‘Game of Thrones’ writer George R.R. Martin is headed to the N.J. Hall of Fame. It’s his first visit to Asbury Park.

George R.R. Martin is revered as a world builder.

In his books, he tells tale of queens, kings, dragons, wights, knights and the lands of Westeros, from the icy winter beyond the wall to the deserts of Dorne. He created the characters and stories that made “Game of Thrones” a game-changing TV sensation.

Yet parts of his homeland have managed to evade him.

“Oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever been to Asbury Park before,” Martin tells NJ Advance Media. That will change on Sunday when Martin is inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Paramount Theatre.

Growing up in Bayonne, Martin’s world was limited to the city streets and whatever he could glimpse beyond — the Bayonne Bridge, the ferries, the lights across the Kill Van Kull.

His friends made it to the Jersey Shore. But Martin seldom did.

“I traveled in my imagination because we didn’t travel in real life,” Martin, 71, tells NJ Advance Media. “We didn’t even own a car.”

Since 1979, the author has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he resides with his wife, Parris McBride. Martin spoke with NJ Advance Media by phone just before a visit to Bayonne.

Now, he’s taking a break from answering questions about the delivery date of his long-awaited book “The Winds of Winter” — the sixth in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series — to head down the Shore.

Martin, the Emmy-winning executive producer of “Game of Thrones,” will join the New Jersey Hall of Fame’s 2018 class alongside other Jersey greats including music’s The Smithereens and Southside Johnny, “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander, Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez, Martha Stewart and veteran Star-Ledger sportswriter Jerry Izenberg.

“It’s quite an honor,” Martin says. “I’ve looked at some of the other people who are in it, and it’s a pretty distinguished list, starting with The Boss. Can’t quibble about that, so I’m very happy about it.”

Bayonne, distant lights and fallen dynasties

Martin, born in 1948, lived at his great-grandmother’s house on 31st and Broadway in Bayonne until he was 4. He spent the rest of his childhood living in the newly built federal housing projects on First Street. Beyond the park, he could see the bay.

“It was actually kind of a nice view,” he says. “I could look out the windows of our living room to see the big ships passing by with all the flags all the countries of the world.”

The vessels would come in from Liberia, Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro. Along with science fiction and fantasy novels and comic books, they helped to fuel his sense of wonder.

“It became sort of a fantasy land to me, distant lights,” Martin says. “There’s nothing like distant lights. It’d be a certain emotional kinship when I finally, many years later, read ‘The Great Gatsby’ and read about Gatsby standing on the end of his dock and looking out across the water. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, that resonated with me from my own childhood memories.”

Young Martin had his own dock — Brady’s Dock. The dock, which stands today, was the legacy of his mother’s once-prominent family.

The Bradys found success in the construction supply business. James Brady, Martin’s great-grandfather, built the dock in order to receive construction material.

“As fate would have it, that dock was directly across from where they built the projects, although it was no longer owned by family,” Martin says. “So I could look out my window and I could see the dock that my great-grandfather had built and had left along to us, and now it was a city dock. When I went to school, I would walk past the house between Third and Fourth Street where my mother had been born, and her father, my grandfather, had owned it then.”

From the federally owned housing where Martin lived with his two younger sisters and longshoreman father, his mother would tell him stories of the more prosperous times, “the family heritage that had been lost in the Great Depression,” he says.

It was through this sense of faded glory that Martin connected with one of his main characters, Daenerys Targaryen, the dragon-riding queen played by Emilia Clarke in “Game of Thrones.” She starts out as an exile, one of the lingering remnants of a defeated dynasty who grows up hearing stories about the power her family once had.

In 2018, Martin launched his latest book, “Fire & Blood,” a history of House Targaryen, at Loew’s Jersey Theatre, one of three theaters, including the Stanley and the State, that he used to frequent in Jersey City.

“It was a thrill for me to be able to go back to Journal Square,” he says of the Loew’s, a movie palace that opened in 1929. “That’s still a great, magnificent theater.”

From box scores to fantasy epics

Well before Martin began selling works of fiction, he wrote hundreds of stories that were published in the Bayonne Times and The Jersey Journal.

The future builder of worlds, who once played Little League baseball and stickball in the streets, had a summer job working for the Bayonne Department of Parks and Recreation, which ran softball and baseball leagues. Martin would write stories for the Bayonne Times about the games.

“It was a weird kind of sportswriting,” he says. “I did it for like four summers, but I never saw a game. I would sit in an office at 16th Street because the games were going on simultaneously at like four, five different locations. And then the kids would come in with their box scores and I would construct a story about the game.”

Today, despite spending decades out west, Martin keeps up his local allegiances to the Giants, Jets and Mets, blogging his thoughts on the teams and their trades. (“It’s been a painful few years,” he says.)

But leaving New Jersey was always a goal for Martin.

“I knew, even as a kid, staring out (onto the water), that I wanted to travel,” Martin says. “I wanted to see the world beyond Bayonne. I liked Bayonne and I still do (not to mention those Jersey bar pies, he says). I still have family there, I visit there every year. But I wanted to see the fabulous countries that I was reading about. I wanted to see the rest of America.”

Martin began his journey by attending college in Illinois, where he studied journalism at Northwestern University. In 1971, his first work of fiction was published in a magazine. By 1985, he had broken into TV writing with a gig working on the revival of one of his favorite series of all time, “The Twilight Zone.”

Working in TV, Martin often found himself hitting a wall, thanks to his “oversized” imagination.

“All of my scripts were too expensive to make,” he says. His first drafts, especially, were absolute budget busters. Martin was inevitably told to pare down the number of characters and locations in his stories.

“When you’re writing a book, there’s no limit, there’s no budget,” he says. “You can put in anything you want, anything you can imagine, and the reader’s imagination does the rest.”

The constraints of TV eventually drove Martin back to books.

“I said ‘the hell with it. I’m going to write something just as big as my imagination. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the locations I want. I’m going to have giant battles and dragons and direwolves and whatever I can imagine,'” he says. “I didn’t imagine it would ever be filmed, but what do you know. Life is full of little ironies, I think.”

“A Game of Thrones,” the first book in Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, was published in 1996, lighting the way for HBO’s “Game of Thrones” to deliver an epic every Sunday for eight seasons, starting in 2011. In Martin’s sweeping, budget-free tales, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff saw the potential for a TV sensation.

The books would go on to sell more than 90 million copies and “Game of Thrones” would break records, including 13.6 million viewers for the May series finale (an HBO best — 19.3 million including streaming and on-demand) and the longest continuous battle scene committed to film. As for that budget-busting imagination, each episode of the final season reportedly cost $15 million to make.

In September, Martin scooped up his fourth Emmy (as did Mendham’s Peter Dinklage, who played Tyrion Lannister) when the series won best drama for its final, and often controversial, season. By its end, the show had long since moved past the events in Martin’s books.

Now, the author is involved with at least two “Game of Thrones” prequel series, including one written by Jane Goldman (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”) and starring Naomi Watts, which is set thousands of years before “Game of Thrones” and filmed a pilot last summer. A second series, from Martin and Ryan Condal (“Colony”), is based on “Fire & Blood,” his history of House Targaryen set centuries before the show.

Martin hopes that one day, fantasy dramas will be as ubiquitous as police procedurals — whatever form they may take.

“I’m pleased that ‘Game of Thrones’ opened the door for fantasies,” he says, moving the genre beyond the 8 p.m. “family hour” and the notion that stories with dragons and swordplay are only for children. “That hasn’t been true in books for 30 years, not since Tolkien at least. But that was the mindset TV had. I think ‘Games of Thrones’ shattered that now.”

Even as streaming began to take off, “Game of Thrones” pulled off the lucrative trick of retaining its hold on appointment television.

“I don’t know if it’ll happen again,” Martin says. “So many more streamers are coming in. People are getting used to bingeing their television instead of watching one episode a week. People watch them in two days then have to wait a year for another one. It’s all different patterns and I don’t know when the dust settles, what will be the viewing pattern.”

But in all these years, one core element has remained the same, he says.

“To my mind, the important thing is still the story you tell, whether it’s divided into 22 episodes or 10, or whether it’s all episodes at once or one a week, or whether it’s releasing movies or books,” he says. “It’s still just stories, it’s still the character. And if you do good work in that way, I think the audience will find you in whatever the medium is.”

Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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