We’re halfway through the third season of Game of Thrones, a year that’s seen the elevation of female characters—and consensual sex—suggestions that one religion, the worship of the Lord of Light, could be gaining precedence and validity in Westeros, and some of the best swordfighting the show’s ever seen. I talked to executive story editor Bryan Cogman about how the show’s handled changes in characterization from the page to screen, how he wrote those steamy sex scenes in last week’s episode, and how the action choreography of the show comes together. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

To get started: halfway through the third season, Game of Thrones remains largely true to George R.R. Martin’s novels, but there are diversions in both plot and characterization. As the story editor, I’d be curious what the conversations about those changes look like. And in the case of characterization changes, do they tend to be driven more by the actors cast in the roles? The need to pace the story? Or a mix?

Oh, good you started with an easy one! Well, for one thing, now that we’re in Season Three — a lot of the changes stem from changes/alterations we made in previous seasons. Now, Margaery Tyrell, as we’ve talked about before, is an important character in the novels in terms of plot but she isn’t a point of view character and you don’t really get to know her until later in the saga. And even then, she’s not really driving her own storylines. Now, in Season Two, we always planned to go behind the curtain, if you will, with Renly and his relationships, but even with that, Margaery was still planned to be (more or less) a minor character. Now, Natalie Dormer was original considered for another role. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to have her be Margaery, but casting her immediately changed the character and the possibilites for her before we even started writing. It allowed us to move up the Cersei versus Margaery dynamic–that’s a big part of a later book).

And this solved a few problems we needed to deal with as we started adapting A Storm of Swords. If you break down A Storm of Swords, there isn’t a ton of King’s Landing story in the first half of the book, and virtually nothing for a few characters (Cersei, Littlefinger, Varys) to do. So having Margaery be a greater presence on the show (coupled with her arrival of grandmother, Lady Olenna) allowed us to dramatize the arrival of the Tyrells and their effect on the Lannisters (and Cersei, Joffrey) in particular. And the idea of Margaery as a sort of Princess Di type was very interesting–and that’s definitely in the books–her popularity with the people is mentioned, we just took that ball and ran with it.
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In a terrific piece about the appeal of Game of Thrones for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester identifies one of the signal things that differentiate George R. R. Martin’s epic and HBO’s adaptation of it. Rather than asking you to believe in magic along with characters who take its existence for granted, an apparent hurdle for some readers that I must confess I’ve always found to be an inexplicable act of snobbery, the books set up a division between many of the characters and readers: they assume that magic is dead, but we know it’s real. Lanchester explains:

The second big reason for the success of the series may be adjacent to the point about instability. It concerns magic. The whole issue of magic, in turn, seems to be the principal turn-off (‘elves don’t exist’) for non-readers of fantasy. In Westeros, people agree with that. They don’t believe in magic either. There used to be dragons, not just in the distant mythological past but in historical memory, and the dragons’ skulls are preserved as relics. But the dragons got smaller over time, and then died out, and with them the magic left the world. In the north of Westeros there’s a 700-foot-high wall, built to keep out ‘white walkers’, terrifying undead magical sort-of zombies who once lived in this same north and were a mortal danger to men. The wall is guarded by the Night’s Watch, a sworn order of men who take a lifelong oath to defend the world to the south from the white walkers. But nobody apart from them still believes in the white walkers. As Tyrion puts it, the Watch are there to defend Westeros from ‘grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about’. The Night’s Watch has become a dumping ground for the kingdom’s losers and criminals, and their membership consists of (Tyrion again) ‘sullen peasants, debtors, poachers, rapers, thieves and bastards’.

The reader, however, knows different. The very first scene in the huge saga begins with three members of the Night’s Watch, on a mission north of the wall, coming into contact with white walkers and meeting a horrible end as a result. The Night’s Watch, and the ‘wildings’, outlaws who live north of the wall, are the only people in the world who believe in the white walkers – but we readers know they are a real and imminent danger. We know also that dragons have been reborn into the world, thanks to Daenerys Targaryen, who fled Robert Baratheon’s infanticidal wrath as a mere baby and has grown up over the seas and to the east of Westeros, where she was married off by her brother to Khal Drogo, the terrifyingly martial Dothraki ‘horse lord’ – the Dothraki being a bit like the Mongols. (Oh, in case you’re wondering – he dies.) In the coup de théâtre that ends the first series, Daenerys climbs into a funeral pyre carrying three dragon eggs, and emerges at dawn with three baby dragons, the first the world has seen in hundreds of years. We surmise, from these events and from the title of the sequence, that Westeros is heading for a white walker v. dragon stand-off, at some exciting juncture a couple of fat novels away.

He pivots from this observation to an argument I think is equally fascinating, suggesting that the instability of Westeros’ seasons’ and its increasing brutality and inequality are an appropriate and frightening mirror of our own conditions and confusion about our changing environment. But I want to linger with this idea because I think it’s an important one. What does it mean to posit the belief in impossible things as the height of rationality, while a rejection of magic is set up as a rejection of history, and to a certain extent, a rejection of reasoned inquiry? And what does it mean in particular to set up that inversion in a series that’s deeply dedicated to demythologizing the central bit of magic in its genre, the idea of an inevitable happy ending for the virtuous, particularly the virtuous and disadvantaged?

To a certain extent, I think that the way Martin and his adaptors have treated magic is as a warning not to underestimate how terrible it’s possible for things to become. Magic is normally multi-directional in fantasy, useable for good or evil, and that’s often a key source of tension in any given franchise. But magic in Game of Thrones is far less controllable by individual humans. It’s an independent force of its own. Daenerys Targaryen may have figured out how to hatch her dragons, but they’re individual creatures with a certain degree of sentience. The White Walkers are a force all their own. Melisandre may be able to give birth to shadow-y assassins, but it’s not yet clear the extent to which she’s a miracle worker capable of summoning power independent, and the extent to which she insists that she’s a servant of the Lord of Light is actually a more accurate description of how her power is bounded. In between those significant examples, magic in Westeros effectively functions as a reminder of the dangerousness of assuming that certain challenges to your stability have vanished from the earth, and of assuming that new and hugely disruptive forces can’t suddenly emerge to create enormous technological asymmetries, like a troika of Targaryens showing up dragon-back to conquer Westeros.
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I’ve mentioned Friend of the Blog Leigh Bardugo’s YA debut, Shadow and Bone, a fantasy set in a world with some similarities to Tsarist Russia in these pages before. We sat down for a long interview to mark the book’s release earlier this month—it’s now up at The Atlantic. Hearing her talk about her world-building is fascinating: she’d been interested in that period of Russian history as a child, but chose it for the novel less because she wanted to emulate the style and politics, but because her research suggested that was an era full of a combination of factors she wanted to explore. I particularly wanted to pull this excerpt where Leigh explains how she designed the magic characters in Shadow and Bone work:

The idea for the Small Science came from my interest in what happens physically when you mutter a curse or wave a wand. What are we actually seeing? This sort of opaqueness occurs with most magic. That was sort of the first straw. I decided also that I wanted a magic that was highly constrained, because I wanted the advent of modern warfare to play a part in the story. What happens when you bring a gun to a magic fight?…If the magic is constrained, if the magic is bound by rules in a very specific system, things can get really interesting. The Grisha age is ending. Yes, they are more advanced, but they are wholly reliant on these particular skills. While the rest of the world is industrializing and creating things like repeating rifles, Ravka is falling behind…

When I created the Grisha, it was important that they be powerful but that they kind of represent the Jewish brain trust that developed before World War II and after World War II in the US. They’re these very talented people that were drawn from all over the world and cast out of places, persecuted, put to death, put in camps. So they all ended up in this one place, and for better or for worse—I think for better—they developed weapons and became a kind of brainy fighting force for the Allied Powers. And that is not is something that is strongly referenced in the book but that was sort of always in my mind in the way that Grisha had been treated. That said, in books two and three, we’re going to encounter some Grisha who had no interest in serving the Grisha or the Darkling and kind of went their own way.

A little thoughtful world design goes a long way. Designing rules your characters have to live by and that governs how the world works is a useful constraint, the kind of thing that results in consistency and clear character motivation. It’s a lesson more experienced pros who get handed hundreds of millions of dollars ::coughPrometheus:: could put to good use.

Novelist David Liss likes to send his heroes up against sweeping forces of societal change, whether Jewish boxer-turned-detective Benjamin Weaver is running up against the rise of the stock market and paper money in books like A Conspiracy of Paper and The Spectacle of Corruption or Ethan Saunders is investigating the circumstances surrounding the founding of the Bank of America in The Whiskey Rebels. In his newest book, The Twelfth Enchantment, Lucy Derrick, a young woman with more than a passing resemblance to some of Jane Austen’s most famous heroines, finds her community and her life under threat by the rise of the Industrial Revolution. And Lucy learns that she has the magical talent to stand against some of the more destructive forces at work behind the rise of England’s mills. We spoke about writing political fiction, Austen’s secondary characters, and magic as a social get-out-of-jail-free card. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve written mostly straight historical fiction in the past. How did you decide to make the switch to fantasy?

I’ve always loved genre fiction, and at some point, I knew that I wanted to do something like this. It might be more accurate to say did I decide I wasn’t going to write genre fiction? I got started on a different track…I was in grad school and I decided I want to write a novel. I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research. For whatever reason, I decided to play it straight and not doing anything paranormal with that book. I’ve always been resistant to being pigeon-holed and being told that because this was the kind of novel I’d written, this was the kind of novel I had to keep writing. I’ve been able to get away with it so far.

Well, even though The Twelfth Enchanment is a fantasy novel, it’s deeply engaged with social issues. It’s always fascinating to me that Austen’s novels, which are very brittle and funny about class, aren’t really engaged with larger social issues.

[There were] two different things I wanted to do. One, which I wrote about in io9, was magic as it was understood in the period. The other thing was I was really interested in was what you were talking about, the narrow view of the Jane Austen novel. She was living in and writing about a period that was going through an incredible economic upheaval that rarely in any way creeps into her books, and then only in the most oblique ways. That was where I began. In terms of the character’s evolution, I guess what I would say is I’m very resistant to writing characters who are contemporary people who happen to be living in the past. I wanted to write about someone who felt to me like a realistic 19th-century character with a realistic set of 19th-century worldviews and interests. To have her start out as someone who is conscious of and aware of and active about these issues never felt realistic to me. Her evolution from apathy to interest I always felt needed to happen in the book, rather than to be introduced to his woman who is a social activist.
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