电视剧《权力的游戏》也因使用“以性爱发展情节”的手法——在赤裸裸的性爱场景中混合复杂的情节发展来吸引观众——而闻名。他说：“当然，在书中是没有这个的。书中有大量的性，但没有借助性爱发展情节。我有许多方法来发展情节，而大卫•贝尼奥夫(David Benioff)和丹•韦斯(Dan Weiss)（电视剧《权力的游戏》的编剧和制片人）无法使用这些方法。”他对这个话题来了兴致，不停设想“以性爱发展情节”可能的更广泛运用。“行业里应该用它。想想员工会议多有趣啊，如果他们在跟你作简报的时候……”他越说声音越低，不过想象中的画面让我喷笑出来。

Martin is not new to TV. He sold his first science fiction story in 1970, while he was in college, and his first novel was published in 1977. By 1983 he was expecting to hit the big time with his fourth book, Armageddon Rag, about a rock band. However, he recalls, “it was the worst-selling of all my novels and essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time. Oddly enough, the same book that essentially crippled my career as a novelist started my career in Hollywood.” The book was optioned for a feature film by a writer and, though the film was never made, the writer drafted Martin into working on a remake of cult TV series The Twilight Zone. In the following years, he worked on pilots and reworked scripts for others. “I made a lot of money but got very little [TV] made,” he says.

马丁并非电视界的新人。他在1970年卖掉了自己的首篇科幻故事，当时他还在上大学。1977年，他出版首部小说。到1983年，他本来预计自己的第四本书、讲一支摇滚乐队的《末日狂歌》(Armageddon Rag)会取得巨大成功。然而，他回忆道：“这是我所有小说中销量最差的，在当时实际上毁掉了我作为小说家的职业生涯。怪异的是，就是这本毁掉我的小说家职业生涯的书，开启了我在好莱坞的职业生涯。”这本书被一位编剧选中制作一部故事影片，虽然这部影片从未制作出来，但这位编剧邀请马丁参与重新制作非主流电视系列剧《阴阳魔界》(The Twilight Zone)。在随后的几年里，他制作试播节目并为其他人改编剧本。他说：“我赚了很多钱，但很少制作（电视）。”

Our starters arrive. Mine looks like an upturned iceberg lettuce. Martin’s, on the other hand, is an edible work of art, its pile of endive leaves beautifully arranged. We munch in companionable near-silence, until I ask how Martin’s fame has affected his writing: millions are depending on him to keep ahead of the TV series, and to tell us how the saga ends. “I have an assistant and I recently hired a second assistant,” he explains. “I am kind of dealing with the fact that I have become a small industry – ‘Westeros Incorporated’ – so to speak.”

我们的开胃菜送来了。我的菜看起来就像是一个倒过来的卷心莴苣。而马丁的菜则是一件可以食用的艺术品，菊苣叶子摆放精美。我们愉快地默默吃了一会，然后我问马丁，出名如何影响了他的写作：无数粉丝指望靠他让电视剧拍下去，并向我们剧透。他解释说：“我有一个助理，最近还雇了第二个助理。可以说我在适应一个事实，就是我已经变成了一个小产业——‘维斯特洛公司’(Westeros Incorporated)——可以这么说。”

The extra help, he says, frees him up to retreat into writing. “When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world. When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven’t unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks.” (Martin lives in Santa Fe with his wife Parris, whom he met at a science fiction fan convention.)

他说，两位助理让他解放出来重新投入写作。“当我以最佳状态写作的时候，我真的沉浸在自己的世界里。我与外面的世界失去了联系。我会很难平衡真实世界和虚幻世界。当写作渐入佳境的时候，好几天、好几周就这样过去，然后我突然意识到所有那些账单都没付，天啊，我没有拆开行李，箱子就在那里放了三个星期。”（马丁和他妻子帕里斯(Parris)住在圣达菲，他们是在一场科幻迷大会上认识的）。

Martin’s fictional world is not a sunny one. Lead characters tend to die. Horribly. There was, for example, an internet outcry after Sean Bean, who played noble Ned Stark in series one of Game of Thrones, was – spoiler alert – beheaded. “I was startled to the reaction to that scene in the show,” Martin says, brightly. “Sean Bean has died a lot, this is not his first death. In fact there is a YouTube video where you can see him die 21 times in 21 different films, so it’s not as if the idea of him dying is entirely original to us.”

马丁的小说世界并不光明。主角往往会死。惨死。例如，在《权力的游戏》第一季中肖恩•比恩(Sean Bean)扮演的贵族奈德•斯塔克(Ned Stark)被斩首之后，互联网上一片哗然。马丁灿烂地说道：“观众对剧中这一幕的反应让我吃惊。肖恩•比恩‘死’了很多次，这不是他第一次‘死’。实际上，在YouTube上有一段视频，你可以看到，他在21部不同的电影里‘死’了21次，因此并不是说让他‘死’的想法完全是我们首创的。”