Westeros

Tor has launched its 2011 Reader’s Choice Awards, giving fans a chance to have their say in what their favorite works of the last year were. Voting’s easy: just sign up for a; make sure to follow the rules!

You can nominate as many titles you like in the following categories: Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Cover Art, Best Graphic Novel. You all probably have notions for what to suggest as your favorite novels last year, but I’d like to recommend comic book fans consider nominating Criminal: The Last of the Innocent by Ed Brubaker (for my money, one of the best writers working in the field right now) and Sean Phillips. If you’ve read it, you know how good it is as it mixes crime fiction with a deconstruction of the classic Archie comic characters (yes, really). And if you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for?

Valyrian Steel, makers of officially licensed replica weapons based on “A Song of Ice and Fire”, have noted via their Facebook page that their stock of Ice—the Stark heirloom sword—has just dipped under 50% of the limited run of about 2,000 weapons.

They have also just noted that a low-numbered case of Arya’s Stark sword Needle turned up, and the next five orders will get numbers 49, 51, 52, 53, or 54. Here’s Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) with an example of Needle that George sent to her as a gift last year.

Yesterday, we shared a (very spoilery) interview with actor Tom Wlaschiha, a new addition to the series who’ll be playing the role of the mysterious Jaqen H’ghar. Well… he’s supposed to be mysterious, but Wlaschiha really does reveal quite a lot about the character, so if you’re unfamiliar with A Clash of Kings, don’t read it!

Next up, Nonso Anozie—the actor cast in the role of Xaro Xhoan Daxos, who plays a central role in Daenerys’s season 2 storyline—is caught at the red carpet for his latest film, The Grey, and speaks about his role a bit in a rather less spoilery way.

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!

Last night, we spotted the fact that A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Cookbook Companion to A Game of Thrones was now available to pre-order, with a June 26th publication date.

We mentioned this last night Twitter and Facebook, but it was quite late so we saved this post for today.

BenBella Books will be publishing Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in June of this year, as part of their Smart Pop series. Edited by James Lowder, the anthology collects critical essays from a number of writers that examine the novels from various perspectives. We’ve seen a partial list of topics, and there promises to be some very interesting material in there.

The full list of contributors or topics can’t be shared yet, but we can name a couple, at least: us.

Thanks to Focus Home Interactive, the European publisher, we have a few new screenshots from the officially licensed Game of Thrones roleplaying game, created by Cyanide. We’ve had a lot of new information of late, so check that out if you want to know a bit more about the game.

These screen shots provide a little additional mystery to the storyline, hinting at curious turns of the plot, some mysterious new figures, a bit of new heraldry, and a glimpse at what combat will look like in terms of information on display as you fight. Also, a couple of shots of Dog—ugly as sin, but he’s surprisingly cute; I think it’s because I expected some sort of direwolf-sized mastiff, and instead he’s… well, not anything that big (very pointy teeth, though).

That list of award nominations? May be getting to be two arms long, rather than just one, now that the Directors Guild has announced its nominations for achievement in television direction. And… you guessed it, HBO’s Game of Thrones makes that list too.

In this case, it’s veteran director Tim van Patten getting acknowledged for his excellent work in directing the first episode of the series, “Winter is Coming”. Here’s the write-up the DGA nomination provides for the director:

His competition? Michael Cuesta for the pilot of Homeland, Vince Gilligan for Breaking Bad‘s “Face Off”, Patty Jenkins for the pilot of The Killing (which, despite all the problems that developed as the show barreled to the end, was a beautifully directed episode, in my opinion), and Michael Waxman for Friday Night Lights‘s “Always”.

Van Patten’s extensive prior record with the DGA, while all the others are first-time nominees, may make it seem like he’d be the favorite. And, who knows, maybe he is. But all the other directors are absolutely worthy, so it seems to us that the award could be anyone’s this season. Still, we’ll be partisan and cheer on Van Patten and Game of Thrones.

Thanks to @olafkeith, we were pointed to the fact that some end-of-year information had come out for the publishing industry… and as it happens, “A Song of Ice and Fire” left its mark on the lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

First up, Publisher’s Weekly recaps 2011 in the US market. When discussing how long paperbacks stayed on their bestseller list, this is what they had to say:

According to Ireland’s RTE, the Irish Film & Television Awards nominees have been announced, and HBO’s Game of Thrones—predominantly shot in Northern Ireland last year—has scored five nominations. The awards are given to Irish-born, Irish citizens, or full-time Irish residents. Here’s the list:

• Best Drama: Game of Thrones (Mark Huffam & Generator Entertainment)
• Director, Television Drama: Brian Kirk (directed “Lord Snow”, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things”, and “The Wolf and the Lion”)
• Actress in a Lead Television Role : Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark)
• Actor in a Supporting Television Role: Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger; Gillen is also nominated in a lead role for Love/Hate)
• Sound: Ronan Hill & Sound Post Production Team (Generator Entertainment)

The awards will be presented on February 12 in Dublin.

After our reporting on the Visual Effects Society nominations for Game of Thrones, we were reminded of the fact that BlueBolt were not going to be lead VFX vendors for the show this season, per our interview with Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor. So, who had stepped up to do the job?

Some Googling reveals that the information has been out there, but it seems none of the fan sites noticed: Pixomondo, “an international visual effects company with a global network of studios in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, Beijing and most recently Toronto,” has landed the job.

The list of awards shows that have placed HBO’s Game of Thrones on their short list is as long as my arm at this point. But here’s one more: the Visual Effects Society announced the nominees for their awards, and in the broadcast categories the show did quite well, pulling in three nominations; the leading show was sibling Boardwalk Empire, with four.

Here’s the categories in which it’s nominated:

UPDATE: HBO has confirmed the breakdown of directors below.

This one’s for those who are interested in some of the minutia of the production. We’ve previously tried to piece together which directors were directing each episode, and we had about half of them figured out after some speculation. The last pieces of the puzzle seem likely to have fallen into place, if this CV from an actor on the show - Darren Killeen, credited as “Baratheon Guard”—is anything to go by.

In it, he lists his experience on the show as covering episodes 3 and 5, and Alik Sakharov (first season cinematographer) and David Petrarca as the directors. Assuming that they’re listed in the correct order (and we believe they are, because we know for a fact that Petrarca directed episode 4, and it’s common for directors to get continguous episode blocks to work on), here’s who we think are directing the ten episodes of the second season of Game of Thrones:

Pearson Moore, who provided this site a number of well-received essays in the course of the season, has let us know that his collected essays (including additional ones never before published on this or any site) are now available as part of the Amazon Prime book borrowing program, free of charge for those who are Amazon Prime subscribers. It’s a great opportunity for Amazon Prime subscribers to take advantage of that offer, and for fans in general to read a number of excellent essays and articles considering Game of Thrones as a series and the world of “A Song of Ice and Fire”. You can get to the books—either to borrow through the program, or purchase outright—at the following links:

• Game of Thrones Season One Essays
• Direwolves and Dragons Vol. 1.01
• Direwolves and Dragons Vol. 1.02

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.