George R.R. Martin: And that being said, you know, I also wrote some fantasies when I was first breaking in, back in the 70s, a few short stories, but mostly I wrote science fiction in those days; the market for science fiction was a lot bigger. You can look at my science fictions though and say, well, this is not the hard science fiction of the way somebody like Greg Benford would write it. This is really fantasy disguised as science fiction. So there’s a lot of fantasy in my science fiction, and! There’s a lot of science fiction in my fantasy. Always trying to think of how things really would be in practicality.

So, you know, one example of that is my dragons. I’ve always been insistent that my dragons have only two legs, two legs and the forelegs are wings, because there’s no creature on earth that has four legs and wings, the front legs become the wings. And these four-legged dragons really [pause] offended my science fictional sense, [laughter] my sense of biology and realism. And I know that seems ludicrous when you think of it; because my dragons also breathe fire, and there’s nothing on earth that breathes fire. But still, that was so much part of the myth, I couldn’t part with that. And I approached vampires the same way. When I wrote my vampire novel Fever Dream, you know, I looked at the things about vampires that I could justify in a fairly rationalist way. And I kept that. But other things, about ‘vampires can’t cross running water’, well, obviously, that didn’t work for books set entirely on the Mississippi. I threw that out. And vampires are not reflected in mirrors. How the hell would that work? When, you know, that violates all the laws of light, to physics and things like that. So I had to throw that out too. But I played with that and I made use of it.