If you were to track the milestones in the career of George R.R. Martin, the science-fiction and fantasy writer whose knightly tales spawned HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” you’d have to include his twisted take on “The Pit and the Pendulum” in high school.
Martin — who famously killed off good-guy Ned Stark early in the “Game of Thrones” saga — recounted an early stage of his literary origin story during a panel session at Seattle Worldcon 2025, a prestigious science-fiction convention that wraps up today.
The spark for the story came when fellow sci-fi writer Isabel J. Kim told Martin that the father of a friend had lent her a 1966 yearbook from Martin’s high school, in hopes that the 76-year-old author would add a fresh signature over his class photo.
The crowd laughed at the contrast between the fresh-faced kid in the yearbook photo and Martin’s current bewhiskered visage — but seeing the yearbook reminded Martin of a story.
“I think my life was changed by a high-school English course,” he said. “I had an English teacher who decided once to give an assignment — I think it was in my junior year. We were reading ‘Pit and the Pendulum,’ by Edgar Allan Poe. And the teacher said, ‘Well, your assignment this week is to write a better ending for “Pit and the Pendulum.”‘ Which is, of course, one of the ultimate deus ex machina’s of English literature.”
In the young Martin’s ending; the French army doesn’t come to the narrator’s rescue. “I wrote an ending where he wasn’t saved, where the pendulum cut him in half and the rats came down and ate his eyeballs,” Martin said.
His classmates loved it. “Everybody likes this,” Martin recalled thinking at the time. “Maybe I could do this writing thing.”
“And that’s how Ned Stark was born!” award-winning author John Scalzi interjected.
Of course, the gestation period took decades. After college, Martin was a journalism instructor for a couple of years, and then went on to produce scripts for “The Twilight Zone” and other TV shows. But he kept writing science fiction and fantasy tales as well, occasionally pulling the same writerly tricks he used in high school. And that’s how a star was born.
During a different Worldcon panel, Martin noted that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” was an early influence on his own fantasy writing — and recalled that at one point in Tolkien’s tale, the wizard Gandalf appeared to be killed off.
“Now yes, I know. Gandalf came back,” Martin said. “Actually, I would have kept him dead. But that’s an issue for me and J.R.R. to discuss down the line. I still love Tolkien, and there’s no doubt that his influence was great. But as a reader, I like books that are not familiar to me. I like to be surprised. I like twists and turns.”
Here are some of the other twists and turns from Worldcon:
- George R.R. Martin hasn’t said much lately about his progress on completing the “Songs of Ice and Fire” saga that began with the publication of “Game of Thrones” in 1996. But a fantasy fan reportedly brought up the issue during a Worldcon Q&A session on Friday. According to reports from attendees and a video posted to YouTube, the questioner worried that Martin might not “be around for much longer” and wondered how he would feel about another writer finishing the series. Those comments were greeted with boos. (For what it’s worth, I was among those who were turned away from the session because all the seats were filled.)
- Martha Wells said she’s been overwhelmed by the response to the Apple TV+ adaptation of her “Murderbot Diaries” books. “It’s not something I expected, that my dumb little robot book would be popular,” she said during an Ink to Film podcast recording session. She originally intended to have Murderbot die at the end of the first novella, but in the course of writing it, she decided that “I don’t want to kill this character off.” Wells also said that writing books about a robot who’s not comfortable with interpersonal relationships led her to realize that she might have had ADHD or a spot on the autism spectrum. “It was kind of a big revelation to me,” she said.
- John Scalzi talked about the genesis of “Redshirts,” a 2012 novel that satirized Star Trek tropes and earned him a Hugo Award. He said he was moved to write the book after getting angry over an unscientific monologue that Mr. Spock delivered in the 2009 “Star Trek” movie. “The fact that it was such lazy writing coming from Spock inspired me to write a book about lazy writing, and what it does to the people who are trapped within it,” he said. “Really shitty stuff can inspire a Hugo-winning novel.”
- David Brin, who anticipated today’s concerns over surveillance and privacy in a 1998 nonfiction book titled “The Transparent Society,” said that he’s now working on a book about artificial intelligence and its potential effects on society. “I believe that there are some truly, truly horrible cliches that are clutched and suckled by some of the geniuses who are bringing this new age upon us,” he said. Brin also touted the launch of a new web platform, TASAT.org, which aims to guide tech experts and planners by matching up their real-world challenges with plot twists from science fiction. TASAT stands for “There’s a Story About That.”
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