Where And When Does Game Of Thrones Take Place?

I've been reading reviews of Game of Thrones by newbies in the last few weeks that talk about the "medieval world" George RR Martin created for the books and while its true that Martin was heavily influenced by Tolkien, the age of chivalry and the Wars of the Roses actually Game of Thrones has a different provenance which sets the GOT universe not in the past but in the future. I shall explain. 
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High fantasy in its present form was more or less invented by JRR Tolkien. Tolkien's Middlearth is a reimagined prehistoric Europe with languages based on old Norse, old Welsh and old Irish, but that's about the only similarity to the real old Europe, Tolkien's Europe (actually Eurasia) exists on a planet in a parallel universe where (according to the Silmarillion) the sun went round the Earth and the world was originally flat. This is not the past history of our planet Earth but an alternative mythological history of a planet with a passing resemblance to our own. 
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High fantasy as a genre exploded in the US in the 1960's after the paperback publication of Lord of the Rings but followers in Tolkien's tradition were not remotely consistent (thank goodness) as to where and when their books were actually taking place. Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, or sometimes a parallel Earth or quite often they offered no explanation at all of where the events of the novel were taking place. One of my favourite devices was the trick Stephen Donaldson did in his Thomas Covenant series where the reader (and protagonist) wasn't sure whether the universe was real or merely taking place inside the hero's own head. Still the vast majority of these novels had swords and horses and blacksmiths and if it wasn't our world itself the planet still had a curiously Earth-like feel that perhaps wasn't entirely logical. 
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But there was another conceptual space for high fantasy, that of the Dying Earth, and in this construct, largely developed by Jack Vance, dragons, swords, magic, different races of men etc. are all possible because we're dealing with the Earth millions of years from now when the continents have changed shape, technology has fallen or been forgotten and human and animal evolution has continued along its merry way. George RR Martin was and is a huge fan of Jack Vance and has edited a tribute volume of stories explicitly set in Vance's world; therefore, it seems to me, that it makes more logical sense to regard Game of Thrones as taking place not in some version of our medieval past but in fact in the far future when, who knows, the continents might have become like they are in the map at the beginning of GOT and some humans may have evolved extraordinary physical and mental abilities that to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke are indistinguishable from magic. Dragons too may have evolved and the more useful animals such as cows and horses would still be around.
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The Dungeons and Dragons universe largely takes place on the Dying Earth (my favourite module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, being the exemplar here) and if you're interested in this idea, let me point you to the work of Gene Wolfe whose Dying Earth Book of the New Sun is probably my favourite fantasy series in this genre. I'm also a fan of the almost completely forgotten Road to Corlay trilogy by Richard Cowper.
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Some of my other geeky Game of Thrones posts here:
Accents In Game of Thrones
Accents in Game of Thrones part 2
The time when my brother and I rather cheekily broke into the Great Wall set.
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As a final little aside it was nice to see the bridge over the River Main at Shane's Castle getting used as the scene for the duel between Jaime Lannister and Brienne. I remember having a wooden sword fight in those woods and on that bridge with my little brother when I was a kid.