George R.R. Martin had a cold—but he was still breathing fire. The creator of the Game of Thrones universe found himself sidelined from the gala premiere of GoT’s new prequel series, House of the Dragon, when he came down with COVID the day before. The day after, however, he rallied to do this joint interview with Ryan J. Condal—his handpicked cocreator for the new prequel series that’s set roughly two centuries before the brutal history viewers saw unfold in the 2011–2019 HBO show.

The writer was, as one would expect, a little testy about fans who used the occasion of his illness to publicly wring their hands over what this might mean for his famously unfinished Song of Ice and Fire books. “Oddly enough, although I hate having COVID here, the two years of enforced isolation enabled me to get a lot more writing done, because I was doing a lot less traveling and public appearances and speeches and all of that stuff,” the 73-year-old said. “I’m making progress, but I’ve given up on any hope of predicting the end. Every time I do, I don’t make it and everybody gets mad at me, and there’s no sense. It’ll be done when it’s done. Hopefully, COVID won’t kill me, so we won’t have that issue. I do find it a little grisly, people speculating online about what’s going to happen to the rest of the books when I die. I don’t like to speculate about that. I don’t feel close to dying.”

The new show, debuting August 21, is drawn from his 2018 book, Fire & Blood, and will tell just a portion of that fictional history of the Targaryen family from an era when dragons were plentiful. The ruthless family wielded them over Westeros as weapons of unimaginable power, but the creatures were also an everyday sight. When civil war eventually erupts within the clan, a conflict known as the Dance of the Dragons, those competing for dominance ultimately destroy the beasts—not to mention one another—rendering dragons all but extinct for generations.

In addition to the show telling this backstory, the first episode of House of the Dragon includes new details of a prophecy that may have major implications for the author’s final words on the Song of Ice and Fire saga. This is Martin’s chance to have his own say over the canon, after the original HBO TV series overtook his glacial writing pace. (While still maintaining general continuity with the previous show, House of the Dragon already changes the Iron Throne so that it looks closer to how Martin envisioned it in his books.)

Martin and Condal discuss all of that in the conversation below, also offering a defense of the most disturbing scene in the premiere episode, one that will surely require a warning for the squeamish.

Vanity Fair: George, how are you? Everybody’s worried about you.

George R.R. Martin: I’m “positive.” Other than being positive, I’m okay. Yeah, I have some symptoms. I have sniffling and I’m sleeping a lot, but yeah, other than that I feel no worse than I’ve felt with many colds in my life. Aside from being quarantined and going a little stir-crazy, I’m good.

Ryan, what’s the backstory on how you and George came to work together on House of the Dragon?

Ryan J. Condal: George very kindly involved me in this project nearly four years ago. It was September of 2018 when I got called up to the major leagues. After that, in the midst, we had this whole pandemic situation that seemed to make time roll back on itself. It just feels bizarre, in a way, after making this thing seemingly inside of a vacuum over in Watford, England, for so long, to suddenly have an audience full of people in a theater [watching] a finished show. There were times that it felt like it would never get finished.

What got some of the bigger reactions at the show’s premiere?

Condal: A lot of people had things to say about the birth of Baelon, Prince Baelon.

[Light spoilers ahead] This is the notorious “heir for a day,” whose stillbirth leads to the succession crisis that consumes the Targaryens.

Martin: That scene is…you don’t want to use the word “enjoyable” for a scene like that, but it’s incredibly powerful. It’s visceral and it’ll rip your heart out and throw it on the floor. It has the kind of impact that the Red Wedding had. It’s a beautifully done scene of something horrible.

The show’s primary characters are the fifth king of Westeros, Viserys I (Paddy Considine), and his daughter, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock), who would inherit the throne without question if only she were a man. Something passes between them that is stirring discussion. Can you explain?

Condal: I think the Game of Thrones nerds were very interested and intrigued and compelled by the secret that Viserys tells Rhaenyra, connecting Aegon [the first king of the family and the original Westeros conqueror] with the prophecies that we know about the Long Night and the Others [a.k.a. the White Walkers] and the Night King coming out of the North—and how maybe the Targaryen dynasty was aware of it long before we think they were.

These are prophecies that ultimately played out as the climax of the original series. This show suggests that not only are they known by the Targaryens 200 years before, but they’ve been known for about a century.

Condal: I think they were very intrigued by that. A lot of them said I committed A Song of Ice and Fire heresy, but I did tell them: “That came from George.” I reassured everybody.

What is the significance of these prophecies, George? Unless I’ve missed it, is this something you wrote in one of the books, or is that an invention of the show?

Martin: It’s mentioned here and there—in connection with Prince Rhaegar, for example [the brother of Daenerys, played on Game of Thrones by Wilf Scolding]. I mean, it’s such a sprawling thing now. In the Dunk and Egg stories [about a future king, “Egg,” a.k.a. Aegon V], there’s one of Egg’s brothers who has these prophetic dreams, which of course he can’t handle. He had become a drunkard because they freaked him out. If you go all the way back to Daenys the Dreamer, why did she leave? She saw the Doom of Valyria coming. All of this is part of it, but I’m still two books away from the ending, so I haven’t fully explained it all yet.

[Note: The Doom of Valyria was an Atlantis-like cataclysm that demolished the old world roughly a century before Aegon I, the first king of Westeros. Martin has previously noted that “the Targaryens were the only nobles with dragons who escaped the destruction of Valyria.” Having advance notice of history is one of the keys to their power.]

Is one of the implications of this series that the Targaryens might’ve been better prepared for the doomsday prophecy if not for this Dance of Dragons civil war that decimated their family and stripped them of these powerful beasts?

Martin: I don’t want to give too much away, because some of this is going to be in the later books, but this is 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. There was no sell-by date on that prophecy. That’s the issue. The Targaryens that know about it are all thinking, Okay, this is going to happen in my lifetime, I have to be prepared! Or, It’s going to happen in my son’s lifetime. Nobody said it’s going to happen 200 years from now. If the Dance of the Dragons had not happened, what would’ve happened to the next generation? What would’ve happened in the generation after that? Yeah, there’s a lot to be unwound there.

Speaking of foreshadowing, we’ve seen the Iron Throne a lot onscreen over the years. In House of the Dragon, it has these additional elements of the jagged swords sticking up all around it. My thought when I saw it was that at some point these will be removed. But I wonder who gets impaled on that before that happens.

Condal: Well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Martin: Yes, that’s completely new. I said long ago that the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones, while it became iconic and has ruled in its own way, is nothing like the Iron Throne that’s described in my books. There have been a dozen different [depictions] of the Iron Throne that’s described in the books, the best of which is by Marc Simonetti, an artist I’ve worked with closely. He’s got a terrific picture of it. I know Ryan and his team wanted to do something close to that, but they can’t do the Simonetti throne because it’s 15 feet high, and you’d need a crane to shoot the king. Maybe you should speak to that, rather than me. They came up with this thing to make it closer to his throne, but still not all the way there.

Condal: Yeah, we went into the series knowing that this was a time of high decadence. We consider this the apex of the Targaryen empire, so we really wanted to communicate this idea of wealth and prosperity and the fact that there had been six years of peace. The Targaryens really were able to develop all the nice things that happened: peacetime, statues and art, and roads and fountains.

I think the original Game of Thrones feels…some of this is due to just, those poor guys had a fifth of the resources that we have now. But thanks to the great success that they earned along the way, we were just given it when we walked in the door. We used that to really make this seem like the previous [show] feels like an empire in decay, the great dynasty has fallen, the Targaryens are gone. They’ve been replaced by Robert Baratheon, who is not known for being a progressive leader who puts coin back into the betterment of the kingdom.

Martin: He’s great fun at a party.

Condal: [Laughs] He is great fun at a party. One of the ways that we wanted to communicate that was by addressing the Iron Throne. I think [original GoT showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] created this very iconic thing. Just the silhouette of that shape, everybody now knows what it is. It’s as iconic as a lightsaber in Star Wars. What we wanted to do is honor that, but also tell the story of a more decadent time, and also communicate that 200 years has passed. If you look very closely, you’ll see that the original throne is there. It’s just added to and augmented, which suggests that history changes things at some point in the intervening time.

Condal: Back to George’s point about the difference between book illustration art and production reality… we did want to do this really grand thing that the Simonetti painting is very famous for. The problem was, from a production perspective, if you put one actor up that high and everybody else is down below, it’s very hard to be with the king. You’ll always be shooting up his nose or over his shoulder, down at the people. You would have to shout. You wouldn’t get great interaction. We wanted to service grandness, decadence, but in a way that was production-friendly and didn’t have our [cinematographers] tearing their hair out.

In addition to being a time of decadence and relative peace, it’s also the era of dragons. In one of the opening shots, Rhaenyra is flying in on her dragon over King’s Landing and there’s a cutaway shot of people walking on the street down below. None of them even look up. Dragons are so common that no one loses a step. Why was that important to establish?

Condal: That is one of my favorite shots in the opening. I will correct you: One guy looks up.

Oh, he does?

Condal: Very subtly. It’s out at the edge of the frame, with the idea being, yes, dragons are a fact of day-to-day life, but they’re still dragons.

He must be new in town.

Condal: Exactly. Just visiting. He came across the Narrow Sea.

Martin: In King’s Landing, dragons are pretty much an everyday thing. The same would be true in Dragonstone, where a lot of dragons come and go, probably in Driftmark, less so in the surrounding lands. If we had a scene instead in Lannisport, a dragon flying over Casterly Rock, or, as will be in later seasons, dragons in the North in Winterfell, that would get a lot of reaction. They don’t normally come up there. That’s a sensation.

Condal: That’s definitely the world-building I think we need to pay attention to, because it really is specific to King’s Landing. King’s Landing is like living near a military base. If you go down by San Diego, you see all this bizarre aircraft flying overhead, and all the people that aren’t from there are like, “Oh, that’s an Osprey! That’s amazing!” Other people are just like, “Yeah, that happens every day.” I think that’s the thing we were going for. 

Certainly, there is a bit of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Miguel Sapochnik, who directed the episode, also directed “The Bells,” which was the last time we saw a dragon flying over a King’s Landing street like that. It didn’t end very well for the poor merchants and shopkeepers that were living on that street.

I reread the relevant parts of Fire & Blood, and the death of the baby, the “heir for a day,” is much more violent in the series than it is in the book. Why was that scene important?

Condal: Really, this particular story is Viserys’s story. It’s kicked off by him believing that he’s going to have a new male son after trying for years and years, and stillbirths and miscarriages, and all the hell that [his wife Queen Aemma] has been through as a mother. Finally the answer is going to come. He’s very confident and sure of it. Just like that, mother and son die in childbirth. Suddenly, everything changes and flips the chess table.

Martin: There’s a lot of opportunity for expansion. That’s what we’ll find a lot of in the series. [What] Ryan and his team of writers have been doing great so far is to do an expansion that does not contradict the book. I mean, you can add a lot of things. You can add scenes. You can even add some characters. But you can’t do anything that affects the structure—or otherwise, three or four books later, you’re going to be in trouble.

This Q&A has been edited, with background added to some questions for context and clarity.

Sign up here to receive “The Westeros Update,” your weekly guide to House of the Dragon.