Page 3 of 4 Interview with George R.R. Martin
By Andrew (2007-11-18)
Did you kind of have to prep again, go back and re-read some of the earlier books?
I have all of the books here so I dip into them every once and a while. Unfortunately Wild Cards is so old, at least in the initial volumes, that a lot of it doesn't exist in electronic form so you can't do a search and replace as easily as you can on a modern manuscript. You just have to remember 'Oh, okay. There was something about that in book three, I think.' Then I take book three down from the shelf and I flip through until I find it.
I believe that at one time iBooks was reprinting the series. I think they got up to six or seven.
Yes, iBooks revived the series in 2000. At that time they purchased the rights to do reprints of the first 8 books of the original series. And they also purchased two new books which became volumes sixteen and seventeen-Deuces Down and John Miller's novel Death Draws Five. But meanwhile they started the reprinting program and they got up to book six. Even though they had the rights to do books seven and eight they never actually issued any versions of seven and eight. And then of course iBooks went bankrupt.
Wild Cards has found a new home with Tor. Are there plans for Tor to pick up reprinting where iBooks left off?
Tor has contracted for a new triad. The one that's been delivered, which will be out January 2008, is titled Inside Straight. That book is finished and delivered and we now are working on the second book of the triad which is Busted Flush. And there'll be one more after that which will be the full mosaic. Whether it continues beyond that point is a question of how well the new books sell. There are various complexities with that. iBooks went bankrupt so those books are caught up in the bankruptcy. And the bankruptcy courts sold iBooks' assets, including their existing contracts to a publisher called Brick Tower Press. So technically speaking those books belong to Brick Tower Press. Now we're trying to get the rights to them back and if we get them back we could sell them to Tor for reprint. But at the moment we haven't succeeded, and are going around and around in circles on that.
There have been so many great characters in the Wild Card universe, which ones are you primarily responsible for?
The Great and Powerful Turtle, Jube the Walrus, Xavier Desmond, and Popinjay.
I'm curious as to how Tom Tudbury came about. Is there a little, or a lot, of George Martin in the Great and Powerful Turtle?
Oh, there's a great deal of George Martin. He's probably the most autobiographical character I've ever done.
The Wild Cards characters are more human than hero, and certainly don't fit the superhero archetype. I guess you would say they're gray characters. Is there something that attracts you to gray characters as a writer?
For one thing I think they're more real. I mean, we're all gray. You look around your life there's very few pure heroes or villains. The worst people have moments of tenderness and are capable of love and affection, and the best people are capable of selfish acts and moments of weakness and moments of cowardice. I find real human beings infinitely more interesting than cardboard cutouts. I prefer to paint in shades of gray.
A lot of sci-fi and fantasy works externalize the struggle of men or elves or what have you, but your books tend towards the internal struggle.
Yes, I certainly do. I often quote Faulkner with what he said in his Nobel prize acceptance speech: "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself." There's a great deal of truth in that.
Andrew Brooks | 
