George R.R. Martin - Tulen ja jään laulu: Kirjauutisia

Call the banners — a new Game of Thrones calendar is here! In this 2019 edition, master illustrator John Jude Palencar brings his surreal imagination to iconic moments of George R. R. Martin’s spellbinding fantasy saga, A Song of Ice and Fire. Renowned for his work with such authors as H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Christopher Paolini, Palencar delivers new heartrending and meticulously wrought illustrations: stunning conjurations of winter’s sprawling snowscapes, and gorgeous character studies that delve deeper into the humanity of each exiled prince and errant knight, the Seven Kingdoms’ most conflicted hearts.

Any plans for Asoiaf-related writing (releases) for 2018? TWoW certainly would be awesome, but anything else planned?

FIRE & BLOOD is planned.

Does this mean FIRE & BLOOD is completed, or merely on track to be completed sometime soon?

The first volume should be completed soon. The second is hardly begun.

Just out of curiosity: will FIRE AND BLOOD be released before or after Winds?

F&B will be in two volumes. Vol 1 before, vol 2 after.

Fire and Blood: Volume II, which will cover the period from Aegon III to Robert's Rebellion and the death of the Mad King, will follow several years later, presumably after A Dream of Spring is completed. This possibly means that the second half of the history will be larger and in more detail than originally envisaged, so for those who've been beginning for a prequel story about the Rebellion, this may be the closest you'll get (I also suspect this will have to follow Spring so George can give the full, "unedited" account of the war without having to worry about any more spoilers).

Yes, most of FIRE & BLOOD consists of the 'sidebars' I originally wrote for THE WORLD OF ICE & FIRE. Abridged versions of some of those pieces appeared as "The Princess and the Queen," "The Rogue Prince," and "The Sons of the Dragon," but these are the full versions, together with some chapters that have never appeared anywhere.

Yes, Fire & Blood will be illustrated.

OnrajSuosittelen Gerrmun uusinta odotellessa kyseisen herran itsensä hehkuttamaa Maurice Druonin historiallista The Accursed Kings -sarjaa, jos ei ole jo luettu. Parasta viihdettä ikinä, ja vaikka vain fiktiivistä historiaa, ei siis spefiä, on minusta jopa parempi kuin Tulen ja jään laulu, jos pitää nyt vertailla.

All's good, boys and girls... lots of exciting things going on.

LOTS of exciting things.

Maybe too many. I am buried in work, so much that it is starting to overwhelm me. Even with my army of loyal minions.

So I am going to step back from blogging -- okay, from NOT-a-blogging -- for a while, till I get a few of these monkeys off my back.

In the near future, you'll likely see fewer posts here. And some of those will be by my minions.

I'll return eventually. Just don't know when.

JussiKiinnostavaa nähdä, miten lukijat suhtautuvat siihen, jos Martinin seuraava Tulen ja jään laulu -kirja ei olekaan kauan odotettu The Winds of Winter vaan Fire and Blood. Luulisi, että Amazoniin tippuu valtavasti yhden tähden arvioita.

JussiLuulisi, että näistä julkaistaan myöhemmin kokoelmat A Game of Thrones -sarjiksen tapaan.

How it all started!
The gripping prehistory about the rule of the royal house Targaryen.

What is the Silmarillion for Tolkien's fans is now published by George R.R. Martin – the epic prehistory of The Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones! Three centuries before the series begins, Aegon Targaryen and his sister wives and their three dragons conquered the continent of Westeros. The reign of his descendants lasted 280 years. They survived rebellion and civil war – until Robert Baratheon overthrew the mad King Aerys II of the Iron Throne. This is the story of the great house of Targaryen, written down by Archmaester Gyldayn, transcribed by George R.R. Martin.

Of course, the story doesn’t end with the regents of Aegon III. There is a lot more history to come, and Archmaester Gyldayn will get to all that too, in FIRE & BLOOD, Volume Two. But that one is a few years down the pike. So don’t get impatient. Gyldayn will get to it eventually, but he’s old, and so am I, and we both have other projects to tend to as well.

The thrilling history of the Targaryens comes to life in this masterly work by the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the inspiration for HBO’s Game of Thrones.

With all the fire and fury fans have come to expect from internationally bestselling author George R. R. Martin, this is the first volume of the definitive two-part history of the Targaryens in Westeros.

Centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones, House Targaryen—the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria—took up residence on Dragonstone. Fire and Blood begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why did it become so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What is the origin of Daenerys’s three dragon eggs? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel and featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley. Readers have glimpsed small parts of this narrative in such volumes as The World of Ice & Fire, but now, for the first time, the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed.

With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire and Blood is the ultimate game of thrones, giving readers a whole new appreciation for the dynamic, often bloody, and always fascinating history of Westeros.

- BRAND-NEW CONTENT FROM THE GAME OF THRONES UNIVERSE: This comprehensive history, straight from the mind and pen of George R.R. Martin, showcases the Targaryen family and their rise to power.
- 70% NEW MATERIAL: Although some elements of this history have been published elsewhere, the vast majority has never been seen before.
- MORE THAN 80 ORIGINAL BLACK-AND-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTIST DOUG WHEATLEY
- FULL-COLOR ENDPAPERS
- GRRM-BRANDED PACKAGING: Cover design reflects the packaging for Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, providing a clear visual link for readers.

I’m returning once again to THE WINDS OF WINTER.

I just don’t understand it. We are human beings, we are human artists, we produce at the rate we produce, and telling us that you really want our work, but that you fucking hate us and that we should nail ourselves to our desks and produce until it’s finished… it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t have both. "You’re a lazy bastard! Now give me that thing that I really want that’s beautiful, that only you do!"

KiLLPaTRiCKKateellinen Jussille. Voisit katsoa blurayltä 27 jaksoa Game of Thronesia putkeen vaikka huomenna.

Kirjan suomennoksesta ei ole vielä sopimusta, kertoo Martinin aiempien teosten suomentamisesta vastannut Satu Hlinovsky Kirjava Kustannuksesta.

JussiSitten kun olen lukenut The Winds of Winterin, aion katsoa viitos- ja kuutoskaudet. Tulen ja jään laulun päätösosan jälkeen sitten kaksi viimeistä kautta. Mutta en ole missään välissä fanittanut oheistuote-telkkasarjaa, katson sitä kirjasarjan sovituksena. Martinin romaanit ovat se juttu, josta innostun.

This question might be painful, but I’ll ask it anyways: has there been any thought of publishing WINDS in similar fashion as FIRE AND BLOOD: in two volumes?

Some of my publishers have suggested breaking up WINDS as we did with FEAST and DANCE. I am resisting that notion.

George, do you think it’s still possible to complete the series in just 7 books? Even without splitting TWOW, I get the feeling there are way too many story arcs that need to reach some sort of conclusion, and we might be looking at an inevitable 8th book. Any thoughts?

My thought is I want to finish book 6.

Regarding TWOW, there is one thing I’m extremely curious about. Going back to your New Year’s post over two years ago, you explained how you for the better part of the year had thought it would be possible to release the book before the upcoming GoT season. Perhaps that was unrealistic to begin with, but it must have meant that you weren’t TOO far away from finishing the book. Since then, 2+ years. What happened?

Did you need to do a lot of re-writing?
Did you stop working on the book more or less completely in favor of other projects?
Have you started working on A Dream of Spring?

I have done some rewriting, yes. But there have been distractions as well.

No, I have not started working on A DREAM OF SPRING.

George, besides the Targaryen history, is there anything else you’d be interested to explore in length that’s reflected only relatively briefly in AWOIAF? If you had the time between other projects, would you write something like that?

Alas, I don’t have the time, that’s the point.

IF I had all the time in the world, I would finish THE WINDS OF WINTER and A DREAM OF SPRING, write another six or eight or ten Dunk & Egg novellas, complete the second volume of FIRE & BLOOD… then I might go back my unfinished historical BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER, do some Wild Cards stories and maybe a Wild Cards novel, write some new Haviland Tuf stories, spec a few pilot scripts for my own GAME OF THRONES successor shows, do a sequel to FEVRE DREAM, return to the Thousand Worlds for a huge space opera… and then do something completely different, like a murder mystery or a western.

Time is always the issue.

Hi George, any possibility of releasing the deleted Tyrion chapter in DANCE (where he met the Shrouded Lord) in the near future? In the Guardian Interview of 2014, you said you have been tempted to publish it as a novella. Have you decided to publish it? It won’t spoil WINDS and we will certainly enjoy it!

I will need to do something with that chapter one of these days… but just what, I don’t know.

Just for the sake of argument, let me point out that many many people invest their time into works without endings. F. Scott Fitzgerald never finished THE LAST TYCOON, Charles Dickens never finished EDWIN DROOD, Mervyn Peake never finished TITUS ALONE, yet those works are still read.

I do intend to finish A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, of course… but doubtless Peake, Dickens, Fitzgerald, and Tolkien would have said the same.

My past experience has proved to me that progress reports do more harm than good. Some people dislike the answer and that triggers a fresh wave of nonsense. Or they do like the answer, but having answered one question just guarantees I will get a hundred more the next day. Also, since no one ever seems to go back to old posts, I get asked the same questions over and over and over again, even if I have already answered them a dozen times.

Sadly, that seems to be just what is happening here on this new blog. Replying to comments just brings in more comments that people want replies to. And the commenters will not stay on topic, no matter how often I ask. This post, for example, was about FIRE & BLOOD, but I am getting tons of comments about WINDS OF WINTER and the GAME OF THRONES series, including some very specific questions about specific characters… questions of the sort that I have never replied to, and will never reply to. Character reveals belong in books, not blogs.

I do like to engage with my readers, but this does get frustrating.

I don’t know… I think I have probably released too many sample chapters already. Put them all together, and what, there are probably more than a hundred pages (I honestly don’t know, I have never tried the exercise).

In the past, I have always been happy to release sample chapters, and to read other chapters at cons. But in this age of the internet, no good deed goes unpunished. That was brought home to me when the Dozois anthology BOOK OF SWORDS was released, and I found myself reading reviews that slammed “Sons of the Dragon” as ‘old, retread’ material because I’d read the story at a couple cons… for the entertainment of the few hundred people in the audience, but of course summaries went up all over the web, and somehow in the minds of some what should have been a brand new reading experience became old and familiar. It’s not worth it putting up sample chapters and giving readings if it means it will come back and bite me in the ass when the book is finally published.

I am not glad. We did not need anything else than Winds of Winter and the last book. All fucking spinoffs and histories and other moneymaking stuff could have waited!!!!! First things must come first!

I am not sure HBO would agree that the spinoffs (I prefer the term “successor shows” myself) could have waited. With GOT set to end in 2019, they put five of them in the works, so as to have a new show… or more than one… to take up the mantle in 2020. (Development takes time). The successor shows were going to happen regardless. I prefer that they happen with my participation and guidance, rather than without it.

I’m not sure if it was the official explanation, but it’s certainly been bandied about that several chapters at the end of Dance were held out at the publisher’s request. I’m sure it was done with the best of intentions, and probably with practical issues in mind (I’m a printer, so I get these things), but have you considered whether in the future, if you feel a book as a whole is one volume of work that you will be more likely to resist these requests. I feel half the frustration with waiting for Winds is that it feels like the End of Dance was hacked off to many people.

My original intent was to end DANCE with the two big battles, yes… intercutting between the two of them, each told through several different points of view. And both battles were partially written. But NOT COMPLETE, which became the issue. Also, maybe even more to the point, not yet good enough in my estimation. Battles are bloody hard, and I wanted these to be great.

The book had already been scheduled for publication, I had blown through several previous deadlines, and we simply ran out of time. Initially I decided to push one battle back to WINDS to focus on the other, but that did not work either, and neither of the sequences came together the way I wanted them to, so ultimately the choice came down to moving both of the battles to WINDS or cancelling the planned publication and pushing back DANCE. And given how far ahead publishers schedule their releases, the pushback would not have been a few days or a few weeks, but at least half a year, and maybe longer.

Also, DANCE was already very long, and the battles would have made it substantially longer. That could also have affected the pricing.

Did we make the right decision? I don’t know, even to this day. I understand your frustration, and some days I do feel the same way. But back then I had the fans howling after DANCE the same way they are howling after WINDS now, and my publishers really really did not want to push back again. And DANCE, even without the battles, was extremely well received — yes, there were dissenters, I know that, readers who did not like the book as well as the earlier volumes, but out in the wider world, DANCE had extremely strong sales, rode the bestseller lists for a long long time. It was a Hugo finalist, won the Locus Award for best fantasy of the year, and was named by TIME magazine as the book of the year. So even without the battles, it worked pretty well… but part of me still wonders if we made the right choice.

These things are not easy. Those who think they are have obviously never written anything, or had to deal with the realities of publishing.

Uh… I never said anything about Dany, that was added by Bantam. Please disregard.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why did it become so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What is the origin of Daenerys’s three dragon eggs? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why was it so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What were Maegor the Cruel’s worst crimes? What was it like in Westeros when dragons ruled the skies? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle

300 years before A Game of Thrones, dragons ruled Westeros

From the masterly imagination behind A Game of Thrones – one of the greatest fantasy epics of all time and an unmissable HBO hit series – comes a definitive history of Westeros’s past as told by Archmaester Gyldayn.

Unravelling events that led to A Song of Ice and Fire, Fire and Blood is the first volume of the definitive two-part history of the Targaryens in Westeros. Revealing long-buried secrets and untold lasting enmity, it sets the scene for the next heart-stopping title in the series, The Winds of Winter.

300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, long before the schism that set the houses of Westeros at each other’s throats, one house ruled supreme and indomitable. House Targaryen, the house of the last remaining dragonlords.

After surviving the Doom of Valyria the Targaryen’s established themselves on Dragonstone. This volume traces their legendary lineage from Aegon the Conqueror to the bloody Dance of Dragons; a civil war that pitted Aegon II and his half-sister Rhaenyra in a bitter conflict for the throne of their father, nearly wiping out the Targaryen dynasty forever.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why did it become so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What is the origin of Daenerys’s three dragon eggs? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel.

With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire and Blood is the ultimate guide to Westeros’s past. Featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley this is an essential volume for any Game of Thrones fan’s library. For the first time the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed.

I am not reading at Not ConJoseII. I may do readings next year in Dublin, or at other conventions, but that’s too far in advance to worry about. I do enjoy reading, but I’ve already read so many different chapters from WINDS, I want to save some for the book.

I will not tour for FIRE & BLOOD… not one of those month-long twenty-city grinds, anyway. I may make a couple of appearances, maybe one on each coast. I don’t know. There’s a lot to be worked out.

he’ll finish Vol II “after he’s done with the main series.”

Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin — still writing his sixth book (out of seven) despite the HBO show surpassing his previously published plots — told THR that he skipped final-season set visits.

“Going to set is a lot of fun but there’s nothing for me to do there, so I thought I better stay home and not go to Croatia; or Spain; or Belfast, [Northern] Ireland,” he explained. “I still have two books to write.”

So how's it going? "I'm working on [The Winds of Winter], and I wish I'd been done four years ago, but I'm slow and the book is very complex, although there are a lot of great distractions out there" — including HBO's Emmy afterparty, which feted Game of Thrones' drama series win.