Gamespy has a good interview with lead game designer Sylvain Sechi and project manager Thomas Veauclin regarind Cyanide’s forthcoming Game of Thrones roleplaying game (Pre-order: X-box, PS3). The game is due to hit shelves in North America on May 15, and should be in Europe around that time as well.
They go into some detail about how they developed the story for the game, and the degree to which George R.R. Martin has been involved. According to them, when they presented their plans with some trepidation, Martin looked it over and told them he had been planning even bigger events to take place in later novels, so their plans were just fine. They also discuss the difference in philosophy between sandbox games such as Skyrim and more narrative-driven games, such as those produced by BioWare.
SFX, the U.K.‘s biggest magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy, runs a yearly award with readers of the magazine nominating among a number of categories. They’ve now announced the results, and they are very nice indeed: A Dance with Dragons took Best Novel (with Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes a well-deserved entry on the short list), and A Game of Thrones landed Best New Show while being shortlisted for Best TV Show (which, I suspect, is perenially won by Doctor Who).
And in a nice touch, SFX managed to get George to accept the award:
The Huffington Post’s television critic Maureen Ryan runs an annual auction for charity called “Swag for Charity”, with items covering the range of swag she gets from studios and networks in her role as a critic. This year, GRRM contacted Mo and offered to throw in a number of signed books to the cause, so there’s an excellent chance to fans of his work to get their hands on a complete signed hardcover set of “A Song of Ice and Fire”, an amazing collection, the start of a superhero saga that’s lasted decades, and much more (including some Spartacus: Vengeance items).
Bid early, bid often, because all proceeds goes to deserving charities, including Partners in Health! The auction on the George R.R. Martin items ends on Sunday.
Over at “Not a Blog”, GRRM has been making recommendations for this year’s Hugo Awards—the oldest and most well-known award for science fiction and fantasy—in various categories. His own work, A Dance with Dragons, is eligible for the Best Novel category, and of course Game of Thrones is eligible in the Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category… but, intriguingly, it’s also eligible for the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category. There’s some interesting discussion on that topic in comments.
The take out? I’d say fans of the show who nominate should all nominate it in the Long Form category, and maybe not vote for it at all in Short Form (a category which will, with 99.99% certainty, be won by the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife”, written by Neil Gaiman) so that the administrators have an easy choice to make as to category. It worked back in 2008 when fans nominated Heroes in Long Form and almost no votes were thrown in for Short Form. That’s what we intend to do, in any case, having gotten a supporting membership of our own.
All members of last year’s Worldcon, and current members of this year’s Worldcon at Chicon in Chicago provided they get their membership—any membership, even the $50 Supporting membership, which has a number of perks such as receiving e-books of all the finalist novels - on or before January 31st), can nominate. And you should do. And if you can actually attend the event, even better—five days of SF/F/H goodness, academic tracks and film tracks, parties and meeting many of the luminaries of the genre past, present, and future, parties, art dealers and memorabilia and books upon books, parties…
Did I mention the parties? The Brotherhood without Banner will be making a strong showing, and their parties are famous. And of course, George will be there, and as he always says, a con’s the absolute best setting to see him, not just at signings and readings, but also on panels and, yes, in the party rooms.
Over at his “Not a Blog”, GRRM has posted details of a book sale he’s holding through to the Super Bowl, in honor of his beloved New York Giants making an appearance there.
In brief:
And to quote instructions:
To get the discount, all you have to do is write GO GIANTS when you send your order.
Payments should be made via my PayPal address: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Questions and queries should go to my assistant Ty at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
As always, GRRM’s happy to personalize inscriptions on books sold through his official website. (At a guess, that GO GIANTS requirement may make this a non-starter for Pats fans…)
Thanks to Indigo Books, we’ve learned that George R.R. Martin will be speaking and signing books at the Indigo store at 55 Bloor Street West, at 7 PM on March 13th. Great opportunity for Canadian fans to meet GRRM. This appearance hasn’t apparently made it onto his Appearances page just yet, so it must have been recently finalized.
And we’ll just mention that his official page is a great way to see where he’ll be in coming months. Trips planned for this year include London in April for Eastercon, as well as such varied places as Portugal, Montana, Seattle, and Spain.
Subterranean Press has just announced that they’ll be producing a limited edition of George R.R. Martin’s first novel, Dying of the Light. A science fiction novel written at a time when Martin had made waves as one of the foremost short fiction writers in the genre, Dying of the Light is a personal favorite, in large part because of the evocative writing and the setting, the dying festival planet of Worlorn which is soon going to see its “dying of the light”. Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire may spot some characters or themes that are precursors to Martin’s bestselling fantasy series.
Pre-ordering is now available, and the pre-order page includes some samples of artist Tom Kidd‘s illustrations and paintings for the nove.
Unless I’m misunderstanding, I believe this interview was actually recorded in the summer of 2011 during GRRM’s book tour for the release of A Dance with Dragons, but in any case, it was posted two days ago. We’ve linked it in the Citadel’s So Spake Martin collection of correspondence, interviews, and signing reports, but will embed below.
No real spoilers to speak of, and no discussion of the TV series, but some interesting reflections on his work both past and present… as well as one rather inexplicable question.
George R.R. Martin mentioned the interview with noted historical fiction author Bernard Cornwell—creator of the Sharpe series of novels, which were famously brought to television with Sean Bean in the title role (a fact that Martin mentions, in light of Bean’s role in Game of Thrones)—on his Not a Blog, but noted that Amazon could only post an extract. He’s made an update, however, noting that the full interview can now be found on his website in the News section.
As Georged noted earlier, Cornwell’s familiar with “A Song of Ice and Fire”, so there’s some references to them from him scattered across the interview—quite cool!
This is a bit late, but neat. Via our forum, we learned that Furthur—a band founded by former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lash—held a concert on December 31st… and their “midnight moment”? Daenerys riding a dragon, to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”, followed by “Sugar Magnolia” after midnight. Quite cool! Besides “Dany”, a “Jorah Mormont” is also present for the 8-minute spectacular.
As noted on the forum, the audio of the concert was recorded and is now available at Archive.org.
Below is an embed of the “midnight moment”, and some discussion of how the Grateful Dead were almost involved in a film adaptation of one of Martin’s novels.
Over at Not a Blog, George R.R. Martin revealed that he had a holiday gift up on his site for fans: the first sample chapter from The Winds of Winter, the sixth novel in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series! A very pleasant surprise, to say the least, and it has some juicy details that hint towards some of the upcoming events Martin has hinted at.
Although this is the first sample chapter he’s posted at his official website, he has read one chapter at a convention, a detailed report and discussion of which can be found at the A Song of Ice and Fire forum.
It goes without saying that there are spoilers. For extensive discussion and speculation, see this thread over at Westeros.org’s A Song of Ice and Fire forum.
Selected for the TIME 100, named one of EW’s entertainers of the year, and so on and so forth—it’s been a banner year for George R.R. Martin and his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. And as we come to the close of 2011, another plaudit: USA Today has named Martin their Author of the Year, citing the booming popularity of the novels and the success of HBO’s adaptation. Congratulations to GRRM!
USA Today has been quite interested in the series, having published a cover feature back in July just before A Dance with Dragons hit the shelves.
This is nifty. With the end of the year on us, Random House—the largest publisher in the world, of whom Bantam is a subsidiary—posted its list of best-selling ebooks in various categories. And if you scroll down to the top-selling science fiction and fantasy titles…
Well, it starts to feel a bit deja vu-like, because the first six entries are all A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin—A Game of Thrones followed by A Dance with Dragons, then A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows rounding out the top 5… and the four-volume e-book set holding the #6 spot. Rather dominating, to say the least!
About a week and a half ago, we saw a tweet from someone who worked at the same building in which Audible.com is housed who noted that they had gone downstairs to the cafeteria and found George R.R. Martin holding forth. We had figured it was something to do with the A Feast for Crows audio book being re-released with Roy Dotrice reading it, but had assumed it’d be something included in that.
In fact, Audible’s released it straight to Youtube, and we’ve embedded it below. As well, we’ve linked it over at the So Spake Martin section of the Citadel, which collects interviews, correspondence, and more from GRRM.
Came across this new interview with George R.R. Martin at Scotcampus, which we’ve added to our collection of correspondence, interviews, and signing reports. There’s some good remarks on episode 9 of this new season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and a bit of speculative fodder for fans of certain elements of the A Song of Ice and Fire series.