George RR Martin and Roger Ebert might not have crossed professional paths often - Martin is best known for books and television, not the primary subjects of Ebert's commentary - but the Game of Thrones writer seemed to be hit hard by the critic's recent death.
Martin wrote on his blog (called Not A Blog) yesterday:
Roger (somehow I think of him as 'Roger,' not 'Ebert,' though I never met him in the flesh, and spoke to him only once, by telephone, in the early 1970s when both of us were young and dinosaurs roamed the earth) has been my favorite film critic since forever. I did not always agree with him, but I always found him insightful and fun to read. He was not just a terrific critic, he was a terrific WRITER....
He was One of Us too. A fan, and an SF fan at that. In his youth, he wrote for fanzines, and he even published a few short SF stories in Ted White's AMAZING and FANTASTIC along about the same time I was publishing in those selfsame magazines. If he had not gone on to be the world's best film critic, he might well have been a successful SF writer.
A brilliant man, a good life. I give him two thumbs up.
The New Yorker website recently republished one of Ebert's science fiction short stories. Martin's tributes echoed those of fans, celebrities and leading movie figures from around the world. Though we haven't found any evidence of Ebert writing about the series, this tweet suggests he may have been a fan:
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