Westeros

That video had a lot of new images, didn’t it? Some excellent material for consideration and discussion, and to help that along, we’ve posted screencaps to our Previews gallery, beginning with this first look at Dragonstone. It goes on for 45 more images, giving us added looks at Brienne of Tarth, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, and even Pyat Pree. There’s one image I failed to capture, of Catelyn, but we’ll be adding that tomorrow. Today… well, it’s 5 AM and bed is calling. Enjoy!

And here it is!

Screen caps can be found here, beginning with this image at Dragonstone.

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.

While you’re counting the hours and minutes to Sunday evening’s premiere of a new trailer with fresh footage from the upcoming season 2, The Hollywood Reporter takes us back to Season 1 with this long, 5 minute behind-the-scenes footage from HBO’s forthcoming DVD (US, UK) and Bluray (US, UK) box sets. This video features Emilia Clarke as Daenerys, as well as director Daniel Minahan and executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, as they discuss the infamous heart-eating scene:

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Mark your calendars, folks. And for those who are True Blood fans, HBO also says there’ll be a “short graphic tease” for season 5 of that show at 8:58 PM.

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:

• $10 off hardcovers
• $20 off limited editions

And to quote instructions:

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…)

Ian Ruhfass, a lead 3D Artist at A52/Elastic, popped over to Reddit to share the fact that he’s worked on the Emmy-winning title sequence, and that he’s been working on the title sequence for season 2. He’s coy with details, but yes, there’ll be some new locations featured in the title this season… and one of them sure sounds like it’ll be Harrenhal, which is to be expected.

He goes on to discuss his work more generally, and offers some good advice for budding 3D artists. Well worth checking out.

Via Czech fan site Ice & Fire, it seems that HBO Central Europe has confirmed that they’re repeating what they did last year: the second season of Game of Thrones will air the day after it premieres in the United States, meaning April 2nd for a broad swath of Central Europe. They join Sky Atlantic as being offer next-day airing of the show, eased in great part by being part of the HBO corporate umbrella. Whether any other broadcasters or cable companies will be able to provide the same service in Europe remains to be seen.

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.

Subtext, makers of the iPad free social reading app of the same name, have launched a completely overhauled version of their application. The UI is sleeker and more informative, a brand new book search tool has been set, and more.

Last summer, Subtext invited me to be one of three “experts”—joined by series editor Anne Groell (who’s also our editor on The World of Ice and Fire)  and Sean T. Collins of Boiled Leather)—to add notes to A Game of Thrones. It was a fun, interesting project, and we amassed something north of 1,000 notes covering the sublime (Sean’s entries are particularly thought-provoking) to the amusing (Anne has some good stories about the behind-the-scenes) to the trivial (well, that’d be my entries, filled with little facts and heraldry and quotes direct from GRRM). The feedback has been quite positive, I’ve been told.

A growing range of books are supported by the app, so that readers, experts, and writers can comment on and communicate with one another about the books they’re reading. It’s a fantastic way to bring books even further into the 21st century, by making them social. Want to argue why a character made a bad choice on page 633? Want to respond to an editor’s funny story about how the author worked his way to writing a particular scene as she did? Want to take argue with someone else’s gloss of the text? You can do all of that with the Subtext app. Or how about embed videos or images that you associate with particular characters, scenes, or events? You can do that, as well.

Books can be imported from various sources, or bought through the Google Books store, and there are nice, clear instructions for how to do it in the app. I believe an Android version is in development, so for now it’s just for iPad, and available only via the siTunes US store. If youv’e an iPad, I really recommend checking it out—I believe there’s a few 50 page previews, with the notes, so you can see what each book they have has to offer.

Kotaku, the gaming-focused site that’s part of the Gawker Media empire, has an excellent write-up for A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Amazon: US, UK) from Fantasy Flight Games.

As the review indicates, it really is a fantastic game—runs a bit long and works best with a full complement of players, and the rules take some learning, but once you have it down, it’s extremely good. So good, that it’s just shy of the top 100 at BoardGameGeek, which ranks something like 5,000 board games. The new 2nd edition is said to be particularly good, bringing in rules from past expansions and marrying them to beautiful art and graphic design. If you’re a fan of deep, strategic board games, the Game of Thrones board game is a terrific choice.

This is almost the most we’ve heard from any of the new cast members, and it’s certainly interesting. In this interview with Blackfilm, actor Nonso Anozie—cast in the role of Xaro Xhoan Daxos—spills some details about his role, his familiarity with the books, and his experience working on the show

Thanks to HBO getting the Art Direction video up on Youtube the day after it was released on HBO.com, we have screenshots of notable bits, with commentary on details.

Featuring the most extensive glimpses we’ve had of Qarth and Harrenhal to date, the screenshots begin here, with what’s also the most spoilery image in the whole thing. Tread carefully!

Thanks to Blastr for bringing this IGN interview with Steve DeKnight, executive producer and writer of Starz’s Spartacus series, we learn that the writing staff of Spartacus are all big fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones while he explains why a certain storyline they had planned for the new season fell by the way side:

Another day, another guild award nomination! This time, according to Deadline Hollywood, the Costumer Designers Guild has announced its nominees, and Game of Thrones‘s Michele Clapton is included in the Outstanding Period/Fantasy Television category. We suspect there’ll be stiff competition from Showtime’s The Borgias (costumes by Gabriella Pescucci) and fellow HBO show Boardwalk Empire (John A. Dunn, Lisa Padovani), to say the least.