Martin and “Wild Cards” author Ian Tregellis turn a scenario from the science fiction book series into the foundation for an exercise in open-ended problem solving.

Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he coauthored.

Long before Westeros, fantasy and science-fiction author George R.R. Martin had a hand in creating Wild Cards, a shared science-fiction universe involving a pathogen called the "Wild Card" virus that has now spanned 32 books,

It’s not every day that a well-known author writes a physics paper. But George R R Martin, who is best known for his Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, has co-authored a paper in the American Journal of Physics with the title “Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe”.

Many science fiction authors try to incorporate scientific principles into their work, but Ian Tregillis, who is a contributing author of the Wild Cards book series when he's not working as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory,