While fans wait for The Winds of Winter – the next novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series – this companion book provides a history of the Targaryens.
It’s an “imaginary history” of the world Martin has created, and which millions of people have fallen in love with – either on the page, or on screen in the Game of Thrones TV show.
Speaking to Publishers Weekly, he said: “I’ve cited as my inspiration Thomas B. Costain’s four-volume history of the Plantagenets — do you have to know anything about the Plantagenets to pick that up and read it? I don’t think so.
“Obviously if you do know something about them it probably makes it a somewhat easier experience, but there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you can follow it easily enough, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with my own book.”
He added: “It would help to have some familiarity with reading histories, and in particular reading popular histories. And there’s an authorial voice there that I had fun trying to create, the Archmaester Gyldayn, who is an opinionated guy and has his views of these people, that definitely leak into it.
“In some places, he has prejudices and gripes and his own cavils, and you have to realise that you’re reading the voice of a character, even as you’re reading about other characters who existed hundreds of years before him.
“But that was some of the fun of it. And I think that will be some of the fun for the readers who enjoy that sort of thing.”
The Winds of Winter is still in the works, and Martin was keen to emphasise that Fire & Blood is not a continuation of the ASOIAF story.
“The important thing, as I keep stressing, is that it’s not a novel,” he insisted.
“I think it’s very entertaining—a lot of people will like it, I hope—but I don’t want them to buy it thinking that they’re getting the latest Ice and Fire novel, which is an entirely different literary form than what’s essentially a popular history.”
Martin has a wealth of projects on the go but recently maintained that TWOW remains his number one priority.
As for the Game of Thrones TV show, it will come to an end with the final season – due to air next year.
Its stars have already gone on to forge successful careers elsewhere, such as Gwendoline Christie in Star Wars, Emilia Clarke in Solo: A Star Wars Story and Sophie Turner in the X-Men universe.
Fire & Blood by George RR Martin is out on November 20.