George R. R. Martin (1948– ) is a popular US writer who has written influential horror and science fiction but is widely known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, an international bestseller. Martin’s work has become only more wildly popular since HBO launched its series based on his fantasy novels, Game of Thrones. Time has called Martin “the American Tolkien,” and the magazine included him in the 2011 “Time 100,” a list of the “most influential people in the world.” He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as a Bram Stoker Award and a World Fantasy Award. In 2012, Martin won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
Martin has over the course of his career been among the most versatile of writers, crafting classics in several genres. To name just two of his best works, “Nightflyers” (1980) is a marvel of science fiction horror, and “The Pear-Shaped Man” (1987) is a disturbing modern weird tale. The impressive entirety of his short fiction output, across several decades, can be found in the volume Dreamsongs (2003). Although Martin often writes fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction tales occurring in a milieu known as “the Thousand Worlds” or “the Manrealm.”
His 1979 story “Sandkings,” published in Omni, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the only one of his stories to do so. Martin was inspired to write “Sandkings” after watching horror movies with a friend who had a tank of piranhas. Martin’s friend would throw goldfish into the tank between films “like a weird intermission.” Originally Martin believed “Sandkings” would be the start of a series of stories. It was adapted for an episode of The Outer Limits (1995). It has been parodied by The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park. A British rock band from the late eighties and early nineties also used “Sandkings” as their name. Despite its appropriation by pop culture, “Sandkings” remains a powerful tale of science fiction horror, one with political overtones.