Something had to do with Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage, and Lena Headey becoming stars, at least during the time when Game of Thrones was the absolute queen of television. And although for many he is simply a reference as the author of the books on which the series that has generated nearly 4 billion euros for HBO was based, George R.R. Martin is a celebrity in his own right.
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He is revered in the world of fantasy literature not only for the five volumes available so far of the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, of which more than 100 million copies have been sold in the more than 45 languages in which it has been published, but also for an extensive body of work that also includes seven other novels, several collections of short stories, a children’s book, numerous anthologies in which he has been the compiler, and the famous Wild Cards , a true literary universe inhabited by superheroes and set in an alternate reality that has been captured in 33 books, in which he has served as editor alongside science fiction writer Melinda Snodgrass.
And yet, the one who was born in New Jersey but found a personal paradise in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is seriously questioned by some of his fans, who do not forgive him – as the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first book and 15 years after he started it are marked – for not having been able to finish the sixth installment of his most famous franchise, titled The Winds of Winter , even though he has revealed in several interviews that he has more than 1,000 pages written. Perhaps what frustrates them the most is that Martin has made it clear that once he leaves this world, no one will be able to sit down to finish what he leaves unfinished.
During a convention in Seattle last year, a fan asked him if it was possible for him to change his mind: “You won’t be in this world for much longer,” he said bluntly. And although the audience present booed the out-of-place fan, many on social media agreed with him. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter during the promotion of the latest series HBO premiered inspired by his books, The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , the author himself highlighted a comment that particularly hurt him: “Someone wrote that I had lied to them, that I’m going to die soon, that you just have to look at how old I am,” said the man who will turn 78 in September.
He has made it clear that once he leaves this world, no one will be able to finish what he leaves unfinished
The truth is that Martin, who writes on an old computer that is not connected to the internet and connects to the world from another, does not lack mundane occupations to keep delaying the awaited novel.
Over the last decade, often inspired more by a desire to help the community than by materialistic calculation, he has been building a true personal empire in the city founded in 1610 by Don Pedro de Peralta, the native of Valladolid who was the second Spanish governor of New Mexico. His company, Highgarden Entertainment, manages the Jean Cocteau cinema, the Milk of the Poppy bar, whose name is a reference only for the initiated, and the specialized bookstore Beastly Books, located side by side.
Additionally, he is a partial owner of Sky Railway, a tourism company that offers 12 different adventures aboard a local train that departs from a station located a two-minute walk from there.
To all these investments is added a significant contribution to Meow Wolf (the wolf’s meow), an immersive art gallery that in Santa Fe is entered through a refrigerator, has four other branches in Las Vegas, Denver, Dallas, and Houston, and will soon open two more in Los Angeles and New York.
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Martin arrived in Santa Fe in 1979 after divorcing his first wife, Gale Burnick. He lives with his second, Parris McBride, whom he married in 2011, in a vast complex on the outskirts where he has tried to build a huge library shaped like a medieval castle with seven fronts that has been rejected twice by the city due to protests from his neighbors.
And although he is fully entitled to enjoy a personal fortune estimated at 120 million dollars, the man who for years was an obscure television screenwriter does not forget that everyone is waiting for him: “I have to clarify that although I am an investor and owner of several of these things, I do not take care of them in my daily life. Every time I announce something on the internet, everyone gets desperate and comments that I have stopped writing books. But I keep working on them,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a previous interview.
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