Look at the world we live in, I’m sorry it’s worse here than in Westeros, he said. (file)
George R.R. Martin, behind masterpieces like “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” had the most Targaryen solution to Russia’s attack on Ukraine: a dragon.
“I wish I had a dragon; I could fly it for the Kremlin,” said George R.R. Martin if Russian President Vladimir Putin used an atomic bomb. He was promoting his new book ‘The Rise of the Dragon: An Illustrated History of the Targaryen Dynasty – Volume 1’ on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’.
“Look at the world we live in, I’m sorry it’s worse here than in Westeros,” he said. “Too many wars were dystopias [novels] In the 50s and 60s, and then we stopped worrying about it and instead focused on the zombie apocalypse. But suddenly, nuclear war again seems more and more possible,” said the author.
Mr Martin, who regards the genre of science fiction as a “belief in a vision of the future”, seemed quite hopeless about it. When Stephen Colbert asked if he “had a crisis of confidence”, he said he was.
“In some of those old books, if there was a nuclear war … there would always be some good people who would get together and rebuild civilization. The optimism was there, even if the setting was terrible. Is it still there? Shall we be optimistic about climate change? What are we going to do if Putin actually uses atomic bombs? What are we supposed to do?”, he asked, before offering his dragons as the solution.
George RR Martin is currently working on The Winds of Winter, the highly anticipated sixth novel in his high fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, on which Game of Thrones is based. Game of Thrones’ prequel House of the Dragon is based on his second book, Fire and Blood.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday surveyed exercises conducted by its nuclear-capable forces as Moscow made baseless claims on India and China that Ukraine was developing a “dirty bomb”.
The exercises are the latest in a series of scathing comments from Moscow and Putin – who observed the exercise from a control room – that the eight-month conflict in Ukraine could turn nuclear.
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