for a friend, she was watching a large screen in the City, and up flashed an image of the novel.

“I felt like I was in a Philip K Dick book,” she says. “The idea that you could become that famous for writing the kind of stuff that in the 70s was looked down on still strikes me as amazing – that George is internationally famous for that.”

Light on magic, heavy on violence, a huge, sprawling saga tracing the battle for the iron throne of Westeros with its roots in the Wars of the Roses, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is one of the publishing phenomena of this century. His books have sold 58m copies worldwide in 45 languages. It’s not a stretch to say that Martin’s stories of murder and dragons, intrigue and sex (incestuous or otherwise), have turned millions of readers on to the joys of fantasy fiction.

It’s a long way from where things were when A Game of Thrones, the first novel in the series and the one from which the HBO show takes its name, was launched in 1996. The books were bought in the UK in a “huge” auction in the mid-90s by Malcolm Edwards, but for years, they failed to find an audience outside core fantasy readers.

“I was a huge fan of all sorts of fantasy, but A Game of Thrones felt so realistic, the people like modern people. The submission material ended with Bran climbing the tower and seeing Jaime and Cersei having incestuous sex in the tower, and Jaime pushing him to his apparent death. Incest and infanticide in the first 170 pages! We had to have it,” says Martin’s long-term editor Jane Johnson.

But the novel was given a cover which made no bones about the fact it was a fantasy book – all armoured knights and dragon claws and crowned maidens. “In those days fantasy was rather looked down upon by the book trade, even though it was commercially successful, so the science fiction and fantasy section was always at the back of the shop where only dedicated fantasy readers ever ventured. So it was not an immediate commercial success,” says Johnson.

Although HarperCollins sold out of a “relatively small” first printing, the paperbacks only took off “in quantity” when they were given a more mainstream look in the early 2000s. “They were big bestsellers in their own right before the HBO series came into existence – but of course the sales became stratospheric with the release of the series,” Johnson says.

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Originally intended to be a trilogy, A Clash of Kings followed A Game of Thrones in 1998, A Storm of Swords two years later, A Feast for Crows in 2005 and A Dance with Dragons in 2011. Today, anticipation for the yet-to-be-scheduled The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in the series, is such that every word Martin says on the subject is pored over by fans desperate for the story to continue – their clamour so aggressive that, years before Dinklage asked them to “ease up”, Martin’s fellow fantasy writer Neil Gaiman was prompted to tell one fan that “George RR Martin is not your bitch”.

Martin himself responded angrily to the “rising tide of venom” from impatient readers in 2009, telling them: ”Okay, I’ve got the message. You don’t want me doing anything except A Song of Ice and Fire. Ever. (Well, maybe it’s okay if I take a leak once in a while?)” But, describing the novel as the “Son of Kong” – the monkey on his back – he’s also poked fun at the situation, throwing a mini-tantrum in a cameo on the web series Gay of Thrones.

“He sometimes gets into trouble because he just says what he thinks. He’s not trying to sell himself,” says Tuttle. “It might be easier for someone like an actor, but George is a writer. He was never in it for the fame. He loved writing and reading and making things up. What he wanted to do was to make enough money at it to carry on doing it.”

Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the young Martin would sell monster stories to his friends for pennies, getting into comics in high school and starting to write for amateur fan magazines. He studied journalism at university, and as a conscientious objector did alternative service with Vista (Volunteers in Service to America) for two years. Going on to work as a chess director, a teacher, and a story editor and producer in Hollywood, he was also writing the whole time, while becoming heavily involved in the world of fandom.

His first book, Dying of the Light, a science fiction novel set around a dying planet, was published in 1977, with his collaboration with Tuttle, Windhaven, out three years later. Novels including the acclaimed Fevre Dream, a vampire tale set on a Mississippi steamboat, would follow. While working in Hollywood in 1991, he was writing a science fiction novel, “when suddenly the first chapter of A Game of Thrones came to me, the chapter where Bran finds the dire wolf pups in the snow,” he told the Guardian in 2011. “It just came to me so vividly I knew I had to write it.” The book was released in 1996.

Joe Abercrombie, a major voice in British fantasy today with his dark, gritty First Law trilogy of novels, says that reading it was a “flashpoint moment” for his own career. “I’d never read anything quite like it. The feel of realism to it, that so eschewed the heroic narrative. I saw in that book a lot of things I felt had been missing in commercial fantasy,” he says. “I’d tried to write prior to it, but there was a massive difference to what I wrote before. He was a big influence. Game of Thrones demonstrated you could do something dark and shocking and very unheroic within the core epic fantasy secondary world market.”

Abercrombie, who has contributed stories to anthologies edited by Martin, had wondered how much effect the television series would have on Martin’s already big sales. “Obviously it made an absolutely colossal difference. He’s said that before he would bring a book out, and it would be number one for a week. Now he’s had seven paperbacks in the top 10 pretty much ever since the series began,” he says.

“The level of sales is stupendous, and it’s really revolutionised how people think about the genre. In the broader consciousness, Lord of the Rings was how people saw fantasy. Detailed, focused on the setting, a lot of complexity, a good-versus-evil narrative. Game of Thrones has given people an alternative way of looking at epic fantasy. We’ve gone from orbiting one sun to orbiting two.”

I don’t think George likes being this famous Lisa Tuttle, author

Tom Hunter, who runs the UK’s top award for science fiction and fantasy, the Arthur C Clarke, agrees. “The series has made a very major impression. The Red Wedding [a particularly bloody set piece from the novels which has since played out on television] ended up in the national press – with spoilers, the bastards. When you have to worry about your daily newspaper spoiling Game of Thrones for you … you don’t get that very often with a fantasy series,” he says.

Today, Martin “has a level of celebrity that is unheard of, really, among writers”, according to Abercrombie. “I think HBO has made an effort to present him as the face of the series. That’s combined to give him huge celebrity which he finds hard to handle. He has had reporters camped out at his house and just doesn’t know how to take it. At ComicCon he has security guards – he needs them as he literally gets mobbed,” he says. Tuttle agrees: “I don’t think George likes being this famous.”

But despite his now-mainstream recognition, Martin himself remains “right at the heart of fandom”, says Hunter, sitting at the bar at a recent convention and “chatting to anybody brave enough to say hello”. Abercrombie agrees. “He’s very involved with the community. He’s a dedicated visitor of conventions, of WorldCon particularly. He loves hanging out with writers and being part of fandom – that’s his background,” says the novelist. “He’s a down to earth guy, approachable – he’ll sit signing for five hours at a time.”

And in the cinema he owns in his home town of Santa Fe, “he’ll happily chat for ages with around 40 people in the audience”, says Abercrombie. “No one is a prophet in their own land – he finds it better that way.”