A Song of Ice and Fire

A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of high fantasy novels by the American author George R. R. Martin. Martin began writing the first volume, A Game of Thrones, in 1991, and published it in 1996. Martin, who originally envisioned the series as a trilogy, has released five out of seven planned volumes. The most recent entry in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011. Martin plans to write the sixth novel, titled The Winds of Winter. A seventh novel, A Dream of Spring, is planned to follow.

A Song of Ice and Fire depicts a violent world dominated by political realism. What little supernatural power exists is confined to the margins of the known world. Moral ambiguity pervades the books, and many of the storylines frequently raise questions concerning loyalty, pride, human sexuality, piety, and the morality of violence. The story unfolds through an alternating set of subjective points of view, the success or survival of any of which is never assured. Each chapter is told from a limited third-person perspective, drawn from a group of characters that expands from nine in the first novel to 31 by the fifth.