George R. R. Martin’s Best (and Cruellest) Story

Simon Kress collects things. Living things.

Simon Kress collects things. Living things. He enjoys showing them off to his wealthy acquaintances when they visit his house, occasionally feeding one to another if it makes for a more interesting display.

But he is bored of his numerous exotic pets. He wants something new, something no one has seen before, and that’s when he finds his way to:

“WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS. ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFEFORMS. AND. MISC.”

Inside the strange shop, Kress is sold four insect-like creatures called ‘sandkings,’ each one a hive mind controlled by a buried ‘maw’ which uses insect-like soldiers to build castles in the sand. They make war with each other in intelligent and elaborate ways and worship the face of their keeper whom they take for a God.

Kress likes the sound of that.

Sandkings, by Enrique Breccia

George R. R. Martin is of course best known for his fantasy stories, primarily those set in Westeros, the world that gave us Game of Thrones and now House of the Dragon, but he has also been a prolific and celebrated writer of science fiction.

You don’t have to know anything about his ‘Thousand Worlds’ universe to enjoy the standalone Sandkings. I hadn’t even heard of it when I came across the novelette, and aside from a few scene-setting remarks at the start, the tale could exist without that context. The set up is simple: we are on a planet where the wealthy Simon Kress can easily source exotic creatures being shipped, sold, or smuggled. It’s a slightly disreputable place, like any historical port town with a shady underbelly.

Just as Kress happens upon Wo and Shade by accident, I stumbled upon Sandkings because I had set myself a ‘sci-fi challenge,’ and was making my way through various lists of the best sci-fi shorts ever written. I had read about thirty in total, including lots of classics from Arthur C. Clarke. Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, and so on. Sandkings was last on my list.

I was intrigued by the idea of a sci-fi short by the author of Game of Thrones, and expected it to exhibit the same cynical realism that made Martin’s fantasy so distinct. I’m not sure that I was expecting to enjoy it, but I went into it with an open mind.

It ended up being my favourite of all the short stories I read which feels almost blasphemous to admit in the face of some of those masters of the genre. Maybe that says something about me…

Sandkings is the perfect story for anyone who played The Sims as a kid and realised whilst doing so that the game was reflecting back to you what you’d be like if you had the power of a god. It’s no secret that, for a lot of us, the answer was pretty unflattering, just take this hilarious article: ‘Sims gamer makes sadistic screenwriting sweatshop because it’s essentially just a horror game now.’ The Sims subreddit has a whole thread on the most evil things people have done to their creations, saying things that in any other context would be cause for extreme concern. For example:

“My most recent was Terry Jong Un. He would lock women in a room and starve them. The last one living was declared the winner and rewarded with him impregnating her. She got a toilet and fridge added to her room during pregnancy. I gave up on him after 4 kids because he made such ugly children.” @yampuffs

Like The Sims, Sandkings serves as a a savage fable about vanity, hubris, sadism, and revenge. The faint of heart should be forewarned that when it gets nasty it gets nasty.

Pat Broderick’s artwork for the DC Comics adaptation, 1987.

Sandkings is a great example of a classic horror-story structure, where a clear central tension ramps up and up and up, each step more compelling than the last. It has one of those endings that we realise, with hindsight, we have been trudging towards with grim inevitability, and Kress is one of the most darkly compelling antagonists of short fiction, you can so vividly imagine his horrid face looming over the sandkings in their tank with all the gleeful malice of a schoolboy plucking the wings off a writhing fly. Martin supposedly had the idea for Sandkings after watching a university friend feed goldfish to his pet piranhas (it is a vacated piranha tank that Kress uses for his sandkings.)

We know exactly what kind of god Kress is going to be to his new creatures and we justly despise him, but we too can’t help pressing our noses up against the glass and ogling the way the creatures squirm. We also want to know what will happen if he exacerbates their little battles by depriving them of food or throwing in other creatures — from the deadly to the innocent — just to see the havoc it will wreak upon the sandkings’ world.

Like a fairy tale (or Gremlins) there are some simple rules Kress has been told to follow if he wants to stay safe, and we know from the moment we hear them that he’ll disobey every one, even the crucial instruction to keep them in their tank, because they grow to fit the size of their container…

Pat Broderick for DC Comics.

A detail that stood out to me on a re-read was the fact that Sandkings is also George R. R. Martin’s version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The creatures carve the face of Kress, their god, into their castle walls and turrets but over time that face becomes twisted and cruel, like the portrait in Dorian’s attic.

From Sandkings:

“I must bid you good night, then,” Wo said with resignation. But as she slipped into her coat to depart, she fixed him with a final disapproving stare. “Look to your faces, Simon Kress,” she warned him. “Look to your faces.”

Puzzled, he wandered back to the tank and stared at the castles after she had taken her departure. His faces were still there, as ever.

Except—he snatched up his magnifying goggles and slipped them on. Even then it was hard to make out. But it seemed to him that the expression on the face of his images had changed slightly, that his smile was somehow twisted so that it seemed a touch malicious.

From Dorian Gray:

As he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise. Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had taken the button-hole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.

Wilde is no stranger to the neatly brutal logic of a cautionary fairy tale, and it’s perhaps this parallel that makes Sandkings feel timeless despite its sci-fic setting. It's an extraordinary little story that deserves a lot more love and is, for me, Martin at his best: we get to enjoy his powerfully imaginative worldbuilding and his unsentimental view of human nature in the restrained bounds of a standalone novelette. Oh and apparently Gore Verbinski is going to direct an adaptation for Netflix and I’m a lot more excited about that than House of the Dragon, season 3.

If you’ve already read Sandkings, did you enjoy it as much as I did? If you read it for the first time (click here to do so), please do tell me what you thought below.

***P.S. Everyone in the comments is telling me to watch the 1995 Outer Limits adaptation which you can find here. I haven’t seen it yet and was a bit wary because it looks like quite a lot was changed, but I will be sitting down with my popcorn sometime this week. A GRRM story adapted for TV? What could possibly go wrong??***

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