Chapter 120: Game of Thrones
On March 29, 1989, the 61st Academy Awards ceremony was held at the Holy Citizen Auditorium in Los Angeles, USA.
Under Wang Jie's vigorous public relations, Meg Ryan, who replaced Jodie Foster in "The Robbery of Pear Blossoms", won the Oscar for Best Actress, the Best Picture was won by "Mississippi is Burning", the Best Director Award was awarded to Martin Scorsese, and the Best Actor was awarded to Swedish actor Max von Sido.
A week after the Oscar ceremony, Bantam Books published three new books by Wang Jie, which is the latest book released by Wang Jie after a lapse of three years, which caused a frenzy of rush among book fans as soon as they hit the shelves, the first of these three books is called "Resident Evil", the second is called "Tales of the Night", and the last one is the most sensational among North American book fans, because his name is "A Song of Ice and Fire".
A Song of Ice and Fire is the work of George Raymond Richard Martin, who began writing essays in 1990 in his spare time and confronted a novel called Avalon. After writing the draft of three chapters, he suddenly conceived a scene of a boy who goes to watch the execution and see the beheading, and then finds the ice wolf in the snow. Martin put Avalon aside and wrote a chapter of the story in a matter of days, quickly realizing that it had nothing to do with his previous novels and would be part of a larger story. This chapter he wrote on a spur of the moment would later become the first chapter of the first volume of the epic A Song of Ice and Fire. After writing a few more chapters, Martin decided that his new book would be a long-form fantasy story series and began working on a map of the story's backdrop and a genealogy of the characters. However, the writing of the book was interrupted for a few years, because in 1992 Martin was called back to Hollywood to create the ABC-booked TV series "The Door", but although the pilot episode was filmed, the show was never released.
In 1994, Martin put aside his work in the TV series and began to continue writing his fantasy story three years earlier, and gave his publishing agent, Kirby Macaulay, the first 200 pages of the manuscript and a two-page blueprint for a plan to write a trilogy series Martin liked vague titles because he felt that it would make his work more esoteric, so he chose "A Song of Ice and Fire" as the title of the entire series: the cold stranger and the flaming dragon may mean "ice and fire", and "song" appeared in Martin's book The Song of Lyanna and The Song of the Dead are Martin's fetish for "songs". Martin also admits that the title was inspired by Robert Frost's 1920 poem "Fire and Ice" – Fire is love, passion is passion. Ice is betrayal, revenge, the dark side of cruelty.
Martin had planned to write a trilogy like his idol John Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, with three books named Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, and The Wind of Winter. But when Martin had not been able to complete the first book story after 1,400 pages of manuscript, he felt that the series needed four or even six books (which at the time was conceived as two connected trilogies to form a long story).
The first volume of the series, Game of Thrones, was published in the United States in August 1996 by Bantam Books. Robert Jordan, the author of The Wheel of Time, wrote a short eulogy for the cover, laying the groundwork for the novel's early fantasy readership. As a pre-sale promotion, a sample novella called Dragon's Blood was also published and won the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novella.
The 300-page manuscript that was taken from the finale of Game of Thrones became the opening chapter of the second volume, A Clash of Kings. Volume 2 was published in the United States in February 1999 with a manuscript length of 1,184 pages, and became the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series to reach the bestseller list, ranking No. 13 on the 1999 New York Times bestseller list. After Peter Jackson's successful adaptation of the Lord of the Rings franchise, Martin also began to receive copyright requests from many producers to bring "A Song of Ice and Fire" to the screen, but Martin, who had feared that Hollywood would not be able to stay true to his work since "Nightcrawler", refused.
Martin delivered the third volume, A Storm of Swords, to the publisher several months late, because the description of the red wedding in two-thirds of the page was so painful for Martin that he had to save the chapter until the end to save enough courage to write it. The 1,521-page manuscript of "A Storm of Swords" is a headache for many publishers. Bantam Books' November 2000 edition published in the United States is a single volume, while editions in other regions and languages are divided into two, three, or even four volumes. "A Storm of Swords" reached No. 12 on the New York Times bestseller list.
After the first three volumes were published, Martin had planned to write three more books. The fourth volume, tentatively titled "A Dance with Dragons", focuses on Daenerys Targaryen's return to Westeros and the conflicts she faces. He had hoped that the story would be set five years after the end of Volume 3, A Storm of Swords, so that the young characters (including the dragons) would have time to grow up, known as the "five-year gap". But his publisher wanted the new book to be shorter than The Storm of Swords from the outset, and Martin agreed, so he began to move the length of Volume 4 closer to The Clash of Kings, and planned to use a long prologue to explain what happened in the five-year interval. Originally, the original draft of "Wet Hair" Ellen Greyjoy had only one chapter to describe the Iron Islands' Elector, but due to the fact that Dorne and the Iron Islands had a greater impact on the novel's story than expected, Martin eventually expanded to describe three different new POV characters. In 2001, Martin was still optimistic that the fourth book would be released in the fourth quarter of 2002, but he found that the "five-year gap" did not apply to every character in writing - on the one hand, Martin was not satisfied with describing the previous events through interludes or reminiscences of the characters, and on the other hand, it was untrue that the story had not happened after five years. After a year of writing, Martin realized that he needed to add a transitional volume to Volume 3 called A Feast for Crows, and at the same time abandoned the idea of a five-year gap. The 250-page prologue Martin had planned to write was then transformed into a number of new chapters of Dorne and the Iron Isles, and as these storylines intertwined, Martin's story became more and more complex.
The manuscript of Volume 4, A Feast of Crows, ended up being longer than Volume 3, A Storm of Swords. Martin was reluctant to cut out a lot of content to reduce the length of the book to a publishable size, because it would jeopardize the story, "making the book super small and giving each reader a magnifying glass" was not a viable option for him, and he did not agree with the publisher dividing "A Feast of Crows" into two parts. By this time, the writing progress was much later than expected, but Martin had not finished writing all the characters' stories, and he was not willing to finish the book without leaving the book. With so many characters scattered around the world, a friend of his suggested that the story be geographically split into two volumes, with A Feast of Crows being the first book.
The strategy of separating the stories gives Martin space to complete the storyline he has already begun to write. Martin put the unfinished character chapters of the East (Essos) and the North (Winterfell and the Wall) into the next book, and kept the original title of the book as originally planned, "Dance of the Dragons", while Book 4, "A Feast of Crows", will tell the story of King's Landing, the Riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Isles on Westeros. Both books follow the end of Volume 3, A Storm of Swords, and unfold in parallel at the same time, and the stories of some of the characters will overlap. After Martin put three important characters (Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen) into Volume 5, A Dance with Dragons, he split the chapters of Arya Stark into two books.
Volume 4, A Feast for Crows, reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list after it was released in September 2005 in the United States and in the United Kingdom in October 2005. Leif Grossman, a commentator for Time magazine, called Martin "the Tolkien of America" in his accomplishment. However, fans and critics alike were disappointed that the publication of the fascicle had left many popular characters without making appearances after the gripping ending of Volume 3. In the afterword, Martin indicates that Volume 5 will be published within the next year, but the planned publishing date is constantly pushed back. At the same time, HBO acquired the rights to TV adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire in 2007 and hired Martin as a writer consultant and producer.
After six years of writing, the fifth volume of the manuscript, A Dance of the Dragons, was published in June 2011, both in length and in length. The story of Book 5 catches up with and surpasses the story of Book 4 by about two-thirds of the book, but covers less than Martin expected, omitting at least one planned battle and ending the stories of several characters in suspense. Martin blamed the missed delivery on Meereenese knot (described as "a web of threads and characters intertwined with Daenerys"), admitting that he spent too much time rewriting and refining the story, and explaining that he had written three different timelines to compare them before finalizing it. But he vehemently denied that media and industry commentators had questioned his loss of interest in writing story series and that he would spend more time making money.
Martin estimates that the last two volumes of the entire series will be large 1,500 pages. He decided to title Volume 6 Winter's Winds as originally planned for the fifth book, and stated in June 2010 that he had completed four chapters, including Sansa Stark, Arrene Martell, and Arya Stark. In mid-2011, Martin moved the completed chapter of Ellen Greyjoy from the then-unpublished Dance of Dragons to the next book. By the time the fifth volume of The Dance of the Dragons was published, the sixth volume had about 100 pages completed. Volume 6 will end early in length by resolving the remaining suspense in Book 5, and will "begin with two major battles—the Battle of Ice and Snow and the Battle of Slave Bay—and then spread out the story from there."
In April 2011, before the publication of Volume 5, HBO finally premiered the first season of the 10-episode TV series Game of Thrones, based on the story of Volume 1, after four years of planning and filming. The TV series received an overwhelming response after it aired and was soon renewed for a second season. After the TV series hit the air, Martin began to increase his public popularity and became a news figure, and various media entertainments began to increase, but at the same time, the call of book fans for him to complete the novel became louder and louder. After a few press conferences, Martin decided to continue working on the long-bouncing backdrop set "The World of Ice and Fire", and he also planned to finish a new story in the "The Tale of Dunk and Igo" series, and said that he would start writing again in January 2012. After releasing a trial chapter of Theon Greyjoy in Volume 6 on the website in December 2011, Martin promised to release another new trial chapter in the 2012 Lite edition of A Dance with Dragons. However, when the International Lite Edition of Volume 5 appeared, it did not include a sample chapter, and the North American edition, originally scheduled for summer 2012, did not appear until October 29, 2013. By October 2012, Martin announced that he had written 400 pages of the manuscript, but only 200 of them were considered "truly complete" and the rest needed polish. In January 2013, Martin posted the second trial chapter of Arrene Martell on his personal website.
Martin hoped that Volume 6 "The Cold Wind of Winter" would be written faster than Volume 5, and estimated that it would be published in three years if it went well, but in reality the book was "written when it should have been written", and previous book lovers were overly optimistic. Martin didn't want the characters to be separated like Volumes 4 and 5, but he said, "[2011] I sat in front of 1,800 pages of manuscript and couldn't write an ending, and in three years the hell will happen." ”
Regarding Volume 7, which was planned to end the entire series, Martin was not satisfied with the original title, The Age of the Running Wolf, and finally announced in 2006 that Volume 7 would be titled The Dream of Spring Dawn. Martin insisted that he would finish the series in seven volumes, "until I decided not to." But in order to tell the story in its entirety, he doesn't cut the length of the story to cater to a specific number of volumes. Martin claims that he has a rough plan for the ending of the story and the future of the characters, and will give the entire series a "bittersweet ending", and not every character will live happily ever after. Martin wanted the ending to be as deep and resonant as "The Lord of the Rings," and on the other hand, to avoid a disappointing ending like "Lost."
Wang Jie likes the book "A Song of Ice and Fire" very much, and the reason why he did not plagiarize it in his early years is that on the one hand, he is afraid that it will cause people's criticism because of his age, and on the other hand, the original author George Raymond Richard Martin does not have the idea of the book.
Because of Wang Jie's fame at this time, "A Song of Ice and Fire" was quickly translated into 24 languages and distributed around the world, and its sales also occupied the top of the bestseller list in many regions.
Wang Jie's previous books were popular enough, but this "A Song of Ice and Fire" completely occupied the status of a top writer, making him the youngest writer.