George R.R. Martin

Before Westeros there was a long career in science fiction, and it is better than its reputation suggests. Dying of the Light is set on a planet going dark. Windhaven was written with a co-author. Fevre Dream is a vampire novel on the Mississippi and is, by some distance, the best standalone he has written. Tuf Voyaging is the funniest thing on his shelf. He wrote for television, and he has edited the Wild Cards shared-universe anthologies for decades (Wild Cards, Aces High, Jokers Wild).

Then A Song of Ice and Fire changed his career and, eventually, the shape of television. What Martin does better than nearly anyone in epic fantasy is point-of-view discipline: every chapter belongs to one character who is missing something crucial, so the reader assembles a war out of partial and biased reports. That is why the books read like history rather than like myth, and why the council scenes are tenser than the battles. Five volumes exist, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons, and they stop short of an ending.

HBO's Game of Thrones ran from 2011 to 2019 and won a Primetime Emmy. House of the Dragon followed in 2022, and the Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, collected as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, reached the screen in 2026 as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire are the invented histories that feed the prequels, and they read like textbooks on purpose.

He holds a stack of Locus Awards, mostly for anthologies he edited, plus a Locus for a fantasy novel and a Hugo for a dramatic presentation. He also turns up on screen as himself often enough for it to be a running joke, including in Atari: Game Over and, memorably, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!.