GRRM on THE WINDS OF WINTER

George R.R. Martin has broken his year-long radio silence on The Winds of Winter to confirm that he hopes to release the book in 2017.

Martin cautions that he had hoped to release the book in 2016, prior to Season 6 of Game of Thrones debuting in April and clearly failed to hit that deadline, and makes no guarantees that the book will be out this year. However, it is his current aspiration.

The previous book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was released in July 2011, itself five years and nine months after the previous volume, A Feast for Crows. The Winds of Winter will break this record if it is not released by April, which does not seem likely at this stage. Publication before Game of Thrones begins its seventh and penultimate season in late June 2017 also seems a little ambitious (but not completely impossible).

The turn-around from hand-in to publication for the novel will be around three months. To get the book out before 2017 ends, Martin will have to turn the manuscript in around August of this year.

Martin declined to provide a page count update for the novel. However, in January 2016 he confirmed that he had completed hundreds of manuscript pages and dozens of chapters. The Winds of Winter is expected to approach the size of A Dance with Dragons and A Storm of Swords, which both had over 70 chapters and 1,500 manuscript pages.

A Song of Ice and Frustration: Fictitious Release Dates & Non-linear Writing for THE WINDS OF WINTER

Amazon France have caused consternation by giving their pre-order page for The Winds of Winter a new release date: 9 March 2017. As is predictable, the fans have gone wild and George R.R. Martin's publishers have issued a statement shooting down the date as fictitious.

This isn't the first time this has happened. When A Feast for Crows was published in 2005 and Martin (highly erroneously) announced that A Dance with Dragons would follow a year later, Amazon.com put a placeholder date for the latter book as 2008. The idea was that the publisher would unveil the real date and they'd bring the date up to the correct one. They weren't expecting the book to be that late and forgot to change it, resulting in confusion and then anger in less net-savvy fans when 2008 came and went without the book being released. Responding to fan anger and complaints from the publishers Amazon changed the release date...to 2032, suggesting either a great sense of humour or perhaps going overboard on contingency planning (the book was eventually released in 2011).

These issues could be avoided if Amazon could have simply put a "TBC" release date on books, but for some reason back then they couldn't. Learning their lesson, neither Amazon US nor UK has a page for The Winds of Winter at all. Obviously Amazon France hasn't learned from their example.

At this point it may be of value to look into why it takes such an immense amount of time for Martin to write these novels.

What the manuscript of A Dance with Dragons looked like in its raw form, all 1,520 A4 pages of it.

These are big books

The average novel, when we consider all genres, is between 80,000 and 100,000 words in length (which translates to roughly 300-350 pages in paperback, depending on formatting) and takes about a year to write. Science fiction and fantasy novels are usually longer, with 200,000 words (600-700 pages in paperback) taking two to three years not being unusual. The shortest novel in A Song of Ice and Fire is 300,000 words long with the longest - A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons - both being around 420,000 words each. Those novels come in at well north of 1,200 pages in paperback.

Obviously some writers can churn out big books very quickly: Brandon Sanderson writes his Stormlight Archive novels (which clock in at around 400,000 words exactly) in three to three and a half years each, Peter F. Hamilton produced the 450,000-word The Naked God in two years and Steven Erikson produced 3,116,000 words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen (not including the first novel, which he wrote many years earlier) in just over eleven years, averaging 283,000 words a year during that time. On the flipside some authors are considerably slower: Suzanna Clarke took ten years to write the 308,931 words of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and J.R.R. Tolkien took ten years to write the 455,125 words of The Lord of the Rings (and, arguably, sixty years to produce the 130,000 words of The Silmarillion, although that was only a summary of the much greater amount of work he produced in that time).

Writing without an outline can result in marvellously naturalistic and unforced character arcs and plot turns. On the other hand, it can also result in...less serendipitous writing events.

They are not written in a linear fashion

Martin's writing process is non-linear and unplanned. He writes several chapters in a row from one character, switches to another, writes several chapters from them, switches to a third and so on. At certain points he'll switch back to a previously-written character, but will then realise that new story points he has created elsewhere will now require a thorough rewriting of previously-drafted chapters to reflect these changes. As the novel continues and gets larger, this butterfly effect can be considerable: a late plot decision executed in what ends up as Chapter 48 may entail the complete page-one rewrite of Chapters 3, 6 and 12, the partial rewriting of Chapters 18, 23 and 32, and the re-ordering of several other chapters.

The writing process for A Song of Ice and Fire bears more than a passing similarity to chaos theory. However, it is not unprecedented. J.R.R. Tolkien executed The Lord of the Rings in a similar fashion, describing it as "waves coming up the beach...each time the waves reach a little higher" after rewriting the opening four or five chapters of the novel at least four times to accommodate tonal changes (from something closer to The Hobbit to something darker) and character shifts (from using Bilbo's son "Bingo" as the protagonist to junking him and bringing in a new character called "Frodo").

Martin's non-linear writing style has been criticised and it has been suggested that he employ an outline. However, Martin has famously said that he distrusts outlines, feeling that they sap the narrative energy from writing. Stephen King, Tolkien and Robert Jordan have also disdained outlines and produced, between them, several of the biggest-selling, popular and enduring works of fantasy ever written, so he may be onto something.

That said, Robert Jordan did produce an outline whilst planning the final Wheel of Time novel to help focus him on bringing the story to a conclusion (which proved tragically beneficial when he was later diagnosed with a fatal blood disease), indicating that other fantasy authors have seen some value in changing up even their long-standing writing habits to increase writing efficiency and speed as their series reaches the wrapping-up phase.

In addition, Stephen King once experimented with using an outline in response to fan criticism that his improvised writing style often resulted in subpar endings. The result was The Dead Zone, a reasonably well-regarded book which has been adapted for the screen twice. However, King said he hated the experience and has never used an outline again.

George writing on The Machine.

Martin's computer is steam-powered

Okay, it isn't. But it is pretty old. George R.R. Martin writes his novels on WordStar 4.0, a word processing programme released in 1987. The PC he uses is of similar vintage. WordStar is a non-WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programme, like Microsoft Word, and requires the author to move around the cursor using the keyboard and enter lines of code to enact formatting such as bold or italics.

Martin has used this stuff to write all of his short stories and novels on since the late 1980s and is at this point institutionalised to its use. Still, although it's perhaps a little more labour-intensive to use such a system it's not that much slower. It's still a way of getting words on the screen. What might be a bit more work is outputting the chapters in a format that can be emailed so George's editor can read them on her more up-to-date computer in New York City. And of course there's what happens when a 30+ year old computer stops working, as happened during the writing of A Feast for Crows: a legacy PC engineer named Stephen Boucher saved the day and the novel was dedicated to him.

Update: At some point in the recent past, Martin stopped using his old 1980s vintage machine and switched to a modern PC running WordStar 4.0 in a DOS emulator.

Writing white-on-black is something that would drive me crazy, making me want to murder every single character I was writing...wait a sec.

To summarise, Martin's writing style does not permit easy estimations of when he will be finished, especially given the heavy overlap where chapters are moved from the end of one book into the start of the next. Given the numerous missed dates on A Dance with Dragons and the resulting insane levels of vitriol, Martin has decided not to issue any predictions for Winter at all. He's also, unlike during his work on Dragons, not issued any page or word counts, perhaps feeling that this could also be misleading and people would be reaching all sorts of wrong conclusions.

The Winds of Winter is not done as of today. Martin and his publishers will confirm when it is, and when the book will be published. Based on precedent, this will be between 3 and 5 months after its completion is confirmed.

THE THORN OF EMBERLAIN might not be coming out in September (UPDATED)

A few months ago, Gollancz confirmed that Scott Lynch's The Thorn of Emberlain - the fourth book in his excellent Gentleman Bastard series - was a lock for release on 22 September this year. However, it is now looking less likely that the book will hit that date.

The book was recently pulled from Amazon UK and replaced by a 2018 placeholder, whilst the American edition of the novel has never been listed at all.

It might be that there has been some mix-up with the schedules, or that Bantam was unable to go to print that quickly and has now convinced Gollancz to delay until they are also ready. But so far no official explanation has been given for the book being pulled. If it has been delayed, it certainly won't be until 2018. Based on Scott's comments about how the book was coming together, I suspect (and hope) it will be more moderate delay until early 2017 at worst.

More news as soon as we get it.

UPDATE: Scott Lynch has confirmed that the book will not hit its release date, citing delays stemming from a move of house and writing space. He confirms that the current placeholder dates are not accurate and a more realistic date will be announced soon.

Sales of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE pass 70 million on its 20th birthday

Worldwide sales of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series on which the Game of Thrones TV series is based, have passed 70 million.

Sales of A Song of Ice and Fire hit 58 million in April 2015, indicating that the series has sold an additional 12 million copies in just the last year. With no new novel released in that time, that is a remarkable achievement and a reflection of the success of both the books and the TV show helping drive sales.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of A Game of Thrones. It is also approximately 25 years since George R.R. Martin started writing the series and the sixteenth anniversary of the publication of A Storm of Swords (which I read on release, something I will forever be grateful for). I will be writing a more in-depth article on the anniversary shortly.

How do Martin's sales compare to other SF and fantasy authors? Quite favourably*:

JK Rowling: 450 million
Stephen King: 300 million
JRR Tolkien: 300 million
Stephanie Meyer: 250 million
Anne Rice: 136 million
CS Lewis: 120 million
Edgar Rice Burroughs: 100 million
Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 100 million
Suzanne Collins: 100 million
Andre Norton: 90 million
Sir Terry Pratchett: 85 million
Robert Jordan: 80 million
George R.R. Martin: 70 million


* Yes, this list is out of date. An update is in the planning.

Happy 20th Anniversary to A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (more or less)

This year marks two important milestones for George R.R. Martin fans: the 20th anniversary of A Song of Ice and Fire appearing in print and the 25th anniversay of George starting to write the first book.

George started writing A Game of Thrones in the summer of 1991. The novel was published on 6 August 1996. However, that wasn't the first time any Song of Ice and Fire material appeared in print. That honour came three months earlier when his publishers started rolling out various excerpts and outtakes from the novel.

The first thing to appear was a sample booklet from HarperCollins Voyager, George's UK publishers. This booklet contained the first 124 pages from the novel (running up roughly to the end of the chapter where Robert tells Eddard about Daenerys's wedding) and was published separately in the UK for 99p (but now retails online for £150!). It was sold at bookstores across the country as a way of whetting the appetite for the book. My three local bookshops cunningly positioned the booklets next to the hardcover displays for the seventh Wheel of Time novel, which was released on 15 May 1996, to get some cross-series fantasy promotion going on.

In the United States, Bantam ran an excerpt in Asimov's Science Fiction in July 1996 (published in June). This excerpt was huge. Dubbed Blood of the Dragon, it contained all of the Daenerys chapters from A Game of Thrones assembled into one self-contained novella. Blood of the Dragon went on to win the Best Novella prize at the 1997 Hugo Awards, making this the only literary Hugo the series has received so far (Game of Thrones has won three for Best Dramatic Presentation, however). A Storm of Swords got the same treatment in 2000 when the Daenerys chapters were pulled out to form a novella called Path of the Dragon, although this didn't win a Hugo.

So there you go. Although the anniversary of A Game of Thrones itself isn't until August, when we'll see some fancy new editions hit the shelves and likely some more celebration of the fact, A Song of Ice and Fire has now been in print for more than twenty years.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 20

The majority of works that caused seismic shifts in the fantasy field did so almost overnight: Terry Pratchett became a massive bestseller within just a couple of years of his first Discworld novel being published. Robert Jordan's books hit the bestseller lists almost instantly, as did Terry Brooks's. Tolkien took a decade or so, but only due to limited publicity and no paperback editions being available for The Lord of the Rings until the mid-1960s. But other works took a bit longer to really make their mark felt.

The HarperCollins Voyager preview booklet of A Game of Thrones, the first-officially available chunk of A Song of Ice and Fire. Released circa May/June 1996.

A Trilogy in [some] Parts

George Raymond Richard Martin (born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey) was a very well-known writer in science fiction and horror in the early 1990s. He published his first short story in 1971, won his first (of five, to date) Hugo Award in 1975 and released his first novel in 1977. His 1980 short story Sandkings and his 1982 vampire novel, Fevre Dream, were both hugely critically acclaimed and successful. However, his 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag crashed and burned spectacularly in terms of sales. He put his writing career on hold, but a meeting with a producer interested in making a film of The Armageddon Rag led to a new career in Los Angeles. He worked on the first two seasons of the relaunched Twilight Zone before switching to becoming a writer, script editor and producer on Beauty and the Beast. In 1987 his short story Nightflyers was also adapted for film.

Beauty and the Beast ended, slightly controversially, in 1990 after the writers had killed off lead character Catherine, played by Linda Hamilton. This led to the conclusion that while even the Terminator couldn't kill Linda Hamilton, George R.R. Martin could (slightly erroneously, as the show's producer actually had to make the final call on how to writer her out). Ratings dropped, the fans got angry and the show had to be shut down. Back home in Santa Fe, Martin began writing a science fiction novel called Avalon. His prose writer career had been revived by the release of several successful short fiction collections and a new "fixup" novel (several short stories combined into a cohesive narrative) called Tuf Voyaging. Starting in 1987, Martin had also begun editing the Wild Cards series of collaborative superhero anthologies, which soon proved extremely successful.

After several months of working on Avalon, in the summer of 1991, Martin suddenly got the idea for a scene in which a young boy goes with his father to watch a deserter being beheaded, after which he finds some direwolf pups in the snow. This scene led to others, and soon the SF novel was forgotten. Martin produced over 100 pages and a map into the fantasy story before he was called back to Hollywood to work on a TV project called Doorways, which never made it to the screen. Returning to the fantasy story after almost two years away, Martin realised he was still full of ideas and enthusiasm for it. He had a title in mind: A Song of Ice and Fire, a trilogy consisting of the novels A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter.

That plan didn't long survive contact with the word processor.

A first edition of A Game of Thrones on sale at the 2014 Worldcon.

A Storm of Sales

Martin sold his fantasy "trilogy" to American and British publishers in 1994, for quite impressive sums of money. Martin ending his long exile from writing novels was in itself exciting, but publishers were almost giddy at the prospect of a respected, long-standing writer trying his hand at fantasy, not to mention that the sample chapters and outline were compelling. Both sides of the Atlantic deployed similar strategies to get fantasy fans and the book-buyers for the stores excited. In the United States all of the chapters from the POV of Daenerys Targaryen were pulled out and assembled into a stand-alone novella called Blood of the Dragon. This novella won the first Hugo Award for the series in 1997. In the UK HarperCollins simply pulled out the first 100 pages or so of the novel and published them as a stand-alone novella.

A Game of Thrones was published in August 1996, but the early marketing work didn't seem to have paid off. The book sold okay, but not as much as either publisher had hoped. There had been plenty of positive reviews, but also a few that had been more mixed or negative. In the UK, the biggest genre magazine SFX published a notoriously negative review which, at a time when the Internet and its formidable powers of book recommendations were still in their infancy, seemed to drive off at least some prospective buyers. In America the problem was more down to an oversaturated market and the underwhelming (if flashy) cover design.

Fortunately, the publishers had faith in the book. In the States they relaunched it with a new cover design and pulled in some heavy-weight blurbs. Anne McCaffrey, Janny Wurts, Katharine Kerr and Raymond E. Feist (among others) gave really strong soundbites but it was the ringing endorsement of Robert Jordan which had the biggest impact. Sales rose sharply, accompanied by rapidly-spreading word of mouth and the help of the nascent Internet.

Sales improved again after Robert Silverberg published Legends, an anthology featuring new short stories set in the signature worlds of major fantasy writers. Martin contributed a story called The Hedge Knight. Readers picked up the anthology for the Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan or Stephen King contribution, read Martin's, and then picked up the main novels as a result. Combined with growing word of mouth and stronger reviews (SFX this time gave a much most positive review), these factors helped push A Clash of Kings onto the lower rungs of the bestseller lists. In 2000 A Storm of Swords debuted at #11, before A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons nailed the top spot.

And introducing Ser Not-Appearing-In-The-Book

A Dance of Delays

The writing of the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire proceeded relatively smoothly. The publication dates (August 1996, October 1998 and July 2000) were quite reasonable, sales rose steadily and the critical acclaim only got bigger with each new novel. However, Martin was struggling with structural issues behind the scenes. He'd started the series with multiple characters in the age range of 3 to 14, planning for each novel to span months or years so they would grow up relatively quickly. But by the end of the third novel less than two years had passed and the characters were still a long way from adulthood.

Whilst writing the third volume in the series, he hit upon an alternate plan: he would bench the story for five years and pick up in Book 4 with all of the "training montages" and awkward growing up material having happened completely off-screen, allowing him to rejoin the narrative and get things moving towards a grand conclusion. In the event this proved unworkable, leading to a massive over reliance on flashbacks and exposition that bogged the novel down. Instead, he jettisoned that material and rewrote the book so it started immediately after A Storm of Swords. Pursuing this blind alley, backing up and starting again cost him over a year's work on the novel. The decision to push stories in the Iron Islands and Dorne to prominence also complicated events. In the end, the fourth book grew to such a huge size and went so far over deadline that drastic action was required.

At the suggestion of his friend (and later formidable fantasy talent in his own right) Daniel Abraham, Martin chopped the story in half by location. The characters in the south of Westeros had their stories told in A Feast for Crows, published in October 2005, and the remaining characters would appear in A Dance with Dragons, to follow, hopefully, a year later.

In event, Dragons was not published until July 2011 after additional structural nightmares, constant rewrites and a whole lot of complaining about it online.

"Let's get out of here."

"Where are we going?"

"Book Six."

A Feast for Viewers

By the time A Feast for Crows was published, worldwide sales of the series are guesstimated to have reached about 5 million. The series was big and the critical acclaim was strong, enough for Martin's Hollywood agent to make attempts to attract the interest of television and film producers. David Benioff, the toast of Hollywood for his fast and skilled scriptwork, was sent the novels and was hooked early on. So was his friend Dan Weiss, then working on the aborted Halo movie. They joined forces and suggested to Martin that they take the project to Martin's favourite TV network, HBO, the creators of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood and Rome.

The project was huge and ambitious, and HBO hesitated over the project, not sure if it was "them". They tentatively took it on, but then grew in confidence when another adaptation of books outside of their usual comfort zone, with the vampire drama True Blood, paid off handsomely. Even though it was almost sunk several times (by the 2007-08 Hollywood Writer's Strike and then a confusing and problematic pilot), the TV adaptation, under the title Game of Thrones finally hit the screens in April 2011 to almost-instant acclaim.

The success of the TV show boosted the sales of the novels by a staggering degree. Over nine million copies of the books were sold in 2011-12 alone. By the end of 2015, sales of the series had passed 60 million. Although still somewhat less than The Wheel of Time, the much smaller number of novels in the series meant that A Song of Ice and Fire has now beaten every other fantasy series by a living writer (bar only J.K. Rowling) in terms of actual readers. Whilst gratifying to Martin, this also meant that the number of readers excitedly waiting for the sixth and (planned) penultimate novel in the series, The Winds of Winter, had grown massively and exponentially. However, the rapid production schedule for the TV series also meant that planned plot points for later novels had to appear on TV as early as the fifth season, leading some to fear that the show would comprehensively spoil the books before the books could ever be finished.

A Song of Ice and Fire is the most popular epic fantasy series of the modern age, despite its incomplete status and lengthy between-volume gaps. But how the story affected people and the impact it had on the direction of the genre is a slightly different story.

A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is released

Bantam (in the USA) and HarperCollins Voyager (in the UK) released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms today.

This book is a collection of George R.R. Martin's three Dunk and Egg novellas, short novels spanning a period of time beginning eighty-nine years before the events of A Game of Thrones and expected to conclude approximately fifty years later. The series chronicles the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight who rises from obscurity to great fame and high office, and his squire "Egg", who is more than he seems.

The collection consists of The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2002) and The Mystery Knight (2010). Martin is working on the fourth story in the series, which has the working (but not final) title of The She-Wolves of Winterfell, but he decided some time ago to rework the story. It will not be released until after The Winds of Winter comes out. A working title of the planned fifth story in the series, The Village Hero, has also been disclosed. Martin has said there may be up to a dozen of these stories in total. Existing Song of Ice and Fire characters have appeared in the Dunk and Egg books, such as a very young Walder Frey, whilst Aemon Targaryen has been mentioned, but as the novellas progress and get closer to the present other characters are likely to appear. Fan speculation is high that the final story will take place at Summerhall on the fateful night of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's birth.

Of course, in the meantime Martin does have two rather large novels to finish.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Dance with Dragons

A Dance with Dragons

Writing Period: Late 2000-May 2011

Originally Published: 12 July 2011

Word Count: 422,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,510

Hardcover Page Count: 1017

Paperback Page Count: 1152 (US one-volume), 1184 (UK two-volume)

Chapters: 73

POV Characters: 16 + Prologue + Epilogue

"The last one was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard."

As his afterword to A Dance with Dragons indicates, George R.R. Martin did not hugely enjoy writing this novel. Originally envisaged "merely" as the flipside of A Feast for Crows and coming out a year or so later, the novel eventually grew much larger (half again the length of Crows) and came out a lot later (five years and nine months), to the annoyance of both the author and many readers.

The writing process for Dragons was torturous. Whilst Martin had 500 manuscript pages left over from A Feast for Crows (and indeed, in a different format, the "post-gap" version of Crows/Dragons), the process of structuring the sequel so it made sense and covered all the ground it needed to proved vastly more complex than first thought. The "promotion" of the mini-POV characters from Crows meant that Martin had a much larger cast of central characters to manage. His decision to bring the novel past the timeframe of Crows and revisit some of those characters later in the novel also introduced difficulties. But most damaging of all was the so-called "Meereenese Knot", a problem caused by different characters arriving in the city of Meereen and impacting on the story of Daenerys Tagaryen in different ways. Martin tilted at this problem numerous times across many months before finally resolving it through the introduction of Ser Barristan Selmy as a POV character. At another stage a conceptual rethink meant rewriting all of Jon Snow's chapters.

The book also had other issues stemming from where it fell in the storyline of the overall series. Originally, A Dance with Dragons was planned to be the middle volume of A Song of Ice and Fire when it was a trilogy and it would have focused heavily on Daenerys and her eventual invasion of the Seven Kingdoms. When the series was expanded to six volumes, Dragons became the fourth book, happening after the infamous "five year gap", and would have also covered political intrigue in Meereen. However, the introduction and expansion of numerous other storylines and characters meant that Dragons would cover less ground than originally envisaged: at the end of the novel, Daenerys's invasion of Westeros still seems a way off, with numerous plot stands in and around Slaver's Bay requiring resolution before she can move on.

A Dance with Dragons was also a book written in the full glare of public interest. Every word that Martin uttered for six years was analysed for hidden meanings or conspiracies. Every holiday or trip that Martin took away from the keyboard was carefully monitored. Each update provided by the author was used to second-guess what he was doing and how. Controversy surrounded the writing of the book to such a degree that when it was done and the author had commenced work on the sequel, The Winds of Winter, he went into lockdown and refused to even talk about its progress. A Dance with Dragons and the subsequent success of the book and TV series marked a notable change in the author's willingness to engage with his readers and provide hard updates on progress on the series.

A Surge of Sales
A Song of Ice and Fire took a while to be a success. A Game of Thrones performed disappointingly in hardcover in the States, with sales not picking up until its paperback publication a year later. The UK edition, featuring cover quotes by the likes of Robert Jordan and trailed by a preview novella released several months earlier, apparently did better. The US paperback, which also included the cover quotes, saw a marked upturn in success. Strong word-of-mouth and positive reviews helped.

A Clash of Kings did well enough to hit the lower reaches of the New York Times bestseller list on release, but it was A Storm of Swords that really stood out for the first time. It hit #11 on the NYT list and sold well enough that it took two years for the paperback to come out in the States (a phenomenon repeated with the two subsequent books). The five-year wait for A Feast for Crows did not hurt the success of the series at all and the book hit #1 on the bestseller list on the day of release.

Between the release of Crows and Dragons it was announced (in 2007) that HBO was developing a TV series based on the books. Some TV critics picked up the books and began talking about them years before the TV series hit the screens. The result of this was a minor uptick in sales. Total sales for A Song of Ice and Fire prior to the TV series airing were never revealed, but guesstimates placed them in the region of approximately 5 million.

The success of Game of Thrones has changed that. An astonishing nine million copies of the books were sold in 2012 alone. Worldwide sales of the series have now passed 60 million. This puts Martin close to the sales of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (estimated at 80-90 million sales) and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (estimated at 85 million), both series with a much larger number of volumes. How much bigger the series can get remains to be seen, but with the HBO series likely to last at least another two years, it is likely that the books will continue to benefit.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Feast for Crows

The original cover art for A Feast for Crows, by Stephen Youll. A few copies of the novel were actually printed with this artwork in place, and can command steep prices.

A Feast for Crows

Writing Period: Summer 2001-May 2005

Originally Published: 17 October 2005 (UK), 8 November 2005 (USA)

Word Count: 300,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,063

Hardcover Page Count: 755

Paperback Page Count: 864 (US), 852 (current UK)

Chapters: 46

POV Characters: 12 + Prologue

When George R.R. Martin sat down to start writing A Dance with Dragons, then planned to be the fourth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, he imagined it was going to be fairly straightforward. It had taken him nine years to write the first three books in the series, but having just penned the massive A Storm of Swords in record time and seen it have a rapturous critical reception, he was highly motivated to finish the series off at a fast pace. When fans asked him when he thought the book would be on the shelves, he confidently said "Late 2002".

This didn't happen.

A Dance with Dragons was supposed to start five years after the events of A Storm of Swords. The young children characters would all be older, some of the chaotic events from the previous novels would have had time to have died away and some of the more (arguably) humdrum aspects of the story - characters travelling and learning - would happen off-page. It was a nice idea and worked well for some characters (Jon, Daenerys, Arya, Bran) but for others (Cersei, Brienne, Jaime) it didn't work at all. Martin found himself having to refer to events that had happened in the interim, sometimes filling out entire chapters with flashbacks to that interim period. For over a year he struggled with making this structure work and eventually gave up.

At Worldcon in August 2001, Martin announced that he had effectively scrapped 500 pages of manuscript he had written for A Dance with Dragons. Instead, he had started writing a new fourth book that would instead start immediately after the events of Swords. This book was entitled A Feast for Crows. In the event it would take a further three and a half years to finish the book (sort of) and more than four to bring it to the shelves.

The primary problem with Crows was that Martin was now "filling in the blanks" of the previous five-year gap for some characters, but other characters were now ready to move into the next phase of the storyline. In some cases it appears new material was created for them, in others it appears Martin simply got them going to where they'd have been after the abandoned gap. He also widened the cast, bringing in new characters in Dorne and expanding the POV roster to include previously-seen characters in the Iron Islands, but now raised to much greater prominence. At one point he planned an enormous (Robert Jordan-style) mega-prologue divided between all the Dornish and ironborn characters, but then changed his mind and split this up into more traditional chapters.

The original and unused UK cover art for Crows, by Jim Burns. Note that this was prepared a long time before the split, hence the presence of Jon Snow.

Martin wrote and wrote during this period, occasionally publishing sample chapters on his website or reading them at conventions. Three Daenerys Targaryen chapters were combined into a chapbook and given away at a fantasy convention. He also started using the web more, particularly the "Update" section on his website, to talk about progress on the book. Updates were given, the book was getting larger and larger, but still with no end in site. For some fans, the fact that they'd gotten three large books within four years of one another but had now had to wait for four and more for one was incomprehensible.

In early 2005, Martin reassessed his status. The book was huge, having topped 1,600 manuscript pages and heading northwards at a rate of knots. Some characters in the book had pretty much complete story arcs, such as Jaime, Cersei and Brienne. Others were incomplete, such as Arya. Others still (including the important central trio of Daenerys, Jon and Tyrion) only had a few chapters written for them. Martin and his publishers began discussing splitting the book into two volumes, with the second volume to follow on a year or so from the first. At first they debated doing this chronologically, but Martin found this unsatisfying as there were few good places where he could end the first half of the narrative.

Martin's friend and sometimes-collaborator Daniel Abraham (more recently famous for his role as one half of James S.A. Corey, the writing machine behind The Expanse SF series, as well as his own, excellent fantasy series The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin) suggested an alternative scheme: splitting the book by geography, as the completed characters were mostly located in the south of Westeros and the incomplete ones were either in the distant North or on the eastern continent. Martin preferred this plan, noting he'd done something similar in his Wild Cards books (where one oversized volume had been split in two, between characters in New York City and others outside the city). In May 2005 he announced that the book was done, if somewhat faster and more abruptly than expected.

George R.R. Martin also made an announcement he later ruefully regretted: he had 500 manuscript pages now complete for the fifth volume (still to be called A Dance with Dragons) and this book would follow "a year later".

 

 The final US cover art for A Feast for Crows.

Cover Art

The explosive burst of sales between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows - despite the gap, George R.R. Martin had overtaken Robin Hobb to become HarperCollins Voyager's most popular living author by the end of 2005 - had made both the UK and US publishers decide to rejacket the entire book series. This meant that early covers prepared for Crows in the same style as the first three books were now abandoned and new covers were prepared. These were more minimalist, with icons rather than characters. Long-term fans preferred the earlier style of cover, but the new covers did seem to attract more buyers during the long drought between Crows and Dragons, even before news of the TV series broke.

Randyll Tarly, Wielder of Heartsbane, Defeater of Robert Baratheon, Driver of the Van of Victory.

What Would Randyll Tarly Do?

During the writing of the Wild Cards shard-world anthology series, a very minor character showed up at a party, said "Where is the cheese?" and then died. Years later, George R.R. Martin would get still get fans asking about the character. He called this the "Boba Fett Effect", where a small, minor character with barely any lines shows up and somehow ends up being considered a cool badass. Early volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire featured this to some extent: Bronze Yohn Royce had (bewilderingly) a few fans from the second he was mentioned, as his name sounded cool. Almost disposable characters like Bronn turned out to be far more popular than first envisaged.

For A Feast for Crows, Martin felt confident he had repeated the trick by introducing a new, lethal and enigmatically cool character who was bad, mad and dangerous to know. He may even had been right, if the character hadn't been Darkstar ("For I Am of the Night"). Darkstar turned out to be an underwhelming damp squib, represented in fan art as an edgy wannabe teenager trying to hang out with the cool crowd and not cutting it.

Instead, being contrary bastards at the best of times, Martin's fans in the Brotherhood Without Banners decided that the true hero of A Song of Ice and Fire was Randyll Tarly, "The Best Father in Westeros." It was argued that by forcing his son Samwell to go to the Wall, he had made him man up and eventually get into a position to save Westeros entirely from the Others. He was "Tough, but fair". He was described as the best general in Westeros and, commanding the "Tyrell van" had defeated Robert Baratheon at the Battle of Ashford. Cue fan art showing a Ford transit van trundling onto the battlefield and Randyll Tarly defeating Robert's entire army single-handedly. And so forth.

The Randyll Tarly meme eventually died down (to the bemused relief of George) but with news that he may appear in Season 6 of Game of Thrones spurring increasingly badass casting suggestions (James Purefoy and Ray Stevenson leading the charge), it may yet return.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Storm of Swords

A Storm of Swords

Writing Period: 1997/98-April 2000 (very approx.)

Originally Published: 8 August 2000 (UK), November 2000 (USA)

Word Count: 424,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,521

Hardcover Page Count: 975

Paperback Page Count: 1008 (US one-volume), 1178 (UK two-volume)

Chapters: 82

POV Characters: 10 + Prologue + Epilogue

As with A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords was not supposed to exist in George R.R. Martin's original plan for A Song of Ice and Fire. The original plan was for a trilogy consisting of the civil war-focused A Game of Thrones, the Daenerys-focused A Dance with Dragons and the North-focused The Winds of Winter. The original Game of Thrones was expected to cover not just the set-up for the War of the Five Kings, but the full struggle itself, culminating in the Red Wedding.

During the writing, Martin discovered that this wasn't really working. In the event it took three books and almost 4,000 manuscript pages (rather than the 700-800 he'd originally thought) to get through this material. Of course, this was a much-expanded version of the story he'd originally conceived with numerous differences. These included expanding the cast of POV characters in every book (Swords adds Samwell Tarly and Jaime Lannister to the roster), covering perspectives such as the ironborn in more detail than originally planned and bringing in many small-but-popular bit-part players absent from the original outline, such as Bronn.

A Storm of Swords was - and remains - the longest book in the Song of Ice and Fire sequence, but it was almost certainly the fastest-written (although it's impossible to be sure due to the heavy overlap of writing between Swords and A Clash of Kings). When A Clash of Kings was completed, hundreds of pages were left over for A Storm of Swords, including (according to some reports) Tyrion Lannister's complete story arc for the latter. Martin wrote like a man possessed through Swords, reportedly even cramming in some work over Christmas 1999 to help get the thing done as fast as possible. Martin reported that the book was completed in April 2000 and it hit the shelves in the UK in August, although it was actually on some bookshelves in the last week of July. For such a big book, this was a very rapid turn-around.

The reason for the sheer length of Swords was that Martin had made a crucial decision during the writing process. His original plan had been for weeks or even months to pass between chapters, so the characters would grow up a lot through the first book or two of the series. In the event this did not place, and between them the first three books in the series cover rather less than two years of time. Unhappy with the impact this had on some storylines (Martin, at least at one early stage, had considered a love triangle forming between a grown-up Arya, Jon and Tyrion as a plot point for the later books), Martin made a fateful and, in hindsight, unwise decision: there would be a "jump forwards" of about five years between A Storm of Swords and the fourth book in the series, A Dance with Dragons. As a result, A Storm of Swords had to conclude pretty much all of the storylines-in-progress so that Martin could pick them up again five years later, with either no cliffhangers or ones that could be easily explored later on in flashback. This required every story put in motion in A Game of Thrones to either be finished, cut off or plateaued by the end of Swords, put into stasis for five years until the next book could pick up on them.

On release, A Storm of Swords easily became the most critically-acclaimed book in the series. It was also the first volume to hit the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, a prize it missed out on to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. With the book completed, Martin set to work on A Dance with Dragons, unaware that this book was going to take slightly longer than its predecessors to get on the shelves.

A Plethora of Pages

A Storm of Swords is one of the largest fantasy novels ever published. The book is over 424,000 words in length and there are very few notable SF or fantasy books which are larger. Here are a few of them:

The Stand: Stephen King's apocalyptic SF/horror epic clocks in at 462,000 words.

The Naked God: The concluding volume of Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy is 469,000 words long, making it comfortably the largest space opera ever written.

The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy saga - the whole thing - tops out at 473,000 words.

To Green Angel Tower: The final book of Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy is a mind-boggling 520,000 words in length, making it one of the longest single novels in the English language. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was a key influence on A Song of Ice and Fire, and several references to it can be found hidden in Martin's work.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Clash of Kings

A Clash of Kings

Writing Period: 1995-mid. 1998 (approx.)

Originally Published: 16 November 1998 (UK), March 1999 (USA)

Word Count: 326,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,184

Hardcover Page Count: 752

Paperback Page Count: 741 (original UK edition, featuring the smallest font know to man), 1040 (original US), 911 (current UK)

Chapters: 70

POV Characters: 9 + Prologue

As discussed previously, A Clash of Kings was not supposed to exist in George R.R. Martin's original plan for the series. This plan was for a trilogy consisting of the novels A Game of Thrones (focusing on the War of the Five Kings), A Dance with Dragons (focusing on Daenerys) and The Winds of Winter (focusing on the Others), with each novel maybe coming in at 700-800 manuscript pages each.

Instead, when Martin realised he was approaching 1,400 manuscript pages and wasn't even halfway through his original storyline for A Game of Thrones by itself, he realised he had a problem on his hands. He found suitable end or cliffhanger points for the existing characters and storylines and submitted this material as A Game of Thrones. The remaining 300-odd manuscript pages were held back for the second volume. It appears that for a time Martin considered rolling this material into the original planned second book, A Dance with Dragons. As late as the summer of 1996, on the eve of A Game of Thrones's publication, marketing materials and blurbs were referring to Dragons as the second volume of a trilogy. Shortly after that point Martin had to concede defeat and announce a new plan: A Song of Ice and Fire was going to be a four-book series.

The new second volume gained the title A Clash of Kings. Using the 300-odd pages inherited from A Game of Thrones, work on A Clash of Kings proceeded relatively speedily. However, the same problem that afflicted Thrones now cropped up in Kings. Martin would write material for one POV character and then switch to another. However, he found himself writing large amounts of material for some characters and getting much further ahead in chronology, so then had to stop and skip back to catch up the other characters. He also made the decision to expand the cast of POV characters. His original plan had been to solely use the seven surviving characters from A Game of Thrones, but for the second volume decided to add Theon Greyjoy and Davos Seaworth to the character roster.

By early-to-mid 1998, the book had ballooned in size just as Thrones had. Martin, once again, had to make the decision to split the book and hold back material for an additional volume. This time, he also wrote a more detailed outline. This new outline (which has never been seen publicly) suggested to him that the whole series would be longer than originally planned. What had been the first novel was going to be three, whilst the originally-planned final book would now be two. As a result, the series leapt from four volumes to six: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter and A Time for Wolves (a title he disliked, but a better one escaped him for the moment).

During the writing of A Clash of Kings, Martin also received an invitation from legendary science fiction and fantasy author Robert Silverberg to contribute to a new anthology work he was planning, entitled Legends. This book would feature new short fiction set in some of the biggest and most popular fantasy worlds ever created. The book would feature new stories in the Discworld, Dark Tower, Dragonriders of Pern and Wheel of Time worlds by Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey and Robert Jordan respectively, among many others. Martin decided to contribute a prequel to A Song of Ice and Fire, a story called The Hedge Knight set eighty-nine years before A Game of Thrones and featuring the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg. The story was a big hit and reviewed as one of the highlights of the collection, convincing Martin to write sequels.

A Clash of Kings was finally published in November 1998 in the UK (the American edition had to wait until February 1999). At 1,184 manuscript pages, it was noticeably larger than A Game of Thrones and ended on a series of cliffhangers. It also featured some of the most iconic scenes in the series, such as Daenerys Targaryen's surreal adventure in the House of the Undying and the epic clash of armies and wildfire in the Battle of the Blackwater. The novel's arrival also coincided with the appearance of the earliest fan websites and forums dedicated to the series, which were soon eagerly debating where the series would go next.

For Martin, again he had written far ahead of the material he had just published and had several hundred manuscript pages in progress for the third volume in the series, A Storm of Swords.

Cover Art

After the cover shenanigans surrounding A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings had a far easier time of things. Stephen Youll created the American artwork and Jim Burns the British, both following the same styles laid down for the first book.

Fan Theories

A Clash of Kings was the first book in the series to be discussed in-depth online after publication, and as such it is notable that fan theories such as "R+L=J" (the notion that Jon Snow is actually the son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, not the bastard son of Eddard Stark at all) and that Aegon VI Targaryen had survived the Sack of King's Landing (following the "mummer's dragon" appearance in Daenerys's vision) both gained widespread credence following the novel's publication. Fans were gratified when the latter theory, at least, was proven with the publication of A Dance with Dragons thirteen years later.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Game of Thrones

After seeing some recent online discussions about A Song of Ice and Fire - the book series upon which the hit HBO series Game of Thrones is based - I thought it would be useful to provide some statistics and information about each book in the series.

 

An American first edition of A Game of Thrones spotted by myself at Worldcon in London, August 2014. This edition was retailing for £540 (approx. $850). I passed.

A Game of Thrones

Writing Period: Summer 1991-Late 1995 or early 1996 (very approx.)

Originally Published: 6 August 1996 (UK/US)

Word Count: 298,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,088*

Hardcover Page Count: 672

Paperback Page Count: 836

Chapters: 73

POV Characters: 8 + Prologue

George R.R. Martin started writing the first volume in the series, A Game of Thrones, in the summer of 1991. He conceived of the chapter where Bran watches Gared being executed and then finding the direwolf pups in the snow whilst working on a separate SF novel, Avalon. Martin was originally unsure if this was a novel, novella or a series. He wrote several additional chapters, initially deciding that this would be a "realistic" fantasy novel featuring no magic or supernatural elements, just set in a fictional world. However, his friend and fellow writer Phyllis Eisenstein convinced him this was the wrong path to take and, as he later put it, talked him into "putting the dragons in" (A Storm of Swords is dedicated to her).

Martin had completed approximately 100 manuscript pages before he received word from Hollywood that a TV pilot script he had written, called Doorways, had been picked up by ABC. Martin returned to Hollywood for much for 1992 and 1993 to work on the project. In the event, a pilot was produced but never aired and ABC passed on the series. During this time Martin continued to develop ideas for the novel and its characters. By the time he had returned to Santa Fe and resumed work on the novel in 1993, he had expanded the series to a trilogy, provisionally consisting of the novels A Game of Thrones (focusing on Eddard Stark and the War of the Five Kings), A Dance with Dragons (focusing on Daenerys) and The Winds of Winter (focusing on events at the Wall).

By October 1993, A Game of Thrones consisted of 173 manuscript pages and thirteen completed chapters. Martin also, unusually for him, prepared a brief outline of how he envisaged the story developing. This outline, made public early this year, is extremely different to the story that we ended up with (not to mention being much shorter), but some of the bare bones remain.

The outline, prepared to help sell the trilogy to potential publishers, proved highly and rapidly successful: HarperCollins in the UK picked up the trilogy for £450,000 ($662,000 in 1994 money) in February 1994. Bantam Spectra picked up the American rights around the same time.

It is unclear when A Game of Thrones was completed, because Martin originally did not envisage the novel finishing where it did. Originally, it appears that Martin planned for a rather shorter and more concise version of the War of the Five Kings to take place, with the first novel expected to end around the time of the Red Wedding. However, this proved impractical during the writing. When he passed 1,300 manuscript pages, Martin realised that the first novel would have to be split into two. He found suitable endpoints for the first novel, which ended up at 1,088 manuscript pages, and submitted this as the first novel in the series, A Game of Thrones. The remaining 300-400 pages were held back for the second novel, now provisionally entitled A Clash of Kings. This split seems to have taken place in late 1995 or early 1996.

Blood of the Dragon, a self-contained novella consisting of all of the Daenerys chapters from A Game of Thrones. Published in Asimov's in July 1996, it won the series a Hugo Award in 1997. Note in the blurb that A Dance with Dragons is still envisaged as the second (!) book in the series.

For A Game of Thrones, both the US and UK publishers chose similar release strategies. Epic fantasy was big business at the time and an established, respected SF author of many years standing dipping his toe into the genre was seen by both publishers as a good marketing opportunity. In the American market, the chapters featuring Daenerys Targaryen were extracted from A Game of Thrones and turned into a stand-alone novella called Blood of the Dragon. This was published in Asimov's Science Fiction in July 1996. It later won the Best Novella Award at the 1997 Hugo Awards, the only Hugo the series has won for fiction (although its TV spin-off, Game of Thrones, has now won three), and helped drum up American interest in the novel.

The pre-release preview novella released by HarperCollins Voyager, circa May/June 1996 and sold in bookstores for 99p.

In the UK, HarperCollins Voyager published the first few chapters of the book as a stand-alone novella, retailing at 99p. Voyager seemed to cunningly position this so readers picking up the then-latest Wheel of Time hardcover, A Crown of Swords (released in May 1996), might be tempted by this sneak peek. I certainly remember it being available at the same time, although I chose not to pick it up at the time (otherwise I may have ended up getting involved in the ASoIaF fandom years earlier than I did, which would have been interesting).

Cover Art

The first edition of A Game of Thrones was published with a silver, reflective foil cover prepared by Tom Hallman and a debatable blue-purple typeface. It was not a huge success, and initial American sales were disappointing. The British edition, with more striking cover art by Jim Burns, was more successful. Sales of the book did not really start taking off until the US paperback, with new cover art by Stephen Youll, was released in 1997.

Sales of the book were also helped by a number of prominent fantasy and science fiction authors providing cover blurbs. Katherine Kerr (known for her Deverry novels), Julian May (of the Galactic Milieu sequence), Raymond E. Feist (of Riftwar fame), Janny Wurts (known for The Wars of Light and Shadow) and Anne McCaffrey (author of the Dragonriders of Pern series) all provided quotes but the most influential (according to both Martin and his publishers) was that given by Robert Jordan, author of The Wheel of Time. The Wheel of Time was the then-dominant epic fantasy series on the market and Jordan's blessing seemed to provide a noticeable boost to sales.

In 1998, Martin and Jordan both contributed short stories to Robert Silverberg's Legends anthology. Martin provided The Hedge Knight, the first of his Dunk & Egg novellas set ninety years before the events of A Game of Thrones, whilst Jordan contributed New Spring, a short story set twenty years before his Wheel of Time sequence. Martin pointed out that many readers picked up Legends primarily for the Jordan story and then read his tale, which inspired them to pick up A Game of Thrones.

Avalon?

George R.R. Martin has not revealed much about Avalon, the novel he abandoned to work on A Song of Ice and Fire. It was part of his Thousand Worlds setting, where his early novels Dying of the Light (1977), Windhaven (1981) and Tuf Voyaging (1987) were all set, along with a large amount of his short fiction (most of it collected in Dreamsongs). Avalon is the name of a planet in this setting, mentioned several times in the other books as being one of the more powerful and civilised planets in the Thousand Worlds, but nothing about the plot or characters of the book are known.

Over the years Martin has even hinted that he may finish Avalon once A Song of Ice and Fire is completed. If true, this would almost certainly make A Song of Ice and Fire the biggest mid-novel writing tangent in history.

The completed manuscript of A Dance with Dragons.

* A Note on Manuscript Pages
As regular readers of Martin's blog will know, he often speaks about "manuscript pages" when talking about the length of his novels. This occasionally causes confusion, especially when he talks about The Winds of Winter being 1,500 pages long, as this leads people to expect a novel half again even the massive lengths of A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons.

"Manuscript pages" refers to the number of pages the book takes up on Martin's word processor, an ancient (late 1980s vintage) piece of software called WordStar 4.0 running on an old DOS machine. All five books to date have been written on this machine, as (presumably) is The Winds of Winter. The published versions of the books vary in length immensely depending on font and margin size, and are inconsistent with one another. Martin prefers to refer to the manuscript page size as this remains uniform across all five published books to date.

Under this count, the novels are the following lengths:

A Game of Thrones: 1,088 manuscript pages (approx. 298,000 words)
A Clash of Kings: 1,184 manuscript pages (approx. 326,000 words)
A Storm of Swords: 1,521 manuscript pages (approx. 424,000 words)
A Feast for Crows: 1,063 manuscript pages (approx. 300,000 words)
A Dance with Dragons: 1,510 manuscript pages (approx. 422,000 words)

Note that A Feast for Crows is 2,000 words longer than A Game of Thrones but occupies 25 fewer MS pages, likely the result the former having 27 fewer chapters and thus fewer page breaks than Thrones.

Next up (natch): A Clash of Kings

The World of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. Garcia, Jr. and Linda Antonsson

The World of Ice and Fire is a companion volume to George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels, primarily written by Elio M. Garcia, Jr. and Linda Antonsson, the founders and administrators of the Westeros.org website who have also worked as continuity guides and fact-checkers for the last couple of novels in the series. Martin himself provides has written several sections of the book and provided vast reams of notes on other matters. The book is both a handy compendium of existing information from the novels, novellas, comics and websites and also a way of shining a light on many areas of both the backstory and world that otherwise would not have come to light.

Let me get this out of the way to start with: I've been a moderator on Westeros.org since 2005 and been impatiently waiting for this book since it was announced seven years ago. I was pre-disposed to like it, and hope I can be fair in my appraisal of the book.

Companion guides to fantasy worlds have had a fairly mixed rep, with Terry Pratchett's various Discworld companions being excellent, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time one being reasonable (atrocious art aside), Raymond Feist's being terrible and the various Tolkien ones being all over the place in quality. The World of Ice and Fire is definitely one of the better ones. The artwork is superb, the amount of new information for dedicated fans is almost overwhelming and the attempt to give the text an in-universe origin (a young maester writing a brief primer on the world for the notoriously impatient King Robert Baratheon) makes for a less dry reading experience than it might have been. There are negatives, some of them significant, but this is certainly required reading for a dedicated ASoIaF fan. Fans of the TV series will also likely find much to enjoy here, but it is not a given that the information in the book will also be canon for the TV show.

The book is divided into several sections. The first deals with the history of Westeros and Essos, initially focusing on the ancient history and mythology of the series before the arrival of Aegon the Conqueror. There is a very lengthy section dealing with the reigns of the Targaryen kings and the various challenges and conflicts they faced, ranging from a religious uprising to the devastating dynastic conflict known as the Dance of Dragons to several ill-fated attempts to invade Dorne to Robert Baratheon's rebellion that forms the immediate backstory to the novels. The rest of the book is dedicated to exploring the world itself, from the individual regions of Westeros to the Free Cities and very distant places like Sothoryos, Asshai and the Thousand Islands. The book's conceit is that the young Maester Yandel (Garcia and Antonsson) has written the book a sort of Rough Guide to Westeros and Essos, whilst drawing on material from Master Gyldayn (Martin). Gyldayn is regarded as more authoritative but excerpts from his work are rare, since they were destroyed in the fire at Summerhall. However, he does give us some of the more evocative moments in the book, such as his detailed account of Aegon's Conquest.

The general prose style is reasonable, although prone to repetition. It is not uncommon to see a phrase used and then re-used just a few paragraphs later. It is a common writing mistake, but it's unusual to see it happen quite so often in a book which had a much longer editing period than most. The other problem is that Yandel likes to cover almost every claim in the book with lengthy caveats. Things that happened long ago are unreliable because of the time that's passed and things that happened more recently are unreliable because different historians have different takes on the subject, informed by their biases and political leanings. Clearly Martin and his co-authors want to avoid nailing things down too decisively in case he changes his mind for future novels, and in the case of the ancient mythology and pre-history stuff that's understandable, but for more recent events it's a little more frustrating. We certainly still get a lot of new information - the Targaryen family tree alone swells to a huge size with the influx of new names and characters in this book - but how much of it is 100% reliable is left up in the air. However, the book does sometimes treat this with a nod and wink: by sometimes describing an event as mythological or untrue, but when combined with the reader's knowledge of the novels it becomes clearer what conclusions the reader is being directed to.

The artwork is of course superb, with Ted Nasmith's castle artwork being a highlight (particularly a depiction of the early, ramshackle King's Landing shortly after its founding and a later depiction of the capital in all its walled glory). The only weak part are the maps. Michael Gellatly's maps are pretty to look at, but are of limited utility. They have quite a few errors on them: Saltpans is shown as being part of both the Riverlands and the Vale, and the Riverlands is shown as extended past of Gods' Eye when the text indicated that their border is at the lake itself. The Inn at the Crossroads is also repeatedly shown as being south of the Trident in clear defiance of the text in the novels and every previous map of the setting printed to date. The errors mean that the primary new information shown on these maps - the borders of each region and their major exports - cannot be relied upon, which is a shame. It's also frustrating that the locations of many frequently-mentioned castles (like Raventree Hall) remain unconfirmed and major geographical features (like the Mander's massive tributary) remain unnamed. Minor quibbles? Certainly, but still irksome. More disappointing are the continued absences of maps for castles like Winterfell, Castle Black and Harrenhal, which feel years overdue at this point. There's also the fact that the in-book world map is almost bereft of any useful information and stops at Qarth, whilst many details are given on lands east of Qarth. A more cynical reviewer might suggest that the publishers want you to buy both this book and The Lands of Ice and Fire collection to complement one another.

There is also an issue with the disparity of information given on different regions. The North gets short shrift, which is quite surprising, whilst the longest region chapter is given to the ironborn. Whilst packed with new details and it certainly fleshes out one of the less-detailed regions of Westeros, the fact that we get more new information on the Greyjoys than the Starks or Lannisters seems a bit odd. Even this is then weirdly-presented: we get tons of new info on obscure internal ironborn conflicts from centuries ago, but only a couple of paragraphs on the Greyjoy Rebellion - a critical bit of backstory for the novels - itself. It is also very strange that various obscure parts of the world are fleshed out in sometimes remarkable detail (the new information on Yi Ti and its relationship with the island of Leng is surprisingly thorough) but Slaver's Bay and Qarth, major locations from the novels themselves, are completely glossed over.

Still, once you get used to the book's eccentricities, there is much to enjoy in The World of Ice and Fire (****). The detailed accounts of Maegor's cruel reign, the Dance of Dragons and Daeron's invasion of Dorne are engrossing and it's satisfying to finally get the chronology of Aegon's Conquest and the repeated invasions by the Blackfyre Pretenders all nailed down. Fan theories will receive a lot of new fuel from this book, from the claim that the seasons used to be normal before some event threw them out of balance (actually suggested by the original cover blurb to A Game of Thrones, but only finally presented in-world here) to the relationship between the Mad King and the Lannisters to the exact nature of the Long Night, the War for the Dawn and the Others. Yes, it's a book more for hardcore fans and in fact the exacting detail of it may be off-putting for casual fans more in the mood for a casual primer, but if you fall into that bracket this is essential reading. The book is available now in the UK and USA.