In a new interview, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin opens up about writing his characters in shades of grey, the controversy surrounding the sex scenes and wanting to surprise his readers.

Business World Online reports the interview with Martin, where he talks about his ASoIaF series. The author says:

One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable. Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it’s going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don’t know if they’re going to live or die.

Going further into the characters he writes, Martin admits that he thinks fantasy is too focused on “stereotypical heroes and villains.” In his novels, he sets out to write grey characters, “flawed human beings who have it in them to be heroes or villains. It’s a matter of the choices that they make in crucial periods in their lives, in moments of stress and emotional turmoil.”

Martin also discusses the famous riddle posed by Varys in the A Clash of Kings novel: In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. Who should he kill?

This riddle has been much discussed by readers and viewers alike, and the author comments, “Who lives? Who dies? Who has the power in that situation? Where does power derive from? Power is a powerful force and very seductive.”

Finally, he talks about the controversy surrounding his sex scenes, and questions why no one reacts this way to the violence in the series:

I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.

Read the original interview here at Business World Online!