20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About George RR Martin

10. A Song Of Ice And Fire Isn't His First Sprawling Book Series

George R.R. Martin made his fortune with A Song Of Ice And Fire, which were phenomenally popular even before Game Of Thrones existed; and the sales managed to get even more bananas after the TV adaptation hit screens. But he'd been doing all right for himself before that, having published his first book in the early seventies and writing plenty more novels and short stories in the interim. While Westeros is often held up as the most rich and complex fantasy world he's created during his career, those people would be wrong. That honour should go to the world of Wild Cards, a series of books about an alternate reality where an alien virus rewrote a portion of the world's population after World War II, giving 9% of people superpowers. The initial idea came from a tabletop RPG game played by Martin and friends, who took their characters and put them into the ongoing story of Wild Cards. The author both contributes chapters and edits the anthology series, which have featured countless writers over the years. The Wild Cards books number somewhere in the twenties at this point. That's a lot of pages.