Do we like George R. R. Martin?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Pro-refugee, anti-Trump in his own words and suing to protect authors; the marks are a co-author row and a famously slow book.
Martin grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, and became the fantasy writer behind A Song of Ice and Fire, the books HBO turned into Game of Thrones. These days he is as much a franchise overseer as a novelist, with House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms both drawing on his world.
The big stoush is with House of the Dragon. In a January 2026 interview, Martin described his relationship with showrunner Ryan Condal as “abysmal”, saying Condal “basically stopped listening to me” after season one. He also said that when he was across the early drafts he thought they were partners, and that HBO eventually asked him to route his notes through the network.
On the harm check, nothing nasty from him turned up in my searches. In 2016 he wrote that there had never been a presidential candidate “more unfit to lead this nation” than Donald Trump, and he cited Trump's mockery of a reporter and his proposal to bar Muslims from entering the US. That's his own politics on the record, and it points away from harm.
The one smudge is the company. In 2022 some fans called for a boycott of a companion book because of its co-authors' alleged history of racist social media posts, including an old post on skin colour. One co-author told Variety she isn't racist and her words were cherry-picked. The Daily Beast piece doesn't carry any response from Martin, so this is about who he works with, not anything he said.
He's also on the side of fellow writers in court. Martin is one of the authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims their work was used to train AI, and in October 2025 a federal judge let claims about ChatGPT outputs resembling his series go ahead. Fair use is still undecided, so it's a fight in progress, not a win.
Nothing new on him lately that I could open and read in full, bar the Condal falling-out. The famous delay on The Winds of Winter is a fan frustration rather than a moral failing. I couldn't find a dated page I could open on his Santa Fe arts and cinema ventures, so that good stuff is left out rather than half-sourced.