Westeros

Update: We’re pleased to say that we’ve been invited by Casa del Libro to sign at their store at Gran Via 29 prior to the talk. The signing will be from 5pm to 6pm.

Linda and I will be speaking at Espacio Fundación Telefónica, who have kindly invited us with the collaboration of the Spanish publisher of A Song of Ice and Fire and our The World of Ice and Fire, Gigamesh, the organizers of the Celsius 232 convention, and streaming source of Game of Thrones in Spain Movistar+. A few years ago GRRM took part in a similar event.

Fans in Madrid can visit the event page for information regarding the time and details of the event, as well as reserving a free pass. For those who can’t make it, the website will stream the event live.

As always, we’re very much looking forward to visiting Spain. That said, since we’re traveling late Sunday evening, busy in Madrid on Monday, and traveling homeward on Tuesday, Linda’s coverage of the season premiere will likely be delayed and/or be briefer than normal.

The official 2018 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar will be hitting shelves in just two weeks. Our understanding is that they’ll be available as well at the Penguin Random House booth at San Diego’s Comic-Con International, as previous calendars have been.

This year’s calendar is illustrated by noted genre artist Eric Velhagen, who recently met George R.R. Martin in Santa Fe as Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema is showcasing some of Velhagen’s artwork. Only a couple of pieces have been publicly revealed so far, including the cover above, but make sure to take advantage of Amazon’s Look Inside feature to see a two more piece of art featuring an Other and everyone’s favorite pint-sized assassin.

Artist Magali Villeneuve (of 2016 calendar fame) reminded us via a tweet that A Song of Ice and Fire is returning to comics form, with Dynamite Entertainment publishing the first issue in their A Clash of Kings adaptation on June 7 There’s a number of covers for that first issue, but we’ll share Magali’s alternate cover first, featuring her take on Stannis Baratheon and his daughter Princess Shireen:

According to the Previews solicitation, the comic is being adapted by writer Landry Quinn Walker with art by Mel Rubi.

Other covers are provided by Mike S. Miller (familiar to fans for his work on the Dunk & Egg adaptations), Marc Simonetti (well-known to ASoIaF fans thanks to his many covers for foreign editions, as well as his calendar and contributions to The World of Ice and Fire, and Rubi; we’ll show them below:

Over at George R.R. Martin’s “Not A Blog”, faithful minion Raya revealed the artist behind this summer’s forthcoming the A Song of Ice and Fire 2018 Calendar, as well as an image of the cover of the calendar featuring Victarion Grejoy in his plate armor and kraken helm.

The artist, Eric Velhagen—do check out his personal site with its extensive gallery!—has been twice nominated for the Chesley Awards, the premiere awards for the SF&F genre, and has been published in the prestigious Spectrum series of art books.

We also have some hints of the subjects Velhagen will be depicting in the calendar, courtesy of Random House:

The A Song of Ice and Fire 2018 Calendar is due to be published July 18th.

George R.R. Martin has provided new information on an anthology slated for October, Book of Swords, which will contain a never-before-published piece of “fake history” that was originally created for The World of ICe and Fire. We reported on it last week, but waited on reporting more as we knew GRRM was going to provide more information at his “Not a Blog”. Of particular interest to ASoIaF fans are the following:

George R.R. Martin’s friend and regular editorial collaborator, Gardner Dozois, has been working away at an anthology titled Book of Swords since 2015, inviting a host of authors to contribute. One of the invited authors, Matthew Hughes, posted a list of some of the authors that were then on board. The list included Ken Liu (whose contribution, “The Hidden Girl”, was optioned for film last year), Ellen Kushner, Scott Lynch, Robin Hobb, Daniel Abraham, K.J. Parker, Garth Nix, C.J Cherryh, Elizabeth Bear, and Cecelia Holland.

Hughes suggested there’d probably be some other significant authors, and as fans have now discovered, one of those names is George R.R. Martin himself. We don’t have a table of contents to share as of yet, but we’ll say that there’s a great deal of speculation among fans related to The World of Ice and Fire and Dunk & Egg.

We’ll see if we can’t shake that table of contents loose.

Over at Not a Blog, George R.R. Martin has given a short and sweet update on the highly-anticipated The Winds of Winter, despite his general policy (forged from past experience) to not remark on it. It’s a brief comment, which we’ll share here:

And that’s it. As he notes, he thinks it could be finished this year… or maybe it won’t be, as he’s noted he has been wrong before. But for those who’ve irrationally feared he’s given up on the series, this should hopefully settle some nerves.

The New Year has begun, and Random House has informed us that this Friday—January 6—will be the last day they will be taking orders on the GRRM Box with its collection of collectibles and goodies for fans of both A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Thanks to Random House, we’re glad to say that fans can order any of the available boxes at 15% off with the code LASTCHANCE if they order here.

For more about the GRRM Box, you can read our announcement post sharing the full details.

Apple and Random House, continuing the enhanced edition series announced back in September, have now released the A Storm of Swords digital enhanced edition. Just as with the prior two books, this enhanced edition includes a bevy of art, journey maps for POV characters, an extensive glossary, and numerous annotations providing insights and trivia into the text. There’s a brief video featuring George R.R. Martin featuring some nifty animations:

To learn more about the series, you can visit here. The A Storm of Swords enhanced edition, as with all enhanced editions, is exclusive to iTunes.

Although the ultra limited edition of the GRRM Box, with a run of just 200 priced at $600 each, sold out almost instantly (the limited and deluxe limited sets are still available), publisher Random House has announced that they are donating the rarest of them all—Ultra Limited Edition Box #001—in an auction to benefit the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary.

Here’s the press release with the full details regarding the auction, which will be hosted on EBay and will begin tomorrow, December 2nd:

UPDATE: Editor Anne Groell has gotten back to us to confirm that Ben Avery has adapted the script, and that the page count is 148 pages, not 240 pages as previously reported. We have corrected the report below.

“The Mystery Knight”, the third in the Dunk & Egg series of novellas set in the past of the Seven Kingdoms, is finally getting the comic book adaptation fans of the first two adaptions have beeing waiting for, according to Amazon. The adaption was first announced in 2013.

With a July 4 release date—matching the date on Random House’s own site—it looks like it’ll be released directly in collected format.

The Hedge Knight, the well-regarded first adaptation from Dabel Bros Productions, had art by veteran artist Mike S. Miller (who is listed as illustrating The Mystery Knight) and script by Ben Avrey (also returning). Eventually rights for the collected series shifted to Jet City Comics, Amazon’s own imprint, who followed up by then eventually publishing the The Sworn Sword collection which for a time was published by Marvel Comics.

Random House has kindly taken some of illustrations fromthe A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition (which is the central item in the limited edition GRRM Box) and has turned them into wallpapers. The artwork comes from Magali Villeneuve and Marc Simonetti, and while some are previously published some of the pieces are exclusive to the illustrated edition. Grab them while you can!

Linda and I are off to Eurocon 2016 tomorrow, and looks like we’re leaving at just the right time: we got our very first snowfall in our area today, so the contrast with balmy Barcelona will be quite interesting. We’ve just one panel at the convention: The Influence of European Authors and History in the Work of George R.R. Martin. Joining us will be the esteem Alejo Cuervo, founder of Gigamesh, and our friend Javi Marcos of Los Siete Reinos. For those who couldn’t make it to the con, the good news is that Eurocon 2016 will be streamed in full in association with the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona

In fact, they’ve already got our panel set up, so keep an eye out at 6.30PM (Central European Time):

Besides that, on Saturday we’ll be joining a host of authors and artists (Ian Watson, Adam Roberts, the amazing Enrique Corominas, and more) at an epic signing session at the Gigamesh store (one of the very best SF/F speciality stories in Europe). Should be fun!

There’s a lot of other guests—including Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon, The Steel Remains, Black Man), Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher), Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, The Way of Kings), Aliette de Bodard (The House of Shattered Wings), and more—and some very interesting panels on a wide range of topics (some in Spanish, some in English), so do check out the streaming schedule. And if you’re going to the con, do say hello!

ETA: And of course I forgot to mention that the winners of the Premio Ignotus—the awards of the Spanish national SF/F convention, similar to the Hugos—will be announced at the convention. The World of Ice and Fire is among the nominees in the translated work category, thanks to the fantastic efforts of Gigamesh and its translators (as well as Corominas for his amazing cover art).

Following in the footsteps of the recent The World Hobbit Project and The World Star Wars Project, a group of 40 university researchers have just launched The Game of Thrones Research Project, aiming to capture the views and opinions of thousands of viewers and fans of the series through an online survey.

“Winter is coming”. Game of Thrones’ most famous saying. But what does it suggest and mean to you? We’re trying to gather the views of thousands of followers of the series, on this and a series of other questions, via a web survey at this address: www.questeros.org. Please, help us by visiting and completing it â`“ and then passing it on. Who are we? We are a gathering of university researchers sharing an interest in the changing nature of ‘fantasy’. We’re entirely self-funded. We’re not affiliated with HBO in any way, or with George RR Martin. All our results and findings will be made publicly available â`“ that’s a promise. If you’d like to know more about us, about the project, and why we are doing it, you can find more information on our website. Take the quiz now at www.questeros.org!

The website, with the very clever domain name of questeros.org, offers more in-depth information about what they seek to learn from the survey and how they intend to publish the results. Looking at the survey, it is (as the name would suggest) focused on the TV series, but it does include some questions that relate to—or can be related to—the novels and the TV series relationship with them. They estimate that it takes about 20 minutes to take the survey, depending on how detailed you make your responses (there’s several questions which allow for longer answers), and we encourage all of our readers to take a look at it and contribute your opinions.

The second enhanced edition of the A Song of Ice and Fire series—e-books exclusive to Apple iBooks, filled with glossaries, annotations, illustrations, and more—has now been released and can be purchased on iTunes. As we’ve said previously, these enhanced editions are really aimed at readers who find the mass of characters, locations, and incidents daunting, as the embedded information really helps with keeping track of what’s going on. However, the added art and some of the more obscure trivia in the annotations may well appeal to hard-core fans, so feel free to give it a look as well!