Game of Thrones

    Saturday I and a Little Group of Serious Thinkers watched the entire first season of Game of Thrones. I'd never read anything by George R. R. Martin, though my wife is a huge fan of his novels. I did hear him speak on a panel at ComicCon last year. Anyway, I became intrigued, partly becasue is twas a good story, but also because there was so little fantasy in this fantasy. It reminded me more of the kind of Thundering Historical Epics my dad used to buy in paperback for 35 cents, writen by people like Frank G. Slaughter and F. Van Wyck Mason. And the story at many points echoed various bits of Tudor and Stuart history. It made me wonder if Martin hadn't written historical fiction diguised as something else. On the other hand, the correspondences are vague enough that I could have been making the connections myself.

    So my question to real George R.R. Martin fans is, what do you think or know about that?