Westeros
The 'A Song of Ice and Fire' Domain
News
Canadian bookseller Chapters is sitting down with George R.R. Martin for an exclusive interview prior to the release of A Dance with Dragons, and they’re soliciting questions from fans! Questions must be submitted before 9 AM on July 4th.
Questions can be submitted at Chapter’s post or their Facebook page. (And just to be clear, those question will only be taken there; posting them in comments here will not help!)
Thanks to HarperCollins Voyager, there’s now an A Dance with Dragons app for those with iOs devices! According to the description, the app contains an extract from the novel, a quiz to sort you into a noble house, a chance at a prize draw, and more.
The official release date is July 12th, with Kindle and Audiobook editions being released simultaneously. Some more information, and pre-order links, can be found here.
According to this very interesting article from The Bookseller, a U.K. publishing industry website, HarperCollins (of which GRRM’s UK publisher, Voyager, is an imprint) has hit a milestone with 1,000,000 copies of the A Song of Ice and Fire series available in the U.K. and 100,000 copies of A Dance with Dragons printed in ahead of the July 12 release date.
There’s some rather amazing statistics, including the fact that this last week has seen more copies of the novels sold than in all of 2010, and that that figure is 6,120% higher than in the same time period last year, and that sales this year to date are already up 1,660% over last year.
The Waterstone’sPiccadilly store will have a replica of the Iron Throne from HBO’s Game of Thrones on display from the 9th to the 14th as promotion for the release of the fifth novel begins.
One of the internet awards for television that we think are among the best known and are the most representative of a certain sort of audience, Television Without Pity’s Tubey Awards are now up-and-running, and as you might expect, Game of Thrones is very well-represented indeed. The polls are open, and below we provide a handy guide to the categories in which the show has nominees, and who those nominees are.
It’s that time again—each summer we run a bit of a fundraiser to help pay back our wonderful host, Rachel (aka Sparks), for giving the community a place to hang out. It’s been especially challenging this past couple of months, with activity surging thanks to the TV series and now the imminent release of A Dance with Dragons. Sparks has worked like a trooper to keep everything running, and is in the early stages of moving things to a more powerful server.
I don’t even want to think about how many words have been written on the site, how many hours have been spent on it, how many people have made new friends—it’s the finest forum I’ve ever been part of, and that’s because of the community of fans who’ve helped to shape it.
So, if you can spare a few dollars, please contribute! You can pay directly via Paypal, or use any major credit card (sorry, we have no alternative payment options). And if you’re concerned about privacy, there’s an option to donate privately, we believe.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and to consider contributing. We appreciate it!
Anticipation for A Dance with Dragons is reaching a fevered pitch. An accidental, early release from Amazon.de has caused a flurry of activity, including on our forum (we broke our concurrency record because of it). But before you go seeking out spoilers, heed these words from U.K. publisher HarperCollins Voyager…
And let us add our own thoughts on this. Yes, Linda and I have had the privilege of reading the book awhile ago. Yes, we knew some of what the contents were, from early chapters George had read or which we had early access to. But a great bulk of it was entirely new to us… and the pleasure in the reading was greatly heightened for us by not knowing what was coming. There are some amazing, jaw-dropping moments in this book. If you can at all help it, don’t ruin the shocks and surprises, so you can get the maximum effect out of them. GRRM’s labored six years on this book, trying to get it “just so”; what’s holding out two more weeks, to make sure you can read and judge his efforts with fresh eyes and an open mind? And don’t worry, we’ve put extreme spoiler protections up on the forum, so it should remain a relatively safe place on the relatively-lawless internet (and we’ll note, word is there’s a number of major forums where spoilers—fake and real alike—are flying like mad, so keep your head down!)
Now, that Amazon.de error is fixed, and any new orders placed via Amazon.de will provide the appropriate shipping date. There are rumors of stores in Australia, Sweden, and elsewhere claiming early release dates, but Bantam/Random House is on the case, double-checking all the international distributors and major chains to make sure that the global July 12th embargo is respected.
So, if you haven’t pre-ordered the book yet, what are you waiting for? It’s now two weeks to go! Here’s a handy list of links:
Just about two weeks away from A Dance with Dragons (US, UK) landing on bookshelves in the U.S., and Suvudu has the full details of George R.R. Martin‘s signing tour. So far, nine locations are planned, though we wouldn’t be surprised if a couple more get added.
Signing locations include Burlington (MA), New York City, Indianapolis, San Diego (right around San Diego Comic Con, where both Bantam and HBO will have a big presence, and which GRRM will be present for), Los Angeles, Redwood City, Seattle, Denver, and Lexington. Rules for each signing event are spelled out, which will be very important for those wanting to get their books signed. Read them carefully!
Extras NI has put out the call for extras for the second season of Game of Thrones. The salient details of how to register your interest are in the post, but we should stress that if you aren’t based in Northern Ireland, there’s simply no chance. As always, what they’re looking for is always fun. Last year, it was clear they were looking for Dothraki. This year? Lets see….
... sort of.
As you may well know, Subterranean Press is publishing the limited edition, illustrated editions of “A Song of Ice and Fire”, using some world-class artists to illustrate George R.R. Martin’s story. For A Dance with Dragons, GRRM selected award-winning artist Marc Fishman to provide the cover, painted illustrations, as well as drawings. We haven’t heard much of late about it, as A Dance with Dragons was long in the making.
But then a tweet from Christie Michelle Stewart caught our attention: she had visited Fishman, apparently for an interview series she’s posting on her site, and had a peek at some of the art he had been creating. Which then led us to the Facebook linked above… and then to this image of Daenerys Targaryen with Drogon.
How we missed this, when it seems it was posted around August 2009, we do not know. So far as we know, this is the one and only piece of A Dance with Dragons art Fishman has published. To get a taste of what else he might be creating, be sure to visit his gallery.
The cross-genre anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, Warriors (US, UK) has won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Anthology!
Congratulations to GRRM, Gardner, and all the writers involved. “The Mystery Knight”, the third Dunk & Egg story that was published in the anthology, lost out the Best Novella to Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”. On the other hand, Neil Gaiman’s “The Thing About Cassandra” published in GRRM’s and Dozois’s themed anthology Songs of Love and Death (US, UK) won for Best Short Story (Gaiman also won for Best Novelette).
Finally, Tor Books—publisher of Warriors as well as the latest Wild Cards novels, including the recently-released For Freak—won for best publisher.Tor’s certainly earned it, and their on-line portal is among the best SF/F websites around. Not least because they’ve given Linda and I a place to expound on matters “A Song of Ice and Fire”, such as our latest essay on “the dream of dragons”.
The complete list of winners and nominees can be found here. The full results of the Locus Poll (the nominees are the top five vote getters, and the winners being the most voted in their category) will be published later in the year.
The final, episode-centric essay from Pearson Moore—an essayist best known for his writing about Lost, and maintainer of Winterfell Keep—is now live! This essay on the final episode concerns itself with courage and charisma in the novel, again with something of a cultural perspective. Fascinating and insightful as always, we should add that there is mild nudity in one of the images, so please bear that in mind when at the workplace or what have you.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Appelo has an article giving five reasons why Game of Thrones might win Emmys… although we note the last one is more about why it might win Emmys a year or two from now, as opposed to winning them this year.
All in all, it’s an interesting piece, and has some great quotes (including actress Mary Kay Place emphasizing how interesting the show is).
We’ve had the opportunity to interview Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor, one of the co-founders of BlueBolt, the visual effects company that served as lead VFX vendor for Game of Thrones, with Ainsworth-Taylor serving as the show’s VFX producer. BlueBolt is responsible for some of the amazing vistas seen in the course of the series, and BlueBolt provided us a number of images showing before and after depictions of how a real world location was turned into some part of the Seven Kingdoms.
And, of course, we talk
Natalie Dormer, perhaps best known as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, has been cast as Margaery Tyrell—only daughter of Lord Mace Tyrell and sister to the Knight of Flowers, Ser Loras—according to EW’s James Hibberd. There’s minor spoilers in Hibberd’s post, if you don’t want to know where Margaery fits into the story, don’t look.
Admittedly, Dormer is rather older than we had expected for this role, but of course she will doubtless play younger. Dormer is 29, while Finn Jones is 23—Loras is about a year older than Margaery in the novels, on the other hand.
Perhaps most notable about the news is the fact that Hibberd states she’s joining the regular cast of the series. The show—famous for having quite the large regular cast—seems likely to be expanding Margaery’s presence in the TV show, as compared to the novel, where she appears in what’s essentially two scenes.
Update: It turns out that the initial report was a little garbled. In fact, what GRRM has indicated is that Dangerous Women is the working title of the next themed anthology project he’s working on, and that the next Dunk & Egg story would appear there. The actual title of the story remains unknown, but our speculation about the Wolf Women still seems accurate. Thanks to @Pizama for the tip.
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According to a report we’ve placed in the So Spake Martin collection, George R.R. Martin revealed that the fourth “Dunk & Egg” novella—stories following the exploits of the young Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg aproximately 90 years prior to the novels—will have that title.
“Dangerous Women” does suggest that we may be seeing the Wolf Women of Winterfell, which should be interesting.
The Dunk & Egg novellas are great reads, but it’s a little difficult to find them at times. “The Hedge Knight” is most easily found in Dreamsongs, volume II, part of a fantastic, retrospective collection of some of GRRM’s earliest fiction as well as some of his very best (including multiple award-winning stories from the period of time where some have argued that he was the best short fiction writer in the genre); we recommend the first volume as well. The second story, “The Sworn Sword”, can be found in Legends II: Dragon, Sword, and King, part of an anthology series containing various masters of the fantasy genre. FInally, the latest, “The Mystery Knight”, can be found in the GRRM- and Gardner Dozois-edited Warriors, a cross-genre anthology.