The crowd waiting in line to hear George RR Martin chat about The World of Ice and Fire (both a book and his fictional universe) looked about what you’d expect. The people here look a little lost, as if a cultural center on New York’s Upper East Side were an exotic realm they would brave to hear their suspendered lodestar speak in person.

Some are in their 20s, others in their 40s and 50s. There are shirts with krakens. Genders look about equally represented, and there are a fair number of couples as well as small posses of pale young men chattering about the ethnicities of Westeros. They don’t seem to notice that the World of Ice and Fire looks like model diversity compared to the demographics of this audience. But everyone is very excited.

Upon entry to the cozy 92nd Street Y’s theatre, each of us is handed a hardcover copy of the aforementioned book, a leathery and large tome co-written by Martin, Elio M García Jr and Linda Antonsson. It is some 300 pages, and full of bright and very well done illustrations of dragons, castles, kings and all the lore of Martin’s world. It’s a shot of distilled Game of Thrones to the nervous system of the show’s fanbase, and the large man next to me, here with his girlfriend, refused to be contained by his seat or civility. He immediately spread the large book over his lap, sprawled himself wide, and ignored his partner’s awkward attempts to get his legs back within a socially acceptable radius of his seat. Every single page, from “the nine mistresses of Aegon IV the Unworthy” to “some celebrated children of Garth Greenhand”, held him rapt.

The book looks fun: a pop compendium of invented history, Tolkien Lite and Borges Liter, the kind of thing certain bookish kids can’t help but love. But I was definitely that kid and enjoy Martin’s books, I’m not the guy to review this book. What I can say is that this book’s an encyclopedia and part of Martin’s ongoing love letter to history, which is more or less how he begins onstage.

The moderator, Slate’s Laura Miller, started off by comparing the new book with JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and with the practiced charm that characterises him, Martin quickly demurs. Tolkien made more than a story or history in that book, Martin says: Tolkien’s “secondary world” of languages, mythology and appendices was the bulk of the proverbial iceberg, and the Lord of the Rings just the tip. Martin admits he’s doing a bit of “a magician’s trick”, saying that he enjoys the world-building as it comes rather than as a goal.

As the world grew and he had to make up maps just to keep it straight, his fans and friends became checkers of fictional facts, co-authors García and Antonsson among them. “I invented a bunch of king names, dates, and everything was fine until I wrote … the hedge knight story,” at which point García pointed out that inconsistent chronology meant that “a son [needed to] become a younger brother or something”.

The World of Ice and Fire is the encyclopedic endgame of that fictional fact-checking, with García and Antonsson compiling much of it and Martin filling in the many blanks. Framed in the voice of a maester (a Game of Thrones sage) who himself is trying to sort through unreliable sources and imperfect records, it satisfies the obsessive fan’s desire to collect and compile. What action figures were to Star Wars fans so dwarf jester’s recollections are to the editors of Martin’s Wikipedia page.



The problem is that this impulse to scientifically catalogue every princeling and peasant can detract from the fun. When Miller made an error about genealogy, a needling voice shouted “You’re thinking of Aerion Targaryen”; Miller and Martin ignored the pedant, but my large neighbor muttered “Aerion the second” – he still hadn’t looked up from the book although his apparent idol was speaking.

Richard Madden as Robb Stark in Game of Thrones. Photograph: REX/HBO/Everett

Martin understands the fan’s impulse to collect and research every detail, but as a writer he also knows half a story’s fun is trying to piece together the clues of what happened before and what happens after the margins of the story. Who is Jon Snow’s mother? Do dragon’s need human sacrifice to hatch? Even simply discovering on your own the backstory of Robert Baratheon’s rebellion is fun; it’s already in the series and does not require an encyclopedia to understand.

Martin acknowledged this problem himself: “One of the hardest things about putting this book together was what to tell and what not to tell … because there are things I want to say in later novels.” He knows his audience, too, and it’s no coincidence that he sprinkled his talk with tangents such as whether one of his dragons could take on Tolkien’s Smaug (“As competitive as I am, no, Drogon is a very young dragon … not to mention Smaug, like, talks, which would give him an intellectual advantage.”)

But Martin’s great talent might be that he blends fantasy with banality – he knows how to balance the mystery with the detail. He outfits his legends with imperfections, “just like in real history, with its different accounts … even from court records and memoirs”. Just as his books show how a bastard or peasant’s actions can affect characters a world away, or how quotidian problems (debt, rations) can bring down kingdoms, he sprinkled mundane details into larger points, for instance talking about the Iron Throne replicas with automatic recall (six in the US, one in Spain, I missed the rest), and throwing in an Ozymandias quote to describe “the psychology behind” the chair.

He joked frequently about his logorrhea and infamously slow writing, saying his verbiage would mean his Silmarillion would have to be called the Grimmer-illion, and that the words of a hypothetical House Martin would be “Deadline? What deadline?” About his characters and world, he had well-rehearsed lines: “Yeah, I miss some of them. A good villain is hard to replace.” “I think I’d live in Santa Fe … where they have the NFL every Sunday. Though after the way the Jets played today I might have to give that up.” Martin the showman – fantasist, world-builder and pitchman for Game of Thrones – came out in self-deprecating and endearing style.

He only seemed to let his down his shield of charm and careful phrasing when an opportunity to digress about history came along, which thankfully was often. Already vivacious, he grew visibly excited telling a well-hashed story about imagining legionnaires’ lives along Hadrian’s Wall, or the mental state of French heretics revolting against the Catholic church. He clearly loves each digression and careful bit of the telling; every chance he had to tell a history – of Zoroastrianism and the Grateful Dead, of Suetonius of Rome and Tiberius of the BBC, of a Belfast set and 1990s fan conventions – he took with relish. Eventually his quips and absurdly detailed rambles down historical lanes even lured the man next to me out of his book. By the end of it he was fully outside the book and in awe of his guide, the happy guy in suspenders babbling on stage.

At one point Martin digressed into a tangent about making literal maps for his books, necessarily aware that the book in our hands was an only slightly less literal map to his world. He talked about the trouble of scale, and how when his publishers magnified his maps they were left with expanses of blank space that he had to fill in. He had no trouble either inventing more or knowing what to keep blank. He assured them, and us, that there was plenty more on the way, and that it his friends would keep him honest. Whether you need one of his maps or not, Martin made everyone in the crowd, from the nerd who forgot him to the skeptic like me, want to follow the way he points.