Westeros

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.

Read the essay!

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

Read the interview!

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.

We received the alert from Amazon US today: you can now officially preorder of the complete first season sets of Game of Thrones!

No release date noted, but the MSRP is plain: $59.99 for the DVD set (down to $45 at Amazon) and $79.98 for the Blu-ray set (down to $56 at Amazon).

Now, the top questions we’ve had:

• “When will it be released?” HBO’s standard practice is to release their DVD sets in the month or two prior to the new season. So, if Season 2 starts in April 2012, it’s highly likely that the DVD and Blu-ray sets won’t be on sale prior to March or February (at the earliest). There have been some commentators suggesting that this show might benefit from being released for sale during winter holiday season, but HBO has a pretty firm view of how these things are done, so we wouldn’t advise you to hold your breath.
• “When’s it coming to the UK?” Looking at True Blood Season 3, it was released in the U.K. on May 23rd (the show premieres June 26 in the U.S.)... and, interestingly, it looks like the set was released on May 31 in the U.S., so the U.K. got it a week earlier. This tells me that HBO UK will be releasing the Game of Thrones Blu-ray and DVD set more-or-less simultaneously. Whether that’s in February-March 2012, or November-December 2011, we’ll have to wait and see.
• “What extras and features will it have?” We don’t really know, but the word through the grapevine is that there’ll be a lot of neat stuff on the sets, but we don’t know specifics. Given HBO’s track record, though, commentaries on some episodes are a given—we’re really hoping GRRM’s invited to comment on “The Pointy End”—and there’s plenty of EPK material that’s both published and unpublished covering the behind-the-scenes development. We know a documntary team was on hand throughout the shooting, including during the pilot, so we wouldn’t be surprised at a 30 minute “making of” sort of thing among the other features. Material on the setting, its history, and its characters? Seems likely. Never-before-seen behind the scenes photos and stills? Yes, that’s pretty likely too. A Rome-like set of pop-ups filling in background details as an episode airs, much as HBO Go does when you turn on interactive features? I would almost say you should count on it. This is HBO, they don’t do things by half-measures.

With the end of the U.K. run of the first season, the fine folks at Thronecast have put together a last episode, with a lot of good things. Among them? An interview with Natalia Tena, who plays Osha, which reveals details about her audition (she brought her own shackles!) and the mighty Hodor (yes, that was a prosthetic; she got to handle it!) And, of course, Linda and I give our thoughts on the final episode and the series overall.

The Natalia Tena interview also appears to have an extended version on their site, as well as an extended version of their interview with Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark) who—as some have noted—is rather publicity shy, so that’s quite a coup! And besides that, the Thronecast team very kindly arranged for Natalia to speak exclusively with Linda and I for a few minutes, the results of which can be found in our Features section, which contains quite a few interviews with other members of the cast and crew.

It was a great experience to be part of it, and we’d like to thank Ruby Thomas at Sky, Dan Wright at Koink, and Geoff Lloyd (en väldig trevligt kille!) for his fine hosting and helping put us at ease—it was all quite a new experience, to say the least.

The latest entry in the Wild Cards series, co-created and edited by George R.R. Martin, is now available!

Containing contributions from old hands and members of the original Wild Cards Consortium—Melinda Snodgrass, Stephen Leigh, John Jos. Miller, and Victor Milán to name a few—as well as writers brand new to the Wild Cards universe such as Mary Anne Mohanraj, Campbell Award-winner David Anthony Durham, comic book and Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell, and more, it’s a look at life on the streets of Jokertown from the perspective of NYPD officers assigned to the eponymous “Fort Freak”, the headquarters for the police precinct responsible for the area. It really seems like a bit of a throwback to the early entries in the city, which focused on and were very much informed by life in New York City at the time.

Via James Hibberd at EW, some great news: viewership of the final episode of Game of Thrones hit 3 million viewers, with 3.9 million viewers overnight across recap and other sources. According to TV by the Numbers, the “key” 18-49 demographic was 1.4, which surpassed Boardwalk Empire‘s finale in that same metric. That figure probably matters rather more to advertising-supported broadcast television—18 or 99, a subscriber is a subscriber as far as HBO is concerned—but it does show that the core audience slants younger.

Via Digital Spy, it looks like “Fire and Blood”  was the 2ndmost-watched episode of the series in its initial airing (after the premiere), with an average of 667,000 (2.7%) viewers in total. The overall viewership of episode 8, “The Pointy End” was, unfortunately, down a bit according to BARB (via @WyverynWood—1.36 million viewers, down from 1.556m for the previous episode. That’s a rather baffling result, we admit, but as we’ve noted before, U.K. figures do seem to have a greater margin of error.

We expect the U.S. figures to come in within a few hours.

Two items that should be of interest to fans were posted over at Suvudu over the weekend or thereabouts, but with all the excitement over

First, the first glimpse of one of the first bound hardcovers of A Dance with Dragons (Preorder: US, UK, Audio US, Audio UK) in the hands of editor Anne Groell, who very cheerfully (...) points out that the book is under embargo; only a handful of reviewers have received copies, and they have all been required to sign non-disclosure agreements. So, don’t expect much in the way of spoilers or reviews until a few days prior to the release on July 12th at the earliest.

And secondly, in honor of the finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Suvudu’s launched a contest with a total of twenty prizes: ten copies of the first novel, and ten copies of the first novel in audio book form. The audio book, read by actor Roy Dotrice, is a real treat—and won Dotrice an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records!

An amazing finale for Game of Thrones! The collective gasps and cheers on Twitter were certainly something else. As with last week’s episode, we’ve rushed to put together our full recap and detailed, chapter-by-chapter break down comparing the episode to what author George R.R. Martin originally had on the page. Please forgive any typos or errors—the hour’s late!

Read the “Fire and Blood” recap!

(P.S. The recap has something very special at the end…)