@DrGames: Way back at the start of the thread you offered, fairly eloquently, your opinion of ASoIaF and how you disliked it because it did not chime with your worldview, which is an understandable opinion. However, that does leave me bemused that you'd give copies of a book in a series you've said you dislike as a 'reward' to players in your group. Were the players pre-existing fans of the series?
Hi Werthead!
I do not know if they were or are fans. I am not a big fan for the reasons mentioned. I know that the books are wildly popular. So, I used the popularity as a way of measuring potential value to my players.
They seemed less than inclined this time around.
:-D
In service,
Rich
www.drgames.org
Hello all. I have been re-'reading' (audiobooking actually) the series lately and for some reason something struck me this morning, and I thought I would share. Apologies if someone thought of this before me
GRRM has been coy about Jon's mother all through the books. Now, somehow it hit me, what if Jon WASN'T Ned Stark's son? We know that his sister Lyanna was 'kidnapped' by Rhaegar (according to Ned), but Dany mentioned the match in more favorable terms at one point. What if Lyanna's last 'please' was to see her son to safety? The blood-drenched room Ned remembers is a birth chamber? A secret that must be kept, to preserve Jon's life from the vengeance of King Robert? Even from Catelyn? Would that make Jon the logical 'third dragon' with Dany and Aegon? GRRM has said that only Arya and Jon look like their Stark father, but he has hinted that Leanna and Arya also are quite similar in appearance. I don't know why this occurred to me, but I thought I would share the possibility. I know Jon's apparent 'death' kind of throws this off, but GRRM is always playing games like this.
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Hello all. I have been re-'reading' (audiobooking actually) the series lately and for some reason something struck me this morning, and I thought I would share. Apologies if someone thought of this before me
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R+L=J (Rhaegar + Lyanna = Jon) is one of those theories that have been floating around since the end of Clash of Kings. Howland Reed probably knows.
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Have you read book five yet?
Apparently, Rhaegar's eldest son - Aegon - was smuggled out prior to the sack of King's Landing and has been raised these last 15 years by Ser Jon Connington among the Second Sons. He's Varys' piece for 'puppet king of Westeros'. We see more about Jon Connington than young Aegon, and I have a vague suspicion that we're going to see Aegon reflected in the hopes of everyone who wants a good king...only to see him cut down by Martin's sadism towards his characters.
While lots of people regard this as 'not playing fair', several mentions were made in book 3 that there were those who felt that Aegon's body was too badly mauled to be identified as his.
Daenerys shows that she's not especially cut out to rule against an insurgency and a hostile population.
Have you read book five yet?
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So the jury is still out on whether Aegon is the real Aegon, highlighted by numerous mentions in the same book of there being Targaryen and Blackfyre descendants in the Free Cities who would presumably have the same colouring as 'real' Targaryens.
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An interesting piece of trivia. GRRM's first-ever published piece of writing, a letter published in FANTASTIC FOUR #20 in 1963 when he was 15 years old.
An excellent new world map for ASoIaF. Also interesting is that GRRM provides commentary for it. He states the map is broadly right but not in the details. He then goes on to say the new Maps of Ice and Fire book coming out in October will feature a canon world map that extends as far east as Asshai. However, it won't feature a map of the whole world, only the world as it is known in Westeros and Essos.
Of interest for gamers running campaigns in the world, the map has other versions available where the labels and layers can be removed for 'clean' area maps for printing or reproducing.
I read an interesting interview with GRR Martin on a travel site of all places.
Not sure how to link it so here is the full address:
http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/game-of-thrones-exclusiv e-george-martin-talks-season-the-winds-of-winter-and-real-world-influences- for-song-of-ice-and-fire.html?id=10593041
My interview with George R.R. Martin at EasterCon 2012. We talk about the TV series, the books and his career as a whole.
Any chance the interview will be made available in pod-format? I've found that I prefer listening to interviews and such on something I can carry around a bit easier than the laptop.
(The first five minutes before the phone rang was good, though - and am I the only one who love that you no longer have to hope that someone on a radio- or TV-outlet will decide that the author you want to know more about, but who live so far away that you're probably never going to attend a panel with him/her, is interesting to actually get to hear that author speak?
GRRR Run-on sentence.
Also: Best timed fire-alarm ever! :D
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Excellent interview, thanks for posting! What was the ADwD question you refrained from asking because it would spoil someone in the audience?
My primary concern from the interview is that it seems like he hasn't actually done that much writing on TWoW since ADwD was published last year. When asked about the status of the next book, he basically said that he has a couple hundred pages done (which I believe is mostly stuff moved over from ADwD which had already been written), and that he hopes it comes out faster once he really starts in on it after he clears out his current side projects. If I were him, I'd be extremely concerned that HBO could need to finish the series before I could get it done. I think he can get TWoW finished in time, but I have serious doubts about the final book being finished before HBO gets there unless they start splitting all of the books into multiple seasons, which seems like a bad idea.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that GRRM seems extremely friendly and accessible to fans, so kudos to him for that!
Elsewhere at the con, GRRM said he had several ADWD chapters left over (inlcuding, I believe, two Arianne and maybe the Theon chapter he's been reading out) but has worked on several other chapters since the book was completed (I believe the Victarion and Tyrion chapters that have appeared at some conventions are totally new). I didn't get a full rundown of what was what.
A review of WINDHAVEN, an early, long-before-ASoIaF novel that GRRM co-wrote with Lisa Tuttle in the 1970s.
Windhaven is a storm-wracked world consisting of a vast ocean and a small scattering of islands, home to the descendants of survivors of a spacecraft crash centuries earlier. The most efficient way of passing messages between islands is by the flyers, specially-trained men and women who can use strong-but-flexible 'wings' salvaged from the wrecked spaceship to ride the winds from island to island. Tradition has it that a flyer's wings are passed from parent to their eldest child, but this order is upset when Maris of Lesser Amberley, the adopted daughter of a flyer, is required to give up her wings to her adopted father's trueborn eldest child, who has no interest in flying. The establishment is opposed to any opening of the flyers' ranks to the 'land-bound', but the winds of change are blowing on Windhaven, and these changes will be difficult and potentially bloody.
Windhaven, originally published in 1981, is a 'fix-up' novel, consisting of two short stories written in the 1970s and a third, concluding section written for this edition. It was George R.R. Martin's second novel and Lisa Tuttle's first. With the book's feudal society and low technology level (due to a lack of metal on the islands), it is reminiscent of fantasy, although there is an SF background to the setting.
The novel is divided into three episodes, taken from different points in Maris's life. In the first, Maris has to fight tradition in order to hold onto her wings. In the second, Maris has succeeded in allowing the 'land-bound' to train as flyers, but faces problems when a bitter and angry new recruit attempts to earn his wings after rejecting the traditions of the flyer caste. In the third, an older Maris, recovering from a head injury, is drawn into a dispute over the powers of the flyers and the land-bound rulers of the islands.
Each episode builds on the same theme on tradition and transformation. Windhaven is, in essence, a caste-based society with the flyers held to different standards, laws and responsibilities as the land-bound. Maris's arguments for changing this to allow the land-bound commoners to train as flyers works because it solves an existing problem, where people in flyer families who are not good at flying are lost in accidents, and their irreplaceable wings with them. However, it is not a safe or easy answer, as the influx of new blood into the flyer community causes unforseen problems that the society has to deal with. The basic premise of a rigid society being changed by the actions of an individual (usually, as in this case, the protagonist) is commonplace, but Windhaven delights in exploring the consequences of each change and following the ripples and additional complications they cause. The book ends with, hopefully, a new, fairer and more permanent order being established, but even in this case Maris realises that problems will continue to arise, this being the nature of societies and indeed life.
Windhaven benefits from strong characterisation. Maris develops from episode to episode, the scope of her ambition widening as her understanding of the world grows. She starts out as a little girl who only wants to fly, but becomes a leader who must make sometimes unpopular decisions to maintain the rules she herself set in place. More complex still is Val, the 'one-wing' Maris starts out by hating but ultimately has to fight for, despite his own dislike of her. There is also S'Rella, the trainee flyer from the far south, who wants to follow in Maris's footsteps and is upset to find the world a harsher place than she thought, as well as Evan (a doctor in the service of a ruthless and cruel lord) and Coll (Maris's brother, born to be a flyer but wanting to be a singer). It's a small but well-defined cast of characters.
There's a strong sense of place to the islands of Windhaven, particularly successful as we still get a sense of the nature of some far-off places even though Maris never visits them. Song of Ice and Fire fans may also be amused to find some place-names that crop up again in the later series (such as the Iron Islands and the Eyrie). The descriptions of flying are vivid, although the actual act of flying plays a smaller role in the story than a reader might expect (it's function and ramifications being more central to the narrative).
Windhaven (****) is a solid early effort from both authors, though perhaps a tad slight compared to their later works and the book's short length requires a fair amount of convenience in plot developments (namely, the way Maris is at the centre of all three major world-shaking moments in the book). It's well-written, mixing cynicism with hope and adding a dash of realism to the optimism engendered by Maris's successes. It is available now in the UK and USA.
Started reading the entire series again for the third time in preparation of HBO's Season 3. It's amazing how many crackpot theories are out there now as the readership swells.
recently I read on Westros.org that some people thought Podrick Payne might be Aegon..
lol
Bantam have confirmed that THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE should be out on 29 October this year. This is a 288-page companion guide to the books, a large-format coffee table book featuring significant amounts of new artwork and vast amounts of new canon information on the world and backstory. George R.R. Martin wrote some new material for this book but otherwise only provided background notes and information. Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, the founders/admins of Westeros.org, wrote the bulk of the book drawing on GRRM's material. The book will also clarify some of the new locations revealed on last year's LANDS OF ICE AND FIRE maps.
Preview pages:
The Dawn Age.
The Children of the Forest.
The Faith Militant Uprising.
King's Landing (with auto-generated text, so not representative of the final book).
Another extract from THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE.
This section tells the story of the war between the Rhoynar and the Valyrians. Incensed with the Valyrians colonising the riverbank, slaughtering the great turtles and engaging in river piracy and trade wars, the Rhoynar raise an army 250,000, augmented by powerful water wizards, to destroy the Valyrians once and for all. After a series of stunning victories, the Rhoynar march on Volantis, only to find that the Valyrians have (inevitably) deployed dragons against them. Three hundred of them.
300 hundred dragons would be ..bad
Surprised no one has mentioned this on here yet, but there is a new sample chapter from Winds of Winter available on George RR Martin's website.
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Yes, and it was a very good read. I really like t
I really hope the next book comes out sometime in the next 12 months or so...
although probably something that shouldn't have much read into it, GRRM did say that recent decisions to cancel some convention visits may get reverse if he finishes Winds of Winter this summer. So while the implication is that it won't be done by the start of fall, he must be far enough along that and end is in sight.
More than that, in an interview with EW he said clearly that he wants to get the book done by the end of this year so it can be published before Season 6 starts airing (in April 2016).
Whether that's actually achievable is another thing, but it's the first clear goal he's set since ADWD came out.