Background of Study
George R.R. Martin was born September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was Raymond Collins Martin, a longshoreman, and his mother was Margaret Brady Martin. He has two sisters, Darleen Martin Lapinski and Janet Martin Patten.
Martin attended Mary Jane Donohoe School and Marist High School. He began writing very young, selling monster stories to other neighborhood children for pennies, dramatic readings included. Later he became a comic book fan and collector in high school, and began to write fiction for comic fanzines (amateur fan magazines). Martin’s first professional sale was made in 1970 at age 21: “The Hero,” sold to Galaxy, published in February, 1971 issue. Other sales followed.
In 1970 Martin received a B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, graduating summa cum laude. He went on to complete a M.S. in Journalism in 1971, also from Northwestern.
As a conscientious objector, Martin did alternative service 1972-1974 with VISTA, attached to Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. He also directed chess tournaments for the Continental Chess Association from 1973-1976, and was a Journalism instructor at Clarke College, Dubuque, Iowa, from 1976-1978. He wrote part-time throughout the 1970s while working as a VISTA Volunteer, chess director, and teacher.
In 1975 he married Gale Burnick. They divorced in 1979, with no children. Martin became a full-time writer in 1979. He was writer-in-residence at Clarke College from 1978-79.
Moving on to Hollywood, Martin signed on as a story editor for Twilight Zone at CBS Television in 1986. In 1987 Martin became an Executive Story Consultant for Beauty and the Beast at CBS. In 1988 he became a Producer for Beauty and the Beast, then in 1989 moved up to Co-Supervising Producer. He was Executive Producer for Doorways, a pilot which he wrote for Columbia Pictures Television, which was filmed during 1992-93.
Martin’s present home is Santa Fe, New Mexico.
By 1977, Martin had already published a number of stories in his Thousand Worlds setting and it made sense that his first full-length novel would also form a part of it. Originally, it was serialised in Analog Science Fiction and Fact between April and July 1977. In the SF Masterworks edition of Dying of the Light, Martin’s friend and collaborator Lisa Tuttle provides a useful introduction which explores its place in his career. She describes the novel as “an apprentice work”, and as the last gasp of the author’s youthful, romantic period. Certainly, there is a pervasive theme of endings and change in this book.
Dying of the Light opens with a lyrical description of the planet Worlorn, which for hundreds of years existed on the edges of human awareness. A rogue planet hurtling through space without a star of its own, it was a useless rock. Only when it came into the orbit of the red star “Fat Satan” and its “hellcrown” of orbiting smaller stars did Worlorn become of real interest. For ten years, it hosted a massive festival organised by representatives from fourteen human worlds. But when the novel begins, the festival is long over, the planet is leaving the stars behind, and it has become a dying world.
The main character is Dirk t’Larien, a resident of the advanced and civilised planet of Avalon. He travels to Worlorn at the behest of an old flame, ecologist Gwen Delvano. Since their time on Avalon, Gwen has become the betheyn or “heldwife” of Jaan Vikary, a member of the ritualised, backwards culture of High Kavalaar. Jaan, in turn, is bound by tradition to another man, Garse Janacek – his blood brother or teyn. These and other complex Kavalar relationships play out against the backdrop of a doomed planet.
Dying of the Light is a rather gloomy, mournful novel. It is the elegy for the planet Worlorn, for the abandoned cities built for the long-ended festival, for the love between Dirk and Gwen, and for the cruel, ossified culture of the Kavalar. All of these disintegrating elements are lit by the receding stars of the hellcrown, which shine more dimly on the planet with each passing day. The story has a fairly tight focus, revolving as it does around four characters closely bound by love, tradition, and obligation. They live a lonely life, surrounded by fourteen abandoned and mostly decaying cities.
Martin spends much of the first half of the novel outlining the unique astronomical conditions of Worlorn, the relationship between Dirk and Gwen, and the intricacies of the Kavalar culture in which women are essentially regarded as property. During this phase, Dirk solidifies his view of the situation, which is strongly challenged by the faster-paced and more engaging events of the second half. This results in a real change in the way both Dirk and the reader views the status quo on Worlorn, which is perhaps the novel’s major strength.
Dying of the Light rarely approaches the excitement and economy of Martin’s short fiction from this era. This first half, certainly, feels overly drawn out. Tuttle is right to identify the book as an “apprentice work”, but it has a uniquely elegiac feel which gives it a distinctive identity both within Martin’s bibliography and in the context of 1970s American SF.
Literature Review
Dying of the Light tells the tale of Dirk t’Larien, who is summoned to Worlorn by his former partner Gwen. Seeking closure since their separation, after which he became a nomadic wanderer among the planets, Dirk comes to Worlorn and finds that Gwen has remarried. Sort of. See, Dying of the Light is fundamentally about one of the fourteen societies to settle on Worlorn, the High Kavalars. The High Kavalars are a militaristic society with similarities to the Dothraki of the Ice and Fire novels, with duels between members routine and commonplace. Each Kavalar male takes a ‘teyn’, a male life partner who is part husband and part brother. There is certainly a pretty clear homoerotic undertone to this relationship, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. A Kavalar can also take a ‘beteyn’, a female who becomes his property. Dirk finds that his beloved Gwen has become ‘beteyn ‘ to Jaan, a moderate Kavalar who treats her as a wife rather than as a favourite slave, and seeks to preserve the spirit of brotherhood and honour of Kavalar society whilst abandoning the less respectable habit of hunting humans like animals and treating all women as property. For this he is hated. Also in the mix is Garse, Jaan’s ‘teyn’ who is much less moderate than his partner. Dirk is thrown into a complex web of love and hatred between the three in their bizarre triad, and also comes into conflict with a group of ‘old fashioned’ Kavalars who do not even believe him to be human.
Worlorn is a world without a sun, ejected from its home system by a supernova millions of years ago and now hurtling out of the Galaxy. For a few years as it passed the colossal red supergiant Fat Satan and is attendant stars Worlon became a Festival Planet, with millions flocking from the outer worlds to spend a decade partying before it passed beyond the edge of the Galaxy. Now the Festival is over, its peoples all but gone, leaving behind a few die-hards determined to stay as long as possible before the planet freezes and becomes cloaked in eternal night.
Dirk t’Larien is summoned to Worlorn by his former lover, Gwen Delvano, for a reason she will not specify. On Worlorn Dirk finds Gwen the lover and bonded partner of Jaantony Riv Wolf high-Ironjade Vikary, a visionary leader from the barbarous world of High Kavalaan, but as he learns more about the Kavalar he becomes convinced that Gwen is trapped in a life she does not want. However, as Worlon passes into the night, greater stakes are raised and Dirk finds himself caught in a desperate struggle for survival.
Dying of the Light is one of these amazing finds. Published for the first time in 1977 (his very first novel, I believe), it’s a science fiction story set on the rogue planet Worlorn: hurtling through space in its aimless course, for the first time since its creation the planet crosses a region densely packed with suns, and gets a chance for warmth and life, however fleeting.
The 14 existing galactic civilizations declare a Festival on Worlorn, each of them building a city to showcase their culture and its accomplishments: when the story begins, the Festival is long over, the cities mostly abandoned, the planet headed once more into the cold blackness of space.
From Worlorn Dirk t’Larien receives a whisperjewel – a psi-encoded memory storage from his former lover Gwen Delvano. It’s a summons, based on an old promise made when they both had the jewels crafted for them: never reconciled with the end of the relationship, Dirk departs for the rogue planet full of hope and dreams. Once there, though, Gwen welcomes him with puzzlement, looking distant and ill-at-ease, and soon Dirk discovers she’s bound to another man, Jaan Vikary, a highborn from the aggressive and patriarchal society of High Kavalaan. Now convinced that the summons was Gwen’s way to forever cut the ties with Dirk, saying a final goodbye, t’Larien slowly learns that Kavalar culture requires a woman to be little more than a chattel, to be shared between her mate and his teyn, a sort of blood brother, a bond that stands as the foundation of all things Kavalar.
The “marriage” is not an easy one, complicated by Jaan’s peculiar customs and his society’s preoccupation with racial purity and mutations, therefore Dirk slowly comes to the conclusion that the whisperjewel represented a mute appeal from Gwen to save her from the unhappy liaison. The situation becomes more problematic as we learn that other Kavalars on Worlorn practice a form of hunt whose prey are the creatures they deem inferior and non-human, which includes everyone else by their standards, so that Jaan’s attempts at stopping the bloody sport and bringing his planet to a higher galactic standard further inflame the already volatile tempers.
Soon Dirk find himself enmeshed in a political and personal struggle, complicated by his feelings for Gwen and a slowly unfolding web of discoveries that create a fascinating cultural backdrop and change his world-view, leading to a breath-stopping open ending.