He knew he wanted to be creative, which led to him playing in rock bands, working in the theatre and DJ-ing at a radio station, all the while holding down what he calls “crap jobs to keep a roof over my head” – everything from selling tacos and collecting loans to drawing military manuals. A reader but never an academic, Williams attended University of California, Berkeley, but admits he wasn’t “in the right frame of mind to study” and dropped out after one semester. Williams was born Robert Paul Williams in Palo Alto, California, but the childhood name of Tad – a reference to a character in the long-running US comic strip Pogo – stuck. The debt Westeros owes to Osten Ard is undoubtable.īefore Westeros there was Osten Ard … Sean Bean in The Game of Thrones.
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But looking back, the series marked the start of a more politically aware, intricately designed brand of fantasy. For anyone who came to the series during the rise of post-Tolkien fantasy, all the elements were there: Williams’s elf-alikes the Sithi or Norns, and his troll-ish Quanucs.
It was followed in 1990 by The Stone of Farewell and then in 1993 with To Green Angel Tower, which was split into two volumes, making it a four-book trilogy.
“Better than this” would be his 1988 novel The Dragonbone Chair, the first book of his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, set in the richly detailed world of Osten Ard. “Eventually, it occurred to me: I can do better than this.” “I was looking for originality and what I was getting was warmed-over rehashes of Tolkien,” he says. Like Martin, Williams was once disenchanted: having had his mind blown by The Lord of the Rings when he was 11 years old, he spent years devouring all the fantasy books he could find – and was left wanting. Fictional worlds were typically populated by elves and dwarves, orcs and goblins, questing heroes and two-dimensional female characters (if there were any at all). In the 1980s, the genre’s bad reputation was well-earned: three decades after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, fantasy still trod well-worn and thinly veiled medieval European paths. And I read The Dragonbone Chair and said, ‘My God, they can do something with this form, and it’s Tad doing it.’ It’s one of my favourite fantasy series.” “Fantasy got a bad rep for being formulaic and ritual.
“The Dragonbone Chair and the rest of his famous ‘I four-book trilogy of the things that inspired me to write my own seven-book trilogy,” said Martin in 2011. I read The Dragonbone Chair and said, my God, they can do something with this form, and it’s Tad doing it George RR Martin
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