BEFORE he published “A Game of Thrones,” the first in his series of best-selling novels set on the mythical continent of Westeros, George R. R. Martin spent about a decade in an all-too-real place called Hollywood. For five years he happily wrote for television series with supernatural themes, like “The Twilight Zone” and “Beauty and the Beast”; and for five more he toiled discontentedly on television pilots and movie scripts that never made it, usually because an executive or producer decided they were too ambitious.

“The reaction was inevitably, ‘George, this is great,’ ” Mr. Martin, 62, recalled, speaking by phone from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., in an accent that still hinted at his upbringing in Bayonne, N.J. “ ‘It’s terrific, it’s a wonderful read, thanks. But it’s three times our budget. We can’t possibly make it.’ ”

But Mr. Martin did not give up his epic dreams, and packed “A Game of Thrones” and the novels that followed (a series known collectively as “A Song of Ice and Fire”) with seven kingdoms’ worth of feuding feudal families, complex genealogies, deceptions and betrayals, dragons and mysterious, violent creatures called the Others. Bantam Books, which publishes Mr. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” novels, said there are more than 4.5 million copies of these books in print in the United States.

Naturally he takes some satisfaction that, some 15 years after spurning the entertainment industry for its lack of imagination, a “Game of Thrones” television series is now days away from its debut. As Mr. Martin put it, “The project that I thought most unlikely to ever be filmed — the project that was actually unfilmable — is now going to be this big show on HBO.”