Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

armored horses, but that idea was deemed unworkable by the show's line producers. Recalled Martin: "'You can have Stonehenge or you can have horses,' they told me. 'But you cannot have Stonehenge and horses.' I called my friend Roger Zelazny to pose the question to him. He sucked on his pipe a minute and said, 'Stonehenge,' and so it was. They fought on foot."

 

Undeterred, Martin moved on to another CBS fantasy show, 1987's Beauty and the Beast, where his scripts continued to bump up against the network's creative limitations. "Counting how many times we could say 'damn' or 'hell,' telling us a corpse's makeup could be 'too horrific,' eliminating a news report on a TV in the background because it might be 'too controversial,'" Martin said. "Bullshit changes, sheer cowardice, afraid of anything that was too strong, anything that anyone might be 'offended' by-those I hated and railed against."

 

Martin grew frustrated, disillusioned. He returned to writing novels full-time in 1991 and a couple of years later he had an idea for a fantasy story-a "reaction," as he once dubbed it, to his years spent writing for television. It was a sprawling epic like J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a saga that Martin adored, except Martin's tale was inspired by actual European historical events such as the Wars of the Roses and reflected the true brutality of the Dark Ages. The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. Sales were, as Martin later wrote on his blog, "nothing spectacular."

 

In rapid succession, Martin followed up with two more books in the saga. Their popularity spread by word of mouth, enthralling an ever-growing fandom with a complex story that shattered the fantasy genre's long-held rules. Beloved heroes died horribly, loathsome villains became strangely sympathetic, the wise and cunning were toppled by the slightest procedural error, and the power of magic was considered unreliable at best.

 

Along the way, Martin t