An Evening with George R.R. Martin and Kim Stanley Robinson

welcome [Applause] that's the reception I usually get when I walk into my classes and start my lectures so it's very familiar thank you I'm Sheldon Brown I'm the director of the arthur c-- clark center for human imagination and i want to thank you all for coming here to this event that we're hosting we're so excited to be able to bring to the UCSD community two of the most celebrated novelist of our time Kim Stanley Robinson and george RR martin and they're here out of great generosity to help help us raise awareness and support for the Clark Center and specifically for one of our most important programs that we run the Clarion science fiction fantasy and Writers Workshop that's right that's right so so in the Clark center we do a lot of different things what we're what we're really established to do is to understand enhance and better enact the outcomes of the human imagination and we do this by considering that phenomenon of imagination in all of its myriad ways in which it operates so we look at it from it's an origins as a neurological operation we look at how it scales up to larger scale brain activity and cognitive behavior and then to the social and cultural methods by which we explore and act and gather the fruits of the human imagination and we have a special focus on science fiction and fantasy how they stretch our considerations of the possibilities of what we may pursue or what we might want to avoid pursuing for ourselves in our world but also to engender what I think is one of the ultimate values that the arts provides to our species which is the creation of creativity so it's through our experiences of the arts that we that it engenders within us the ability to to recreate our own condition and we're fortunate that we have an amazing network of authors that we bring to campus regularly for collaborative activities and public programs so this is you know one of the bigger public programs we've done recently and and so if this is one of the first times you're hearing about the Clark Center you know hopefully you'll come back to some of our programs down the road and and the clearing science fiction and fantasy writing workshop is one of the most fertile sources for these great writers that that were able to kind of bring to the campus and and not only the ones that have established themselves but as an incubator of the great writers that are soon to come as they go through the Clarion process now both Stan and George have been affiliated with Clarion as students and faculty for Clarion and we're grateful that tonight we're going to have the opportunity to hear from them thoughts on their work on fiction in general and and I think in a really interesting way the act of becoming a writer now but before we get into that I just want to say you know I hope you come back to some of our programs we've got a we've got a really interesting program coming up in June we have the mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose it's going to be here for a conference on human consciousness and this will be a mind expanding event for sure and so check our website our Facebook our Twitter feeds for all these details on this and now what I want to do is introduce dr. Shelly shrevie who will be moderating the activities tonight - the professor of literature and ethnic studies here and and as a UCSD faculty director of the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop [Applause] Thank You Sheldon and thanks for your leadership in bringing the Clarion workshop under the umbrella of the Clark center he did that a few years ago and it's been flourishing ever since I'm a faculty director Shelley's 3b I'm really excited to be here tonight we've got a really wonderful program ahead of us and I just want to say a few words about the Clarion program so I'm the director of the workshop Clarion has been in existence since 1968 it's the largest or it's not the largest but it's the oldest and the most prestigious workshop of its kind in the world and we have some of the most celebrated writers and with most talented writers in the world who come to UCSD for six weeks every summer and they live on campus with the students and tiny little beds and the dorms and we workshop these incredibly talented writers stories and many of them have gone on to win awards soon thereafter so Clarion has been at UCSD since 2007 Kim Stanley Robinson who you're about to hear talk was instrumental in bringing it to UC San Diego and we're really excited to have both stan and and george RR martin with us tonight so Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time he enrolled at the University of California San Diego in 1970 he received his BA in literature here and then he went on and got his PhD here as well in 1982 while he was at UCSD he had the idea of writing a trilogy of books that would explore three different pathways that California might take in the future and that became the wonderful Orange County trilogy but of course since then he's gone on to write many more important novels the Mars trilogy Antarctica the years of rice and salt green earth 23:12 Aurora and most recently New York 21:40 he's also worked harder than anyone I know on behalf of Clarion and to keep it here at UCSD and I'm truly grateful to him for that our other guest of honor george RR martin is also one of the great writers of our time he's especially well known for his fantasy novels but he's also written a lot of science fiction and I highly recommend his science fiction to you check it out if you haven't read it George has been writing since he was a child he was publishing science fiction story short stories just out of college in the 1970s and then he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at Northwestern graduating summa lotta and then a master's degree in journalism the following year because debut novel dying of the light came out in 1977 and in the 1970s he also was an editor for a lot of book projects new voices and science fiction and the wild card series which I hope some of you know George also spent most of the 80s writing for Hollywood he worked on the TV show Beauty and the Beast and also on the reboot of The Twilight Zone and it was a 1991 that he started writing a song a Fire and Ice which of course became the HBO series Game of Thrones and the rest of history but George has also authored a lot of other great stories and novels including sand kings tough voyaging night fliers the neat house man and a lot of others he's won many awards he's won Hugo's nebula's locus Awards and most recently or maybe not most recently but notably the 2012 world fantasy award for Life Achievement we're so lucky to have both of them with us tonight please join me in welcoming Kim Stanley Robinson enjoy Dharma [Applause] so we're very happy to have these two great writers with us and we will talk for maybe 40 minutes and then we're going to take some questions from the audience you guys have been filling out the little cards and about 40 minutes in I'm going to read some of the questions from the card so that we'll have an opportunity to hear from you the kind of things you want to talk about but when we were back in the green room we were talking a little bit about how things have changed for science fiction and fantasy how in earlier decades it was more of our considered a kind of peril literary genre couldn't get any respect now suddenly science fiction and fantasy are at the center of the culture so what do you guys think caused that to happen and what kind of effects has it had you have anything you'd like to say about that change I'm not really sure what close doesn't happen but it certainly has been happening during my lifetime I mean certainly when I was young if they quote you in school reading a science fiction book they'd take it away from me why are you why are you wasting your mind with that crap you know when you read Silas Marner they will know when I was going to college there were no college courses in science fiction or fantasy and if depending on what professor you got if you took a creative writing course some of them would let you write it but a lot of would not you know this is creative writing we're doing literature here we don't want that John they're crap so you got that but I have seen dose attitude change I think in the and even as early as the late 70s you started seeing courses in science fiction and mostly in science fiction not so much for fantasy popping up at a few universities and in Bowling Green and in Ohio was one of the first and and we've heard about the people they're doing doing that my voice is somebody gotten much louder and echoing ah yes I am the voice of God and today it's it's a it's a very different landscape we have science fiction fantasy writers winning the the Pulitzer Prize winning other you know major prizes winning National Book Awards Stephen King winning a National Book Award even that was controversial though there were some writers who did not like that protested against that bitterly so things have changed a great deal and from where I stand have changed for the better the change is still not complete even now you may have a you may have a course in science fiction of course in fantasy taught at your university but if the course is you know survey of American literature there will be no science fiction books in the Canon there will be no treating will force a k-league win or Roger Zelazny or some of the great things well they will not be included with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Philip Roth and Sol bellow and the other people so it's changed for the better but the thing does not yet complete so the literary canon you think still exclude science fiction and fantasy writers even though you may have horses in universities the focus yes the official literary canon such as is which is kept alive mainly back into mia i think still excludes not only science fiction fantasy but pretty much a whole genre fiction that's also true you know you can take a course in mystery fiction and some things and then you'll get Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and some of the others but you will not get a ring and Chandler novel taught at the same time as The Great Gatsby in the same course Stan what it yes feelings about this change well it was the English department thing to a certain extent as well as the what we would call the New York literary establishment but when when you were in the modernist period one things that meant was that there was high high literature and and pop literature and high literature was high and pop literature was low and so it was a kind of a class system but in any case of snobbery and people like to be snobs in a way because it clarifies what's good and what is it so but the thing is that fantasy Gilgamesh the first story that we have that's a fantasy a really good one and a science fiction we are now all living in a science fiction novel that were co-authoring together so when on the one hand you got realism well that would be science fiction on the other hand you have fantasy well that's our dream life that's the stories that we tell each other every day there was always a good reason for science fiction and fantasy to be central but there was a short period of time where you had to be doing what I call domestic realism to be legitimate in the modernist system but I will say the literature department here at UCSD all the way back to 1970 which is when I first encountered it was always extremely welcoming to science fiction crazies like myself mainly because of the professors that I met and so it was a matter of accident and that's that's a good thing about UCSD and maybe why UCSD has had so many great science fiction writers come out of it not out of a literature department but at least out of UCSD it should be you know the division between high literature and low pop literature culture is actually a relatively recent thing in global history um you know if you if you go back to you know the Elizabethan theatre Shakespeare was Shakespeare was not some pointy 20 guy he was writing for the ground lingos much as anything else he was including plenty of ripe old jokes and short fights and you know exciting stuff in his plays that would please the people who were just standing in the pit and eating an onion because event they might throw that onion and they were very conscious of audience reaction I think a lot of the division and that produced this attitude dates from Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson the most you know that story from your lip courses I don't want to bore you if you already do but I don't think they know I don't run again they doesn't okay okay Henry James had Lovelace Stephenson had a celebrated literary choral at one point which was brought on by James writing the review of two books one of which was Treasure Island by Stevenson and the other which was a book about a young boy I don't remember the author it was a book about a young boy and provincial France coming of age growing up and James in this review contrasted the two books and he said for me the pleasure of literature is seeing the author's depiction of the world and the recognition it brings in me and I I go through it then I say yes he got that right no I don't think he's describing that right you know the quality that he brings to common shared experiences of people in the real world experiencing real things and in the case of these two books he said well the the Treasure Island is far more accomplished the prose is better it's it's altogether better written but it's very unrealistic and he said the friendship book despite all of its flaws is about a child growing up and that's an experience I have had I I have been a small child trying to come to terms with adulthood so I have been a child but I have never been a pirate hunting for buried gold and having sword fights and dealing with the black spot and la Isla and so therefore even though Treasure Island is more accomplished book the French book is a more worthy book it's a more serious book about a serious subject and the other one is just sort of fun Stevenson responded in the next issue of the magazine with a you know a rather famous one sentence thing here you know mr. James says that he has been a he has been a child but he has never been a pirate country for very gold then obviously he has never been a child and James responded to that and many other people got involved and it became a very long literary debate with the academic and literary establishment at a time separately decided that James had one and from that point on Stevenson and all of the treasure islands and kidnaps and dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde and Elizabeth were sort of consigned to genre literature kiddie literature fun for children but not about serious subjects in the real world if you want to be a serious writer you have to write about you know coming-of-age and problems in modern life and you know things like that hopefully as elegantly as possible and therefore we had creation of genre literature's which was accelerated by the growth of the pop magazines in America which made of rural genre magazines detective fiction and romance fiction and ranch romances and westerns and Zeppelin stories that were all very specialized but they were old hope and they weren't seriously they're true with all science fiction and fantasy writers old mystery writers all romance writers were all the literary descendants of Robert Louis Stevenson while the people were reigning literary fiction or the literary descendants of Henry James but I think and I hope that the two sides having it separated for a century are starting to come together again when they give Stephen King the National Book Award he's definitely a descendant of Stevenson and that gives me great hope for the future what about the relationships between science fiction and fantasy and they're changing appeal let us say mass audiences you have started out writing science fiction stories now you're known as a fantasy writer I wonder if you could talk a little bit about you know the choices you make when you choose to write a story in one genre or the other and what relationships you think there are between them and Stan I'd like to hear a little bit about what you think those relationships are - well that's an interesting subject guess when I started out writing in the early 70s I I did a few fantasies early on I've been published in fantastic magazines one of the most intense magazines of the day but predominantly I published an analogue and amazing and the magazine tour had identified the science fiction magazines and I wrote a lot of stuff that were set up other planets with aliens and starships and all of that stuff I think a lot of that was not because I didn't I preferred science fiction a fantasy I love them both I mean I grew up reading Robert a Heinlein and Andre Norton were two writers that I devoured in my childhood and really early teenage years but I also read Robert E Howard and cocaine for the fantasy HP Lovecraft or we didn't called horror that we call the monster stories I love my monsters first and having read all this I also wrote all this when I come of age but in the sixties and seventies well as the 70s there were far more markets for science fiction particularly in the short story length so that's predominantly what I write I and I love the world's I created and some of stories I told I'm still very proud of but I you know I look back on it now and saying you know I was writing fantasy all along I mean I'm I'm not a hard science guy like Stan everything that I know about science I learned from science fiction stories so by my science fiction stories if you you know look at them quickly here a really space fantasy I'm usually aliens this to the village or whatever it's a it's a furniture difference rather than a quantitative difference and I actually believe that a science fiction and fantasy are just two flavors the same thing I mean one of them is chocolate ice cream and one of them is strawberry ice cream but they're both ice cream and they taste really good now there are some people don't believe that who feel that they're completely opposite and indeed mazing and being opposition to each other because science fiction is real and realistic and you know could possibly happen and fantasy is not which is a dubious proposition we don't think about because it doesn't hold up actually there's far more evidence for the existence of ghosts than for hyperspace yes so why don't you toggle ed the border between science fiction and fantasy is so permeable and interpenetrated that it can never be keyed out and none of the ways that people try to do it actually work very well so it's a game that we play in our field and some people will argue over than other people realize that it can never be accomplished because time travel is usually called science fiction and yet it's a fantasy and every night we are all is having about three or four fantasy novels run through our heads which are our dreams and those dreams are real and so you could say that the kind of science fiction where where you drop into your dreams every night and there are other ways in which the borders are permeable if you if you set your story 5 million years in the future and there's humans evil then you have this clark's law that in any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic very true like your cell phone it's magic so we're already there and the the distinction between the two is more is it is unimportant except in publishing terms and the the guy who wrote the encyclopedia science fiction and the encyclopedia of fantasy John clewd writing almost every entry in both encyclopedias if you could look at it he suggests that we call it all fantastica to to a distinguished it from domestic realism and in try and instead of trying to make a distinction that can't be made between science fiction and fantasy you accept that in fantastica things that happen that might not happen to you on the street tomorrow and yet are worth writing about and talking about and in fact my teacher here at UC San Diego I was so lucky to have Fredric Jameson said to me once it's clear to me fantasy is about pre-capitalist cultures and science fiction is about capital Lister post-capitalist color and it works like a charm actually so it's a game you can play forever I see you see a lot of that that stigma we talk about that science fiction and fantasy but science fiction in particular was was sub literary was not real literature it still has its influences I think and you see people denying that they write science fiction when obviously they are writing science fiction I mean under that would classical case here with which he denied no I'm not a science fiction writer there are no squids from space of my stories yes and you know she had been formed that switch from space are not actually necessary hmm although just fun yeah and it crops up in the strangest places I mean they have you know my television career at one point when Twilight Zone was winding down and Star Trek The Next Generation was was just gearing up I had an interview with Star Trek The Next Generation for you know a possible job as a staff writer and I remember coming into the office of this producer so thankfully did not last long on the show and you can see where when I tell the story and he said well I don't know I don't know who you are can you tell me your credentials I love I just coming off Twilight Zone where I worked for a while but before that I wrote novels and short stories I'm primarily a science fiction writer and he said ah oh really well you know I'm Star Trek is is not a science fiction show it's it's a people show oh my god oh of people I was fooled by the proton torpedoes and the starship I was misled this old needle says I didn't get that job after you know breaking shameless fun of this idiot but yeah these the crazy denials that you get just mean you know I don't want to be I don't wanna be tarred with that brush but the brush is updated and you know the modern audiences like I think most of people in this room read all this with a with great enthusiasm and don't think of it as a as a guilty pleasure or something some literary and hopefully that would go away in a few more years didn't her Salah Kayla Glynn famously replied to Atwood but you know she was just afraid of being stuck in a literary ghetto and her definition of science fiction didn't really make sense that's what I remember I think she did what about your the worlds that you create they're so intricate both of you in different ways you're both known for creating these richly detailed world I'm wondering if you do research or what your process is for creating those worlds is it something that requires reading or even sketching maps or something of that nature or do you just dig into the story and start there and I'm interested in hearing from both of you how you write well I think ever since folk poping fantasy does require in math and fantasy fans expecting I expected - I like maps I even like real world maps and all that but I certainly like fantasy maps in the front of my fantasy books if it's set in the secondary world Damon life once famously said that he would never read a book with a map in the front self the damon was wrong about a number of things but uh as well as being a the founder of Clarion and write about things well Damon was like Chairman Mao and right 51% of the time it's a you win particularly with epic fantasy which of course is what a Song of Ice and Fire is the the setting is very important those of you who are in creative writing courses literary courses will know about the elements of fiction and you know you'll have teachers probably back in high school to talk you about character and plot and theme and all of the different elements that go the short story and setting is usually in that list but it's usually way down on the list it doesn't get a lot of attention because if you're writing about the real world or the mundane world that's a science fiction writer would say it's the world that's all around us you don't have to describe what an office looks in a detail people know what an office looks or a living room or so forth or they know what you know what you're find in New York City or farm in Kansas but if you're really dealing with totally made-up places you know we wouldn't know what the Shire looks like except opium tells us what the trier looks like and draws a map and you see the relations in place to each other and you learn a little vast history and how long it's been in place and that gives that gives a verisimilitude to it that is a equal to a mainstream writer just saying I was born on a farm in Kansas you can't you can't do that without doing some more building in fantasy or science fiction to some extent Tolkien's first breakthrough in America was in the late 1960s he worked water rings in the 50s but it was published only in hardcover and owned in England for a few copies made it across the ocean until a spook discovered that there was a lapse in the copyright laws so they pirated it and put out a unauthorized paperback edition which actually forced talk into licenses to ballantine books which put out the authorized edition and they became enormously popular particularly with young people college students of the 60s and a lot of people I knew had had a poster on their wall a token poster but it it's interesting me coming back what was that poster was it a portrait of Gandalf was it you know Frodo and Sam walking somewhere was it Aragorn with a sword no none of those things it was a map of middle-earth that was the poster that sold millions of copies to the to the students for the 60s middle-earth was a character in that book middle-earth the setting was as vivid as important as everything else there's been a token calendar now which has been going on for half a century every year there's a new coat calendar something and I'm trying to imitate what my westeros Ice and Fire account is which been coming out for like ten years now but you look at the token calendar and even without reading any legends you know these places you just have to look at the art to do that the painters that the artists are creating okay that's Rivendell that's ministerís that's the Shire oh here's one where they're in the mines of moria totally made-up places but we know what they look like we see an image and then we instantly recognize them just as we see recognized images of Paris or anger what or you know any of the places that exist in the real world that Taj Mahal toking created his world with such detail that his fantasy places took on a tangible life in our imaginations and live there still and I think all of the great fantasy books do that Narnia we know what Narnia is like Oz Robbie Howard's Hyborian age and hopefully my own Westeros these places have been built in such detail that there is real to millions of readers as Thailand or Mexico or you know Berlin and that's perfect as far as I'm concerned that's that's very cool and it's I think it is necessary a very strong sense of place in settings for fantasy books they ask proof of plastic to a certain extent particularly since in science fiction one of them subgenres that I love the most is the planetary romance where you go to another planet and then the joy of it is the same but different it like Earth but not like Earth how is it different and it needs to be specific and also if you're doing a novel and a science fiction novel so it isn't set on earth in the present you have what I call the cardboard sets problem from Star Trek the cardboard set that you what you would want to do is compensate for that by a little bit of a hyper realism where you add more detail to make sure that you believe in this setting and it isn't a cardboard set behind some kind of an adventure and then in terms of my own longest novel there have been stories about Mars for forever as humans have always been aware of Mars and the telling stories about it but they were always just a made-up space until 1976 to a certain extent 1969 but the Mariner pacified during a dust storm so it was 1976 when Mars was handed to us on a platter so the Percival Lowell he got it wrong HG Wells laws bits and we bub Bogdanov all of the great Martian literature after Percival Lowell said he saw canals was although kind of made-up Mars same with Ray Bradbury with Martian Chronicles it might as well have been Arizona same with you know Edgar Rice Burroughs as Mars is a is Percival Lowell's Mars done over and over again but they never had the place and then in 76 then you did have maps it's precisely in a sense of satellite maps in great detail and lo and behold the place was like but not like like New Mexico on steroids everything was a hundred times bigger than the earthly feature that was similar to it so that the biggest volcano on Mars would turned out to be a hundred times bigger than Mauna Kea and the biggest canal was a hundred times longer than the Grand Canyon it went and on and on like that there's a noctis labyrinth us is a set of labyrinth like it having a fantasy novel Olympus Mons would stick right up out of the sky so as you climbed the mountain you'd climb out of the atmosphere there's a canyon at what I call the Dover gate where you'd be looking down a depth that would be four or five times deeper than the Grand Canyon at its deepest spot and it's real and that's the thing that I found interesting real but empty as spectacular as anything of anything novelist could make up but the next planet out so that had to be a character and nobody had the opportunity to do that until 76 and there is indeed a bunch of Mars literature in the 1980s but I decided to throw caution to the winds and you know double down on making a landscape of character - this is a really beautiful thing it's because your work is so complex and intricate both of you that I you know wondered how it could ever be adapted in other media of course HBO has done a beautiful job with your series but I wanted to ask you a question about adaptation so stand for a while Spike TV was planning to adapt red Mars from the Mars trilogy which is one of my favorite works of fiction ever and you were talking to me about being on hold but I was wondering if you could talk maybe a little about how you feel about adaptation on the one hand and whether you think but that that there's a way in which an adaptation could do a kind of justice to your work I'm curious I would like to ask you I know George you work in Hollywood in the 80s and so I've had more experience kind of working with TV scripts and I read that you said you were happy that HBO was doing Game of Thrones instead of one of the network's because the story was seen as to sexual to violent too complicated for other networks and you know in reading the books and watching a series I still have to say that I find so much more depth than power in the books I'm wondering if there are things you wish that they have been able to include that they didn't or they're things you particularly liked on the other hand about the way it's been adapted um yes I mean for most part Game of Thrones is a magnificent adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire but just the nature of translating from one medium to another things have to be cut out I mean we have ten episode seasons for everything we've done so far that's ten hours you look at my books you can't get everything in in ten hours if we tried to do it literally and include every line of dialogue and every character you'd be talking 30 hours of season now that being said I would have liked and I've said right from the beginning that I would have liked a few more hours per season some of the other H we should be clear feels that went before us Hydra Sopranos in the Deadwood they had 13 episode seasons so they had three more hours if we'd had just three more hours of season we could have included some of the material that was cut particularly some of the smaller character scenes I think would have deepened it enriched and the experience what our show was simply too big it was already one of the most expensive things a Pheo did it was very complex it's it's not a show like The Sopranos that you shoot entirely in northern New Jersey we we have Podge crews in some cases that are shooting in in Belfast in Northern Ireland in Morocco and Croatia in Spain in Iceland it's a huge undertaking and David Benioff and Dan Weiss the showrunners & Dunn who did most of the work of translating from when me and other said to me at a certain point when we were debating us Georgia we had if we had 13 episodes per season it would kill us yeah and I like David Danna I don't want them to die so I stopped saying that we knew thirteen but dead certain episodes per season would have been would have been good you're always going to lose things in that process even I mean my novels are gigantic but even a novel that it's much I didn't antic it's hard to get all of it into a movie or even a TV show I had before I made to deal with HBO I had offers some people wanted to sort of success of Lord of the Rings for Peter Jackson and wanted to make mine into a feature film and I had meetings with them but I sort of last notice there's nobody get all of my stuff into two and a half hours so I'm very glad we chose the best we did and yes it had to be HBO you can't put us on CBS people people would die you know they would see a boobie and so no no it has to be it has to be HBO or something comparable and HBO should be an amazing group to work with and I'd like to know what happened to the red Mars thing too so you can answer the first well yeah I will get to that but I do like to I like the series that were when Game of Thrones is filmed in one of these small countries I'd like doubles their GDP for that year that's a good June third three more episodes a year or three more small countries would be raised out of poverty it's it's a beautiful story and in fact that is just in Barcelona where the the biggest bookstore in Barcelona is owned by a guy who bought the rights to Spanish rights to Game of Thrones that's very very early on when nobody else in Spain was interested and so he owned building that his books tourism now entirely from that it and beautiful stories proliferated about the effect that a Game of Thrones has had in this world now as for Mars maybe it's the opposite story I have not only has it had six or seven options and then screenplays each more dreadful than the last but it's it's killed an entire production company's off and and the most recent one Spike TV has been banned from ever trying to do fictional shows ever again so Spike TV has been returned to the reality TV and whatever alpha whatever else it was doing before and the Mars trilogy has moved on and it's restless movement for the media world and again there's interest again and dubious I really have been encouraged when the people doing the adaptations have even read red Mars because several times they happen so I'm not exactly lucky and also it's it's a work in progress it could happen at any time because the many factors have to come together as I guess the best way to put it it's interesting that you know TV having been historically regarded as kind of the lower form than film is actually more useful for exploring a world in great detail so it's kind of reminding me of the way science fiction and fantasy sports ins have changed it seems like TV is now being seen as something that you know you can have really wonderful art and you know carry something out for a longer period of time well it's true that historically you know future films were the highest level in Hollywood and television was seen as a lower level so that the snob factor that we talked about in the literary canon also exists there but that's completely changed now I mean feature films have come to be a place to go for spectacle but if you want serious drama and character develop and all that then its television we are living I mean forget the early 50s that was a great age this is the Golden Age television it has been never been so many great television shows on and I get the quality of a television show of today's television shows like Game of Thrones holds up to any feature film I mean we've we've showed Game of Thrones episodes on IMAX screens you know blown up through to the size of a football stadium and then it still looks great what you couldn't say for you know I mean don't put any Star Trek episodes even the next generation certainly not the original series on an IMAX screen it's not going to work that way cardboard the special effects of cinematography all of the production values of the best television shows are right up there with any feature film and more and more directors and writers and actors who previously only did features are now moving into television so exciting it's a great new world for people who like television and a really more good show so I think people I think will ask you a question about hierarchies of power now I see that as a concern in both of your movers so I wonder if each of you could speak about what insights your work might offer about these big topics or what questions you might be exploring more specifically I was thinking George just reading around a little bit about your life it seems you're from a working-class background I was wondering if that matters when it comes to what you write and how and I wondered what particular tools fantasy with it's often pre-industrial settings might offer for thinking about power Stan I was thinking a great strength of your work is thinking about global structural inequalities and climate change and I wondered if you could talk about what tool science fiction might provide to help you think about those big questions this Tiger listen well what I something I said to George last night if I am NOT a systematic or coherent thinker and so that's why I'm a novelist and if I if I knew what I thought I wouldn't have a dozen characters in my head arguing with each other and what I can do is disentangle that clash of voices and turn them into arguments between like puppet figures that I come to believe in it's very much Calvin and Hobbes in that I'm Calvin I believe in Hobbes and the Hobbes is if you believe in him he's way more interesting than Calvin more more wise and more intelligent and it works like that for a novelist and being a novelist is a special thing but it isn't organized thing so when I write a novel I try to give a clear and fair point of view to people that might disagree with each other and might that I might disagree with but they need to have their fair say in the context of the novel and then it's bigger things like the plot of the whole trilogy or the plot of the whole series that when I look back on it I say well maybe that is expressing what I thought or what I believed but because it's so complicated it means that it can't be reduced to a simple statement so we do have climate change we're already in it we've already started it we're going to be living with it for the rest of our lives and beyond our lives into generations to come well if you're doing near-future science fiction it means you have to deal with it one way or another and it gives you a lot of stories to tell and I guess that's pretty much where I would I would leave it well I've been on my books particularly a game of Thrones and Song of Ice and Fire do deal a lot with the issues of power in the middle setting yes but you know you can even translate some of those lessons to to the real world I mean I think we we as human beings have have some kind of basic drives and motivations that that drive all of us you know we all want to you know love and we all want to sex and we all want kind of recognition you know glory if you go back to the Casablancas all the same old story a fight for love and glory and those are all good things but I also think there's something innate in human beings which is the drive to have power and of course we see it acted out in the Middle Ages in the Roman Republic people striving for elected office or the highest level to be the consul to be eventually the Emperor killing people to achieve this you know poisoning them stabbing them leading armies against each other in modern times we fight it out with elections but it goes deeper than that I mean I don't know how it is is a university but at some of the places I've taught you know the the height to be chairman of the English department was as bloody as the Hundred Years War I not to be the chair is a tiny little bit of power but the people people still want it I I don't know there's something innate in us that we like to have the power to tell other people what to do and we don't want other people to tell us what to do and a that certainly proved me I hate people telling me what to do but I do enjoy telling other people what to do so you know power isn't endlessly fascinating subject and then what to do when you have the power you know they the whole issue of kingship and what is kingship for fathom what do you do here is a ruler this is something that Tolkien as great as he was and many things never really dealt with this I mean his evil guys wanted power so on and so forth wanted power and if you put the ring on and became corrupted by it one of the things one of the signs of corruption was you wanted power so clearly there's a something there that says power is evil and he he believed that on some level I guess but then you get to the end of the book and you come across well Aragon then was king and he rules wisely and well for the next hundred years people living a long time in those days especially they had a little elf blood or something Iran and the land prospered the land always prospered in fairy tales and things if you had a good king got a good king and would prosper and a true king after that an evil came the land would wither the cave was connected with the land it's a wonderful myth system of course it doesn't it doesn't work that way in real life it's not making a good King doesn't make you being a good person doesn't make you a good king or a good president you know I think during my lifetime Jimmy Carter was probably the best person ever to serve as president incredibly intelligent incredibly moral well-meaning and all day was a terrible precedent you know as I like Jim a great guy terrible president so in my books I'm kind of exploring I mean ruling when you get to power what do you do ruling is hard ruling is very difficult so he rules wisely and well 400 years tokens as America what 1 what was his tax policy you know did he did he rule over the elves to do what he else could tend to rule over him even though he was a man when he sent to order to Rivendell or a lot Laurie in the do say yes sir King sir or they say leave us alone you're not our King what do you do about all those leftover orcs there are hundreds of thousands of leftovers that he like set up little orc schools and try to get them off eating man's flesh and become productive members of society or could be pursue a policy of organized genocide where he's had people into all those tunnels to completely wipe out the earth what Cogan never answers any of these questions these are hard questions so my characters have to deal with that stuff you know yeah there's no clear-cut good answer or bad answer you have to oh my god I'm the king I have to make this decision and no matter what decision I make some people are going to hate me so how do I go through it I love to grapple with these kinds of issues well I think we've reached the audience question portion so I will be reading these and will be as surprised as you will to hear them when creating a universe and beginning a saga where is the best place to start or with whom also what race and class combination in Pathfinder do you like to play most often and why I've never played that finder which me neither so I can't answer that now you know homeless catullo I can talk about you know a few other role-playing games that have done but not that one you know you begin at the beginning although the beginning that you begin at may not be the beginning when the book is finally published it may think of it means Sheppard's before that in the case of Game of Thrones I began with this not the prologue which I wrote some time later but would the first proper chapter where they find the dire wolf pups in the snow and where did that come from it just came I was writing a totally different novel besides the Kannamma was a point of fact and one day I just from somewhere got this image of a dead dire wolf mother dire wolf with two pups around her still trying to nurse with her even though she's been killed and finding him and I knew it was important novel idea but I I put aside that novel followed it where it leads so it came down from on high where do you begin well I'm a homer in media race Aristotle says that's not bad and it's useful if you have a thing like the Mars trilogy so you go to Mars the trip there you're stuck in an Motel 6 for nine months it's not got that interesting you get there you have to build a town from scratch it becomes like a design kitchen or construction novel construction novels are not a genre and there's a reason for that so I started with a murder that was maybe you know 40 years into the story of the inhabitation of Mars and it's a kind of a Cain and Abel you can tell it's a triangle it's a charged situation and and the murderer is a machi male who gets somebody else to do the job and that's all within the first chapter then you go back and all those characters are ostensibly friendly and have a different set of relationships and but you know what's coming and so as you read all these stupid little construction things or little arguments or you know where it will lead and it gives some tension to those first chapters you also begin to think you're always going to know what's coming but I pass through that murder in at the end of chapter five I think and then there's chapters six seven eight really long chapters where suddenly you don't know what's happening and it's like being shot out of a cannon into unknown space and many a reader has said well I read the second half of the book in a single night because I didn't know what was going to happen next and it was a good structure so in media race Aristotle has the best word analyzing Homer one of our great Clarion writers Ted Chang says write the ending first and write to the ending have either of you ever done that is that something you would ever do I'm doing that now but it's like building a crossword puzzle I actually think it's harder than hell seems difficult I don't know it might be a good idea I see my India receding exactly for me I'm running after it for the consetta kubera further away it's like the midgets like the reflection the Mirage on the freeway uh-huh let's see what we have here when writing about a given character you attempt to quote inhabit them psychologically physiologically etc if so how do you get in the frame of mind I guess I do inhabit them odd as it may seem I I am you know some of my time I am a dwarf and some of the time I'm a incredibly hot kick writing a dragon telling the time I'm a psychopathic 10 year old girl killing people and slitting their throats so uh it my gets my mood varies but uh changing between them is very difficult I mean I do not write the attractors in the order in which you read them I you know I'm if I'm Ana Tyrion prove I will write you know three or four tyrion chapters and then say well I'm almost the end of the Tyrion stuff for this book I better stop and write about somebody else but that transition where I stopped writing about Tyrion for a while and then I go write three or four Johnstone chapters that's a calm transition because they are very different and they have different voices they know different people I have to reread a bunch of the old chapters to remember where they were and what they sounded like and I usually have a couple false starts when when changing but yeah I live inside my character the viewpoint characters anyway yeah it's a it's the great joy of writing novels and it's also a way in which I think character based fiction differs from build the the idea that you had to live it in that fiction is kind of autobiographical a sort of disguised memoir so Kerouac Hemingway many a person's ruined their life trying to have experiences that they could then turn into novels Fitzgerald as well so it was kind of a as a young American man here at UCSD in the 70s the idea of what a novel was supposed to be was obscured to me but what it really is about is getting out of the way of other voices of trying to be someone else and imagine the other and then see if you can make that plausible because although you can't really ever imagine the other you can write a sentence and then the generosity of the reader and pops into those sentences and makes the character so the novelist gets out of the way tries to be the characters that are the point-of-view characters and then it's as crucial to have generous readers that are willing to play the game of that's doing a sentences is about this other person and not about George not about Stan it gets you out of that Jack Kerouac trap ins you have to have done stupid things before you can write about stupid things and since we're writing about you know killing orcs or landing on Mars you know it would be hard to do that stuff okay for George what's your favorite piece of writing that you've ever produced even harkening back to your youth yeah I don't know that one is like asking a parent well which is your favorite child yeah thank you they all have favorite children they just won't admit it so what's yours you know I some of my favorite children who live in my head I haven't actually looked at it reread for four decades and probably it would be wise to keep it that way obviously a game of Thrones A Song of Ice and Fire is going to be what I'm remembered for if I'm remembered for anything it's my magnum opus but it's not finished yet and therefore I'm still nervous about you know will I stick the landing here will I will I bring it in as powerfully as I hope to bring it in and make it a complete work of art with a beginning middle and end that's my goal I have done other things that I have finished I mean I started out writing short stories and a lot of my short story yeah produce some stinkers and some that were kind of mediocre but I also produce some that were very I'm very proud of us won't rely on my first you go winner Sam things which oddly enough I didn't think much of when I wrote it but I went on to become my until Game of Thrones my most popular work and the one everybody knew me Horace and King a few of the more obscure stories like this tower of ashes or the stone city I was really that was I think my science fiction is the bested best it's got some of my earlier standalone novels fever dream will always have a very special place in my heart and the Armageddon rag you know I kind of have a love-hate relationship with that knowledge I was very proud of it I still am proud of it I think it's an important oblong blade I wrote it it almost destroyed my career no one bought it and I couldn't sell it he's not well after it so they changed the course of my life and some huge and fundamental ways but nonetheless I I still have a affection for that do you have a favorite of yours it is a hard thing I from what we were I said just before about trying to get out of the way of a story and imagine that you're another I wrote a novel called the years of rice and salt in which all although Europeans died in the Black Death and then world history went on since a chapter in that called the widow Kang it's about a Chinese woman it's from her point of view Qing Dynasty the year is 1776 which is a private joke as they don't have that calendar anymore and and then when I look back and read the wood ok I don't know where that came from it is the most not meet and so I'm extremely fond of it and proud of it ok who do you think or who is supposed to be the most controversial conflicting character I guess this is in songs of Fire and Ice Game of Thrones like who are we supposed to be most confused about rooting for from Esther thank you that's good question man I I'm I hope you're confused about all of them and uh I believe in I believe in great heritage I love great characters much more than stop hero and villains a lot of fantasy in particular is about the battle of good versus evil in the world and I think that's a very valid thing for for fantasy fiction or indeed for any type of fiction but in my opinion the battle between good and evil is not way between armies of really ugly people who wear black clothing and some really good-looking people who wear white clothing it swayed in the individual human heart every day and all of us have good needle in us all of us have the capacity to be heroes and also the capacity to be villains and indeed most of us are both during our lives we've we've all done I think heroic selfless noble things for other people things we're proud of and that we're honest with ourselves most of us local done some selfish things some things were ashamed of some despicable things and what will we do tomorrow what will we do and we're really quick to the test that's what interests me that's what fiction is it's all about and I'm putting all of my characters through the to the test and seeing which one's rise the occasions and which one's full and that's not true of Ice and Fire that's true of all of them okay for both of you how do you juggle so many storylines while writing your books with increasing difficulty [Music] there are days that I sit in front of my computer and reviewing all my files and notes and character sheets and remembering all these millions of characters that I've rented tonight I say plaintively did it have to be seven kingdoms the five Kingdoms of Westeros that would have been right five is a good number why did I have to make it seven but you know once having thrown the balls in the air I am compelled to keep crumbling so I do the best I can but it is hard I didn't know when I began this that I would be you know I started readiness in 1991 I thought okay a trilogy three novels I like four years five years I'll be done here it should have all been done by 1996 1996 was when the first book came out so here I am all these decades later and I'm still still working on it it's this it's consumed me and transformed my life hopefully in it in many good ways but it's it's huge and it is hard to keep track of all of them at times that's maybe why I'm slowing down from the pace I had at the beginning also the stuff about getting older I don't recommend that don't get old it yeah it sucks I'm waiting for the science guys to come up with that the youth experiment I've been promising us to reverse the effects of aging and so forth the longevity treatment I get out a big long sheet of butcher paper and a bunch of colored pens sharpies and I make a map of the novel I lifted characters as the colored pens and try to because it's too much to hold in in my head and and pretty soon I'll see patterns or I'll see what I've dropped a thread and needed and and so I make it as a writing to kind of help myself figure it out and in fact in my most recent novel which is a it has a mystery plot in it so I decided to sketch the mystery because I couldn't understand it and by the time I was done with the butcher paper and the colored pens and it looked like the cat had actually gotten into the colored pens and he's a complete morass of arrows and circles and I've heard that Raymond Chandler the Big Sleep or the Maltese Falcon that if you actually try to unpack the plot you can't understand it it doesn't it doesn't make sense and I was looking at my plot going you know this isn't even a mystery novel ultimately it just has a mystery in it this is crazy and so I find drawing drawing and then cutting it helps to keep trying you do anything like that or on your head well I have charts and maps and then computer files that are you from time to time maybe not as many as I heard had you know indeed my earlier novels like I did keep it all in my head so right when I started this not knowing how big it would be I did the same thing when it did some certain point it got away from me and I forget things especially when I'm you know away from actually working on it for a while and then I have to review the winter it I will say that you know that I don't have talking did it but you know my series would not have been possible without the computer I mean I wrote all my really anomalous and most of my short stories on the typewriter and if I had written this on the typewriter I would have gone man I mean it the only way I could keep any astray there's that wonderful search and replace function that you can I can just search for a character's name to find out what court I he had although I'm beginning to wish I had never described what color eyes anybody this is one of the things that takes place in in fiction you know we always find out what color eyes people are I don't think people really know that in real life and I'm sitting here looking at you I'm not that far from like the first row I can't tell what color any of your eyes are it's it's insane but we always use it for fiction and we bring that I'm constantly getting that wrong and they're damn readers notice they send me wait a minute said Renly's eyes were blue and now they're green in the second book so then in the third book I read lays eyes were blue green ended on the color of the light yeah I also have a horse to change of sex between books but I wasn't able to explain that one so you know notably well we were questioned about influences and they are wondering who are the important influences on each of you and then they asked George they say they have knowledge that you have listed both Lovecraft and Faulkner among your influences and how do you square the tension between their purple and spare prose we which one wait which one is spare horror and Lovecraft yeah there's not much fairness there there's no spiritus there is no spare there no Faulk those influence on me you know wow why I read his books I haven't read all of his his work planning means but well I read some of it but the greatest influence that Faulkner has had on me is his a Nobel Prize acceptance speech which if you haven't read it you can find it online and it's a it's a very moving speech about the kind of writing he was doing what he thinks could be about them in particular he said the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself and I've taken that particular phrase as kind of a mantra for my work and that's where I think all of this stuff about genre it is unimportant because if it is a important work we are all writing about the human heart in conflict with itself whether it's on a spaceship or inside a medieval castle in some fantasy land or whether it's in suburban Chicago and a mainstream novel doesn't matter with telling stories about the human heart in conflict with itself and I think Falken nailed it there and that's the influence Lovecraft I think was the greatest horror writer who ever lived he's certainly one of the big three he's read if they would Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe there are many other good horror writers but nobody approaches those three and he just scared the bejesus out of me when I encountered his work at the age of fourteen or so and I still do occasionally when I when I reach for a scary effect in a book or a story I reach form of crafting effects is he's a writer I've sometimes tried to echo or write like I don't think I can I'm not you know I don't have a deep level of insanity I think that drove something is some of his best work but yes he did have a huge influence on me along with science fiction and fantasy writers I mean cocaine robbery Howard and the fantasy side Fritz library to a certain extent on the science fiction side Robert a Heinlein Andre Norton who is another writer that I read you know when I was quite young I think the biggest influence of you are other people you read when you're young I mean I'm 68 years old now I read many books that are good and I admire them but they're not going to influence me I'm not going to find a new writer oh my god this guy I've got a I've got to try to do what he's doing here no they influences a role in your formative years when you're when you're still vulnerable to influences yeah well and once you're working novelist pastor the age of learning the whole the thing what you want is to get weirder and more like yourself and and know and have less influences and more strangeness but for me I discovered science fiction here at UCSD in my freshman year and it blew my mind and it explained Orange County to my child at home and I realized that science fiction was the best description of the way the world felt that I had ever run into and so this was fall of 1970 and then year of 1971 and I and the new wave was sweeping science fiction actually it had swept at about five years before but it meant every single one of the great New Wave books was in print or about to be printed and in paperback for a quarter fifty cents there was a used bookstore down where the baseball stadium is now that had all these books and I I started reading them voraciously my my UCSD career as a history major was trashed because I didn't care and I had a double major alright science fiction and then later I limped into the literature department as a way to justify it so the new way and that means first located and what that means is not the people who were called Lee Wave in those years but everybody writing between 1965 and 1975 was caught up in this ferment and so it if you just pick a science fiction text between 1965 and 1975 you're going to have an interesting book on your hands and there's no doubt about it so Ursula K Le Guin Jean wolf Tom dish Roger Zelazny Samuel R Delaney Joanna Russ extremely important Kate Wilhelm and but also Jack Vance or Poole Anderson who were bit older writers Silverberg they were writing and they got hot and from 65 to 75 because the younger writers were were also boggling their minds and suddenly you could write about sex drugs and rock and roll and put it in the future and it was going to be science fiction so the new wave was what I've always loved and like you say it was what hit me when I was young that's what I wanted to do let's see I think we've got to for George I'm going to ask them both to you together who would you want to see on the Iron Throne dead or alive you can think about that one then who's deaf do you regret the muss [Applause] who would I like to see on the Iron Throne well I'm not going to reveal that you're gonna have to keep reading the books and mine find out there that's a little little too much you guys argue about that whose death do I regret the most uh John F Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy [Applause] okay I have one final question for both of you so what are you most excited about in the field of science and fiction and fantasy today what what excites you about where the fields going do you have particular writers you think everybody should be reading um says a lot of threat years coming in a science fiction has conquered the world from from this little ghetto genre that you know you weren't supposed to associated with we've taken over the world we've taken over television we've taken over movies most of the highest-grossing movies or old-time are science fiction fantasy movies comic book movies and all that and as a result of that of course more and more people are entering the field and there are some extraordinary new talents that are coming up and that's all that's all very exciting to me admittedly there's so much of it that I often feel like I can't keep up just because there are so many new people entering you know there was a time once upon a time when certain science fiction fans like first day Ackerman were able to read everything every science fiction book published in a year or all the magazines all the novels he read them all but even about a seventies when I broke in you couldn't do that any longer but then there was another time like 20 years well yeah it was a lot of books being published a lot of stories he couldn't read them all but some of them you know were more important than others you could kind of keep up with the important parts of the field you can't do that anymore either the field has diversified so much in terms of genres and subgenres I mean we have we have epic fantasy and high fantasy and dark fantasy and urban fantasy and you know we go on with that though you know science fiction we have the cyberpunk movement and you know the well the New Wave is pretty well gone but it left its residues on the shore we have the new space off or the new weird all of these statements and you can just read in one of these some gunners and still have more books and more writers and more stories to read than you ever had before one of the things that is exciting for me is the fact that not only is the field becoming more diverse in terms of subject matters and subgenres but it's becoming more diverse sexually and ethnically and nationally where we're seeing more and more I mean there's I don't wanna say that they've never been there they've always been women writing science fiction and some great ones Andre Norton one of the formative writers in my own youth was actually Alice Mary Norton and you had Leigh Brackett and seal more two incredible writers of the of the Golden Age and there was a huge influence of women in the 70s but today there's it's many more it's exponentially larger and we're seeing more and more writers from other countries with six in Lu won the Hugo Award the first translated novel he said Chinese writer in China three body problem one day you go wood for summit translated novel as ever won and the same year a Dutch writer for a translated novel that I believe also won so we had two translations science fiction has conquered not on the United States but the entire world I mean books are being published in all these countries and they're largely American and sis electrics and British books but now for the first time we're getting a reciprocation than that the you know we're getting their visions as well as them getting our visions so I think all that is its tremendous ly exciting well I share these sentiments we come from a time when science fiction was looked down on and so I personally have a chip on my shoulder that will never go away and I like to punch people who don't like science fiction and yet now we are all living in a science fiction novel that we are co-writing together it's called reality so the predictions came right and because of the work and people like George it's really central to the culture people talk about in terms of Game of Thrones because everybody's read it or seen it and can understand each other's references and that is a very heartwarming experience and then in terms of new writers I think one of the things that happens is it's harder to look down the generations to new work than it is to look to the generation right before you which is so incredibly vivid to the mind as a reader but I will say that I see when I chest out the waters because I'm always trying to not know what's going on so that I can do my own thing without fear of learning anything from anybody else I would say that when I talk about younger writers I see great work by Jonathan Lethem or Cory Doctorow or Paolo Bacigalupi also Kelly link or Laura Jemison or Nettie Okafor and almost kind of these people are probably nearly 50 years old so my head doesn't cook directions back because there are newer new people but there are but I don't know people there those are in the mist to me and that I have not explored the the latest work being done I'm confident it's out there and that it's great and it's you know that's not really my job as a reader and I'm still reading Daniel Defoe which immense pleasures and you know I'm a little off the cutting edge but I love it all I'm really excited about all the amazing work that's come out of Clarion in the last few years Alyssa long and Sam Miller Carmen Machado so many people just producing amazing work so rush out and read work while there's people with you yes haven't heard of them well thank you gentlemen this has been a wonderful evening and I want you all to stay in your seats because we're going to give them a big round of applause and let them depart and then we're going to have our raffle to give away the science books so please join me in giving a big [Applause] as all to play date go door [Applause]

Channel: Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination

Views: 67,240

Keywords: George R.R. Martin, Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, Game of Thrones, Mars Trilogy, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, Clarion, fantasy, writing, literature, speculative fiction, UC San Diego

Id: zfbwx7RAJss

Length: 81min 19sec (4879 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017