Game of Thrones
A lot of people who have read or heard of my unpublished novel Children of the Crescent Moon have compared it to Game of Thrones, either or both of the TV series and the books, and it is something that I have been quite interested by.
I first started to develop the book in 1989 and it was based on real life events that started in 1987, while Game of Thrones the book wasn't published until 1996, so there is no way for me to have actually copied it. At worst, it could be considered that, having already established the basic plot, I made alterations to it based on having watch the TV show and/or read the books. Whether that has actually happened is another matter entirely.
Prior to writing the book, I had been a big fan of Star Wars, the movie series, which, prior to my starting the book, had released all three of the "classic trilogy", namely Star Wars (later renamed to "A New Hope"), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, as well as the Ewok movie. I loved all of them and I considered them to be the very best movie series ever imagined. I went so far as to buy comic books about them, including books that theorised a 9-part movie series, with 3 prequels and 3 sequels. While those books weren't exactly matched by the actual movies, they weren't too far off them, with the prequel series about Anakin before he turned evil while the sequel series was about their children. That idea existed in 1987. It has just been an issue of how to go about the finer elements of it.
So my book was in many ways inspired by Star Wars. In fact, some elements were so heavily influenced by it that I had to change how I wrote it.
My greatest problem with Star Wars has always been that it was set in space. I could see no reason whatsoever that it had to be as part of a planet-hopping space fantasy. To me, the story would have been better had it been told all in the same planet, just moving around that planet, whichever one it was.
Indeed, prior to writing my book, I had written concept plans for a new and improved Star Wars, one that was set on a single planet. I planned it out, wrote the plot, characters, everything about it, and I wrote a short story version of it, of some 30 pages or so. It was fan fiction, though I never showed it to anyone.
However, Star Wars is not the basis of Children of the Crescent Moon, because Children of the Crescent Moon is based on a true story.
In 1987 my maternal grandfather died. Before he died, he said to his wife, his children and grandchildren, including me, his final words, messages he wanted us to remember of him after he died, things he was worried about for the future. What he told me acted as a prediction, and that prediction formed itself into dreams, which in turn formed this book.
The original form of the book therefore was, through the veil of dreams, telling the story that my grandfather predicted.
Later versions were based on a combination of the prediction and what actually happened.
While Lord of the Rings was written long before I was born, I did not read it until much later in life. While I heard about it when I was quite young, my first exposure to the story itself was in the cartoon adaptation of it, which had three movies that told the story from the four novels (The Hobbit plus The Lord of the Rings trilogy), written for children aged 10-12 or thereabouts, as opposed to the movie series which was aimed at 18+ or the original novels which were aimed at around 15-16. The story was the same in all three versions but how it was told differed tremendously.
I watched the cartoon version in 1993, and I can say that it did have some influence on how I wrote my novel. The content wasn't affected but the way it was told was.
Between 2004 and 2006 I read not only all four of the novels but also The Silmarillion and every book JRR Tolkien had ever written, to understand why he wrote such terrible children's stories, such boring essays, and then such a brilliant trilogy.
This writing style and way to write the novel heavily affected how I wrote the 2006 version of my novel. It justified to me that I had taken so long over writing it, and all of the processes I had gone through. It also said to me why, in spite of writing such a good version of the novel, it still wasn't ready to be published.
After all, The Lord of the Rings, in its published form, was somewhat unfinished, as he clearly wrote it originally aimed for children then changed things to make it for an older audience half-way through writing, but some parts were still for children, some parts being a mix of being for children and being for teens and young adults. Some characters weren't fully fleshed out. An extra year or two on writing it and it would have been perfect.
So there I was, writing my book, and criticising what is often claimed to be the greatest movie ever made and the greatest book ever written. Who am I to think that when my own book is unpublished?
And yet that was my aim. I didn't aim to be spoken in the same sentence as those two wonderful productions - I wanted to be better. I wanted this to be the best story ever written, to be made into the best movie ever made, and to simply be the best.
When I first heard of Game of Thrones, it was the TV series, and I thought it was a spin-off from Lord of the Rings. I thought perhaps it was just telling the story of the humans, as opposed to the elves and dwarves, or hobbits. The human storyline of Lord of the Rings was very interesting. Surely that was what it was about.
I eventually watched a bit in the middle of Series 4, and, with my wife, we caught up on the first three seasons, one episode per day, after our Foxtel pay TV subscription let us do it. From Series 5 onwards, we watched it live.
When I saw Game of Thrones, the TV series, my first impression was that this was eerily similar to my novel, more similar than Lord of the Rings, more similar than Star Wars, more similar than anything else ever created.
I then got to wondering if Game of Thrones had copied my novel, if somehow they had got a copy of it.
"Don't be ridiculous - the book it is based on was published in 1996," I was told, but that's 1996, not 1986.
He had 9 years to steal my book and write his own based on it.
But did he?
The first thing to consider is that, while I had the ideas since 1987, I didn't start writing it until 1989, and I didn't finish my first full draft until 1996. Not only that, but the 1996 draft wasn't shared with many people. I never put it online and only showed perhaps 20 people at most.
So then he couldn't have stolen it.
Except that he could have.
In 1993 I wrote a website as part of my university degree, and on that website I included 4 sample chapters, because I wasn't sure where to start in the chronology. Part of me wanted to start at the very start, but then I worried that it would spoil the novel, so I considered 3 other spots further along in the chronology. So I put in sample chapters, just a couple of pages for each stage, and asked people to vote in a poll so I could work out where to start.
That website was viewed more than 20,000 times, according to my counter, and in those days there weren't very many websites.
So it is very possible that George RR Martin, as part of the research of his book, stumbled upon my website.
But is that plagiarism?
The combined total pages of what I shared was 8 pages, probably a bit less, compared to some 600+ pages in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones. If he did look at my website, then at most it gave him some ideas.
I had watched Star Wars to help me with some ideas for how to frame my story, and I read Lord of the Rings to help me with some ideas for how to go about writing it, so what's the difference between George RR Martin looking at my website for some ideas?
Certainly, the fact that his male lead (Jon Snow) is a ranger is replicated in my writing - and I had the idea first. His female lead (Daenerys) is a princess, as is my female lead. He has a great wall, dragons, and even the powers of the night king are replicated with the powers of my bad guy (though my bad guy is much more powerful).
The thing is that in my sample chapters I simply speak of the powers being able to manipulate the dead, so he could have interpreted that, incorrectly, to being the major power he had. It wasn't, of course. My bad guy could obliterate 1,000 people at once - the night king was nowhere near as strong. Just the same, the general feel was the same.
Of course, the book as a whole is more than just those sample chapters. I released them online knowing that they didn't equate to the whole novel. The fact that George RR Martin's stories have a significant similarity to my 4 sample chapters does not mean that the book as a whole does.
There are more differences than similarities between the two works, and I'll explain them here.
I have one religion and one religion only, albeit with supplemental religions such as the worship of dragons, the atheist beliefs of the swinekin, and the beliefs of the fae. He has the new Gods and the old Gods, with vastly different themes.
I have 12 kingdoms and 12 symbols of the Gods, focusing around the moon theme. He has 7 kingdoms in Westeros and 7 parts of the new Gods. Different number, if nothing else.
I don't have any old Gods, only the fae, who are real people. He has old Gods galore, including the drowned God, Rh'llor and the God of Many Faces. I don't have anything like that.
He has the Children of the Forest essentially to replace my fae, but his Children of the Forest are nowhere near as powerful as my fae. My fae are stronger than the Gods themselves - the Children of the Forest were easily dispatched by a few wights. My fae are, in their true form, red-haired giants (though I didn't reveal that in my sample chapters) while his Children of the Forest aren't even shapeshifters.
I had people raised from the dead to use as puppets, mostly as bombs to go off, especially including brain bombs. He had that being the main power of the night king. My undead could wipe out 1,000 people in one go when their brain bombs exploded, while his undead struggled to kill one person, and it'd typically take 20 of them to take out 1.
I had a lot of dragons, dozens of them, and they were very much alive and free. He had 3, and they had to be hatched from dragon eggs.
My dragon lords were basically kind of evil. While not completely evil, they were kind of evil. My main heroes were most certainly not dragon lords - though they did end up riding dragons.
Dragons were set up as demi-Gods, who were worshipped in a God-like fashion by the dragon lords. Nothing like that happened in Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones had face-changers. My heroes had the ability to do that.
My wall encompassed the entire continent, and it was disguised as a mountain, while his only separated the north from the far north.
He had lords, called Sers, and knights. I didn't have any lords at all, going straight from kings and queens down to commoners.
Is my book better? I certainly think so.
I started reading the book a few weeks ago and I am not impressed. The grammar is horrible and it just seems boring. Perhaps it gets better later on, and perhaps it seems worse as it is so similar to the TV series, but it just doesn't impress me.
One thing I noticed was that every chapter is a POV chapter, which is how I initially wrote my book, and how the sample chapters were written. People told me that they hated doing it that way so I was told to write in third person, but I've always thought that that was the better way to do it, for my story at least.
So in my latest version I am experimenting with telling it with POV chapters again, but doing it in the way that George RR Martin did in A Game of Thrones.
Certainly he has no claim to sue me for plagiarism but I probably don't have a whole lot of claim to sue him either.
He probably did read my website, though, but he's probably allowed to.
I first started to develop the book in 1989 and it was based on real life events that started in 1987, while Game of Thrones the book wasn't published until 1996, so there is no way for me to have actually copied it. At worst, it could be considered that, having already established the basic plot, I made alterations to it based on having watch the TV show and/or read the books. Whether that has actually happened is another matter entirely.
Prior to writing the book, I had been a big fan of Star Wars, the movie series, which, prior to my starting the book, had released all three of the "classic trilogy", namely Star Wars (later renamed to "A New Hope"), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, as well as the Ewok movie. I loved all of them and I considered them to be the very best movie series ever imagined. I went so far as to buy comic books about them, including books that theorised a 9-part movie series, with 3 prequels and 3 sequels. While those books weren't exactly matched by the actual movies, they weren't too far off them, with the prequel series about Anakin before he turned evil while the sequel series was about their children. That idea existed in 1987. It has just been an issue of how to go about the finer elements of it.
So my book was in many ways inspired by Star Wars. In fact, some elements were so heavily influenced by it that I had to change how I wrote it.
My greatest problem with Star Wars has always been that it was set in space. I could see no reason whatsoever that it had to be as part of a planet-hopping space fantasy. To me, the story would have been better had it been told all in the same planet, just moving around that planet, whichever one it was.
Indeed, prior to writing my book, I had written concept plans for a new and improved Star Wars, one that was set on a single planet. I planned it out, wrote the plot, characters, everything about it, and I wrote a short story version of it, of some 30 pages or so. It was fan fiction, though I never showed it to anyone.
However, Star Wars is not the basis of Children of the Crescent Moon, because Children of the Crescent Moon is based on a true story.
In 1987 my maternal grandfather died. Before he died, he said to his wife, his children and grandchildren, including me, his final words, messages he wanted us to remember of him after he died, things he was worried about for the future. What he told me acted as a prediction, and that prediction formed itself into dreams, which in turn formed this book.
The original form of the book therefore was, through the veil of dreams, telling the story that my grandfather predicted.
Later versions were based on a combination of the prediction and what actually happened.
While Lord of the Rings was written long before I was born, I did not read it until much later in life. While I heard about it when I was quite young, my first exposure to the story itself was in the cartoon adaptation of it, which had three movies that told the story from the four novels (The Hobbit plus The Lord of the Rings trilogy), written for children aged 10-12 or thereabouts, as opposed to the movie series which was aimed at 18+ or the original novels which were aimed at around 15-16. The story was the same in all three versions but how it was told differed tremendously.
I watched the cartoon version in 1993, and I can say that it did have some influence on how I wrote my novel. The content wasn't affected but the way it was told was.
Between 2004 and 2006 I read not only all four of the novels but also The Silmarillion and every book JRR Tolkien had ever written, to understand why he wrote such terrible children's stories, such boring essays, and then such a brilliant trilogy.
This writing style and way to write the novel heavily affected how I wrote the 2006 version of my novel. It justified to me that I had taken so long over writing it, and all of the processes I had gone through. It also said to me why, in spite of writing such a good version of the novel, it still wasn't ready to be published.
After all, The Lord of the Rings, in its published form, was somewhat unfinished, as he clearly wrote it originally aimed for children then changed things to make it for an older audience half-way through writing, but some parts were still for children, some parts being a mix of being for children and being for teens and young adults. Some characters weren't fully fleshed out. An extra year or two on writing it and it would have been perfect.
So there I was, writing my book, and criticising what is often claimed to be the greatest movie ever made and the greatest book ever written. Who am I to think that when my own book is unpublished?
And yet that was my aim. I didn't aim to be spoken in the same sentence as those two wonderful productions - I wanted to be better. I wanted this to be the best story ever written, to be made into the best movie ever made, and to simply be the best.
When I first heard of Game of Thrones, it was the TV series, and I thought it was a spin-off from Lord of the Rings. I thought perhaps it was just telling the story of the humans, as opposed to the elves and dwarves, or hobbits. The human storyline of Lord of the Rings was very interesting. Surely that was what it was about.
I eventually watched a bit in the middle of Series 4, and, with my wife, we caught up on the first three seasons, one episode per day, after our Foxtel pay TV subscription let us do it. From Series 5 onwards, we watched it live.
When I saw Game of Thrones, the TV series, my first impression was that this was eerily similar to my novel, more similar than Lord of the Rings, more similar than Star Wars, more similar than anything else ever created.
I then got to wondering if Game of Thrones had copied my novel, if somehow they had got a copy of it.
"Don't be ridiculous - the book it is based on was published in 1996," I was told, but that's 1996, not 1986.
He had 9 years to steal my book and write his own based on it.
But did he?
The first thing to consider is that, while I had the ideas since 1987, I didn't start writing it until 1989, and I didn't finish my first full draft until 1996. Not only that, but the 1996 draft wasn't shared with many people. I never put it online and only showed perhaps 20 people at most.
So then he couldn't have stolen it.
Except that he could have.
In 1993 I wrote a website as part of my university degree, and on that website I included 4 sample chapters, because I wasn't sure where to start in the chronology. Part of me wanted to start at the very start, but then I worried that it would spoil the novel, so I considered 3 other spots further along in the chronology. So I put in sample chapters, just a couple of pages for each stage, and asked people to vote in a poll so I could work out where to start.
That website was viewed more than 20,000 times, according to my counter, and in those days there weren't very many websites.
So it is very possible that George RR Martin, as part of the research of his book, stumbled upon my website.
But is that plagiarism?
The combined total pages of what I shared was 8 pages, probably a bit less, compared to some 600+ pages in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones. If he did look at my website, then at most it gave him some ideas.
I had watched Star Wars to help me with some ideas for how to frame my story, and I read Lord of the Rings to help me with some ideas for how to go about writing it, so what's the difference between George RR Martin looking at my website for some ideas?
Certainly, the fact that his male lead (Jon Snow) is a ranger is replicated in my writing - and I had the idea first. His female lead (Daenerys) is a princess, as is my female lead. He has a great wall, dragons, and even the powers of the night king are replicated with the powers of my bad guy (though my bad guy is much more powerful).
The thing is that in my sample chapters I simply speak of the powers being able to manipulate the dead, so he could have interpreted that, incorrectly, to being the major power he had. It wasn't, of course. My bad guy could obliterate 1,000 people at once - the night king was nowhere near as strong. Just the same, the general feel was the same.
Of course, the book as a whole is more than just those sample chapters. I released them online knowing that they didn't equate to the whole novel. The fact that George RR Martin's stories have a significant similarity to my 4 sample chapters does not mean that the book as a whole does.
There are more differences than similarities between the two works, and I'll explain them here.
I have one religion and one religion only, albeit with supplemental religions such as the worship of dragons, the atheist beliefs of the swinekin, and the beliefs of the fae. He has the new Gods and the old Gods, with vastly different themes.
I have 12 kingdoms and 12 symbols of the Gods, focusing around the moon theme. He has 7 kingdoms in Westeros and 7 parts of the new Gods. Different number, if nothing else.
I don't have any old Gods, only the fae, who are real people. He has old Gods galore, including the drowned God, Rh'llor and the God of Many Faces. I don't have anything like that.
He has the Children of the Forest essentially to replace my fae, but his Children of the Forest are nowhere near as powerful as my fae. My fae are stronger than the Gods themselves - the Children of the Forest were easily dispatched by a few wights. My fae are, in their true form, red-haired giants (though I didn't reveal that in my sample chapters) while his Children of the Forest aren't even shapeshifters.
I had people raised from the dead to use as puppets, mostly as bombs to go off, especially including brain bombs. He had that being the main power of the night king. My undead could wipe out 1,000 people in one go when their brain bombs exploded, while his undead struggled to kill one person, and it'd typically take 20 of them to take out 1.
I had a lot of dragons, dozens of them, and they were very much alive and free. He had 3, and they had to be hatched from dragon eggs.
My dragon lords were basically kind of evil. While not completely evil, they were kind of evil. My main heroes were most certainly not dragon lords - though they did end up riding dragons.
Dragons were set up as demi-Gods, who were worshipped in a God-like fashion by the dragon lords. Nothing like that happened in Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones had face-changers. My heroes had the ability to do that.
My wall encompassed the entire continent, and it was disguised as a mountain, while his only separated the north from the far north.
He had lords, called Sers, and knights. I didn't have any lords at all, going straight from kings and queens down to commoners.
Is my book better? I certainly think so.
I started reading the book a few weeks ago and I am not impressed. The grammar is horrible and it just seems boring. Perhaps it gets better later on, and perhaps it seems worse as it is so similar to the TV series, but it just doesn't impress me.
One thing I noticed was that every chapter is a POV chapter, which is how I initially wrote my book, and how the sample chapters were written. People told me that they hated doing it that way so I was told to write in third person, but I've always thought that that was the better way to do it, for my story at least.
So in my latest version I am experimenting with telling it with POV chapters again, but doing it in the way that George RR Martin did in A Game of Thrones.
Certainly he has no claim to sue me for plagiarism but I probably don't have a whole lot of claim to sue him either.
He probably did read my website, though, but he's probably allowed to.
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