Mr Robot: Season 1

Elliot Alderson is an IT technician who suffers from anxiety and depression. At night he hacks other people on the internet, sometimes just for something to do, sometimes to help them. His skills are called upon when he is recruited by the enigmatic "Mr. Robot" into a hacker's collective, Fsociety, which plans to bring down E-Corp (which Elliot nicknames "Evil Corp") and erase all of society's debt as a way of freeing it from control by the banks and governments.

Mr. Robot is an intriguing show. Created and developed by idiosyncratic film-maker Sam Esmail, its premise sounds deeply boring. In actuality, it's one of the best-directed, visually distinctive shows of the last few years, with a layered, complex and fascinating plot related through some extraordinary performances. There's nothing quite else out there like it in terms of it having its own unique feel and atmosphere, save maybe the first season of True Detective and both (so far) of Fargo, although it's a very different kind of series.

The series is rooted in the character of Elliot. Elliot is a massively atypical protagonist. He is nervous, anxious, socially awkward and suffering from a range of anxiety and depressive issues. He is a brilliant hacker and technician, but his ability to work with other people is limited. He also has boundary issues and finds it hard to relate to people around him. It's a tremendously powerful and nuanced performance by Rami Malek, who sells this awkward and damaged human being with total conviction and utter skill.

The actors around him are just as good: Christian Slater is very good as Mr. Robot (who doesn't appear that often but gives a nervous, edgy and intense performance when he does) but one of the other stand-outs is Portia Doubleday as Angela, Elliot's best friend, who starts off feeling like a disposable side-character but rapidly becomes an integral figure as she is blackmailed by a different hacking group and inadvertently ends up ascending the hallways of corporate power. Her character arc is unexpected and brilliantly developed. Frankie Shaw also gives a charismatic performance as Shayla, Elliot's drug-dealing neighbour who starts off as a bit of a cliche but very rapidly becomes a compelling character. Martin Wallstrom also gives a blisteringly intense, offbeat and bizarre performance as Tyrell Wellick, the corporate super-executive who is very much Elliot's mirror image but uses his brilliance for much darker ends.

The direction is intriguingly different, putting characters in the corners of the screen to make them feel crushed by the space around them, reflecting the magnitudes of the tasks they face. The musical score is atmospheric and sparse and the story developers with pace and verve over the course of the ten episodes in the first season. Up until around the sixth or seventh episode, I was convinced that the first season of Mr. Robot was going to supplant the first season of Fargo as my favourite season of television this decade.

Then it all goes off the rails.

Not completely or fatally, but in the last couple of episodes of the season Esmail puts an explosive device under the storyline you thought you were watching and blows it to pieces. Rarely have I seen a show that was so bold as to completely rewrite what you thought you were watching and start telling a new story. It's conceptually brilliant, artistically brave and, from a creative writing standpoint, very impressive. The problem is that this paradigm shift really only benefits a few characters (Angela and Darlene, most notably) but it has a huge detrimental affect on Elliot, who becomes much more difficult to read and sympathise with as a character as a result. There's also a similar shift (if for different reasons) for Tyrell, who becomes flat-out loathsome and utterly repugnant. Then there's the fact that this shift completely shunts the Fsociety hacking storyline, which dominates most of the season, to one side. It feels like the audience's emotional investment in the characters and storylines is short-changed by it being revealed that so much of what we thought was going on wasn't right.

Some people may disagree, and certainly the blanket acclaim levelled on the show - even the bitty and highly unsatisfying semi-cliffhanger finale - shows that it works for many. But for me it leaves Season 2 with a lot of work to do to redeem that final twist and make it work.

Mr. Robot's first season (****) is certainly worth watching for its fantastic acting, directing and atmosphere, not to mention its unusually accurate depiction of hacking, and for its superb character development. The way the season ends is also startling, shocking and fascinating, but also divisive. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and DVD (UK, USA).

Empire Ascendant by Kameron Hurley

The kingdom of Dhai stands on the brink of disaster, threatened by a vast invading army from a mirror dimension which has already obliterated the powerful northern empire of Saiduan. Ahkio, the inexperienced Kai or spiritual ruler of Dhai, is forced to make unpalatable decisions to prepare his small, brave and peace-loving kingdom for war. The price for saving Dhai may be to sell out its soul. Meanwhile, the Empress of Dorinah sends her best general, Zezili, south into the kingdom of Tordin on an errand that will have a profound impact on the coming conflict, and the entire world.

The Mirror Empire was a decent opening to The Worldbreaker Saga, introducing a wide swathe of interesting new ideas, delivered in the author's trademark take-no-prisoners style. At the same time, the book undercut its promising opening with a whole lot of confusion, launched a sustained assault of invented terminology and context-less worldbuilding that left a lot of readers scratching their heads. Towards the end of the book, as the worldbuilding, character development and thematic ideas started coalescing, it picked up and ended on a reasonably intriguing note.

Empire Ascendant picks up on that promise and delivers it with the force of a brick through your window. The book explodes into life at the start and doesn't pause for breath. After the much bittier and more inconsistent Mirror Empire, Empire Ascendant is resolute, determined and focused, which is a great relief.

The core characters remain the same as previously: Ahkio, Zezili, Roh and Lilia, along with a number of more minor POV characters, including some of the so-called "villains", now humanised by allowing us to see events from their points of view. In particular, the alternate Kirana, the ruler of the dying world who is desperately trying to save her people by evacuating them to Grasia using portal-opening rituals that can only be fuelled by blood and death, is made more relatable. Although still a mass-murdering tyrant, Kirana believes her actions are necessary as the only alternative is to let her world die and her people be completely wiped out. This puts the actions of our more "heroic" characters in Grasia in a different light as they are also forced to adopt more and more desperate tactics (including sacrificing hundreds of lives in feints and using scorched earth tactics to deny the enemy resupply) to survive.

Empire Ascendant's greatest success is taking the characters and archetypes we thought we'd gotten to know and reinventing them. Lilia could be - on a bare, simplistic level - be seen as a Daenerys Targaryen figure, a young girl who gains tremendous and far-reaching powers which we expect her to use for good. Events don't turn out that way and Lilia developers a ruthless streak which the reader can cheer when she is deploying it against the invading Tai Mora but then becomes a bit disturbing when she advocates tactics that will kill hundreds or thousands of innocents but it is justified because it inconveniences the enemy. Other characters go through similar emotional wringers and transformations but retain their credibility.

The story develops at a relentless, page-turning pace: this is a 500-page book which catches fire early on and never goes out. The confusing morass of moons and satellites and astronomy and astrology from the first book is made a lot more understandable here, so the significance of certain satellites appearing and disappearing is now clearer. Armies march, lots of things blow up and there's a lot of betrayals and daring escapes, as well as hideous major character deaths. It's a dark book, but one where there are shades of hope and light as well.

Empire Ascendant (****½) is a far more dynamic, impressive and vital novel than its forebear, and may be Hurley's finest work to date. It is available now in the UK and USA. The concluding volume of The Worldbreaker Saga, The Broken Heavens, will be released in October 2017.

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS hits Netflix

Classic 1980s cartoon The Real Ghostbusters has arrived on Netflix in the USA, UK, Ireland and quite a few other countries.

The cartoon ran for seven seasons from 1986 to 1991. Picking up after the events of the original 1984 movie, the TV show follows the continuing adventures of the Ghostbusters as they battle demons and spirits. Due to events later explained in flashback, they have been joined by Slimer, the first ghost they ever captured, as an ally. The TV show half-ignores Ghostbusters II (whose claim that the Ghostbusters were shut down for five years between the two movies is impossible to reconcile with the series), although multiple characters from the first movie such as Louis Tully, Walter Peck and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man do show up.

The series is noted for its surprisingly dark and occasionally flat-out disturbing tone, especially in the first three seasons. For Seasons 4-7 the show was renamed Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters and became aimed at a younger audience, with an accompanying sub-series expanding on Slimer's adventures in the hotel before the events of the first movie.

The series is also an early showcase for the skills of J. Michael Straczynski, who started his career in animation with this series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe before going on to write Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Babylon 5, Crusade, Jeremiah and now Sense8.

Despite being aimed at kids, the cartoon series has quite a few excellent episodes which are comfortably superior to either Ghostbusters II or the 2016 reboot.

George R.R. Martin explains delay for THE WINDS OF WINTER

Fantasy author George R.R. Martin has finally reveals why work on his signature Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series is taking so long. In an exclusive exclusive, he reveals the truth. Exclusively:

George R.R. RoboCop's first experimentation with cybernetics was only a modest success.

The truth is, I finished The Winds of Winter three months ago. Not only that, but I had the whole last book mapped out and ready to go. I was just about to send the titanic manuscript to my editor when, as so often happens on deadline day, a massive rip in the fabric of the space/time continuum formed in my office.

I heard this voice cry out “STAY THY HAND” and a figure emerged. He was dressed in leather over high-yield body armour, with his left arm replaced by some kind of laser minigun. He also had a magnificent and well-kept beard. With a shock, I realised I was looking at myself, only transformed into a Terminator-style cyborg from some kind of alternate timeline. I had to admit that I looked kind of badass.

“GEORGE!” cried the other me. “I have some come from some kind of alternate timeline where you have become a Terminator-style cyborg.” “Aha!” I said. The other me continued: “You must not publish The Winds of Winter! That is where it all started going wrong.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Many millions of fans are waiting for this book. You would ask me to deny them?”

“Yes!”

The alterno-George went on to explain that for many years the Earth had been scrutinised by a hostile alien race known as the Litmongers. They had planned to invade the Earth and lay waste to human civilisation before summoning their dark god Cthulhu to unleash a millennium of pain and torment upon the survivors.

“Wait, Cthulhu is real?” I said, both horrified and impressed.

“Sort of. The Litmongers are great readers of human literature, particularly speculative fiction, and so created a malevolent entity modelled on the works of Lovecraft, which they use to subdue worlds.”

As RoboMartin continued to explain, at great length - with enjoyable-but-unconcise tangents into the aliens’ complex caste structure, heraldry and dietary preferences - the Litmongers had been poised to invade Earth in the summer of 1996 but one of their number had stumbled across a copy of A Game of Thrones. The cruel aliens had been so gripped by my expertly-crafted narrative of feuding kingdoms and subtly-complex-yet-relatable human characters (“So venomous they could eat the Borgias” – SFX Magazine) that they had stayed their hand, waiting for the series to conclude. Their patience had been worn thin by the wait for later books in the series, their arguments about whether to invade Earth and plunge seven billion souls into horrific torment or wait a bit longer to find out who Jon Snow’s dad was spilling over and manifesting themselves in bitter flame wars on the human internet.

“So I have to keep writing Song of Ice and Fire novels forever to keep humanity safe from utter obliteration?” I asked, feeling both the despair of art being subsumed by commercial requirements but also the financial security that comes from having a reliable income stream. “I’m not sure my fans will buy that. Well, not all of them.”

“Indeed!” said the Other Me. “In my timeline, after publishing The Winds of Winter the Litmonger faction that favoured invasion finally won the argument, after a particularly punishing online debate over the twist that Jon Snow is capable of time travel and is in fact his own father.”

“What?” I cried. “That was a tremendous, well-foreshadowed revelation. I was very disappointed they went in a different direction on the TV show.”

“Anyway,” said the Alternative Bearded One, moving hurriedly on. “The Litmongers invaded in full force, sweeping across the globe in a tidal wave of terror before finally triumphing. Even the mighty forces of the American military under President Sanders were unable to stop them.”

Clearly there were other changes between our timelines. But now the full weight of the horror wrought upon that world struck me. “So there was no hope? No victories to speak of?”

“Well, the Litmongers destroyed the United States from west to east, so technically the Giants won the NFL that year by dint of the other teams all being driven insane before being immolated ahead of them.” Ah, almost worth it. We fistbumped.

“So what can I do?”

“Stall! The Litmongers have a limited time before they must return to their own world through hyperspace, after which it will be millennia before they can regroup and return. After another (indeterminate)  you can publish The Winds of Winter safely, without it resulting in the utter ruination of lifekind as we know it.”

“Very well.” I knew with a heavy heart that this was the way it would have to be.

“Also, that storyline you ditched where Melisandre imbued Stannis with the power of R’hllor and turned him into the Human Torch? Do that, that was awesome.”

Alterno-GRRM again tore open a hole between realities, ready to return to the hellscape that had been his homeworld. “Wait!” I cried. “You do not have to live your life in that terrible place, you can stay here and survive in peace.”

“A tempting offer. Tell me, are there any other changes between our realities?”

After explaining our changed political situation, MechaMartin considered a moment, whilst the tormented shrieks of uncounted legions lost beyond all hope seeped through the gate behind him.

“Well, sometimes the devil you know, eh?” he finally concluded, before stepping through the portal and shutting it behind him.

So there you have it, loyal readers. The Winds of Winter can only be published when doing so would not result in the extinction of humanity, and that time will be goto 50%%%%*$$$&…

The two greatest video games of all time get new editions

The two greatest video games of all time (arguably) are both being re-released in spanking new editions fit for modern gamers.

First up is StarCraft Remastered. Blizzard have confirmed that they are re-releasing the original, classic StarCraft and its expansion Brood War is a new edition complete with new resolutions (essential as the old game had a locked, low-res perspective) and reworked graphics. Surprisingly, the game is still in 2D and does not use the StarCraft II engine. Although not confirmed, it is also assumed that they will be replacing the old, CG cut-scenes with reworked ones.

The original version of StarCraft will remain available but, impressively, will now be free. Even more startlingly, as StarCraft Remastered uses the same codebase as the original, players will be able to switch between modes at the touch of a button and original players will be able to play against those using the new version of the game in multiplayer.

More controversially, the UI will apparently not be improved. This means that you will still only be able to select 12 units at a time and you won't be able to auto-send newly-built units to resources.

Despite these age-old limitations, StarCraft is still widely regarded as one of the best real-time strategy games of all time (challenged only by Company of Heroes, Hostile Waters and Homeworld), mainly due to its sublime unit balance between three completely different sides and fast-placed gameplay. Arguably, StarCraft II added too many variables to the mix and made the game a bit more challenging, whilst the original's smaller roster still allowed for a wide mix of strategies whilst being more constrained. Less arguably, the original game has a far better-written, more interest and more concise story than the sprawling, increasingly silly sequel.

Also getting the remaster treatment is (probably, although it's not been quite 100% confirmed yet) Planescape: Torment. Widely-regarded as the greatest CRPG of all time, the game is set in the Outer Planes and the bizarre city of Sigil, and sees the player taking on the role of the Nameless One, an immortal entity who has to discover the secrets of his past and the nature of his own reality. The game is notable for its commitment to dialogue, characterisation and ideas over combat, blood and looting. The game recently gained a "spiritual successor" in the form of Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition is being handled by Beamdog, who previously handled the expanded and enhanced versions of both Baldur's Gate games and the two Icewind Dale titles.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

They called it the Second Pulse: an unexpected collapse of glacial valleys in Antarctica that poured billions more tons of ice into the world oceans than was ever expected. Global sea levels rose by fifty feet in a few years, displacing hundreds of millions of people and triggering an economic meltdown. The world recovered, but it had to adapt.

In New York the lower half of Manhattan was inundated, becoming a "Super-Venice". New Yorkers are a hardy breed and they keep trucking along, taking skybridges and boats to work instead of taxis and trains, and still grumbling about the weather. For the inhabitants of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Madison Square, life continues in this changed world. But when two residents are kidnapped and the city is threatened by a tropical storm, the tower becomes the centre of a sequence of events which could change the world.

New York, New York, so great they named it twice. In novels and on screen, it's been blown up, hit by meteors, invaded by aliens, attacked by Godzilla and King Kong and been subjected to every disaster that the human mind can conjure. Kim Stanley Robinson is the latest author to take a crack at subjecting the city to catastrophe, but his one is both much simpler and more plausible: a significant rise in sea levels. Lower Manhattan is transformed into a series of islands, buildings connected together by bridges and boat taxis, the city at considerably greater risk from storm surges and hurricanes but New Yorkers carrying on as normal because that's what they do.

Robinson is one of SF's most interesting voices, mixing realism with a healthy optimism with real scientific vigour with an interest in macroeconomics. His work veers from the large scale to the intimate: his Mars Trilogy remains the final word on the colonisation of the Red Planet, whilst Galileo's Dream, Shaman and the Science in the Capital trilogy have been more down-to-earth works. Generation ship drama Aurora and his state-of-the-Solar-System epic 2312 have shown a general trajectory back to large scale events, as will his next novel (in which China colonises the moon). New York 2140 takes a different tack, depicting a vast, complex and changed world through the prism of the (now very soggy) Big Apple. There's some interest to be found from parsing the ultra-cynical, profit-driven city through the eyes of Robinson, a Californian utopian scientist through and through.

So this is a book which examines the future of human society through the greatest city humanity has ever built (and maybe ever will build), but the book zooms in even further than that, concentrating on the inhabitants of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Madison Square (the one with the impressive giant clock), now, like so many other buildings, an island rising from the waters. The main characters include NYPD office Gwen, a lawyer named Charlotte, a hedge fund manager, two homeless kids, the building's supervisor Vlade (whose tasks involve making sure the building doesn't sink or collapse from waterlogged foundations) and a cloud video star named Amelia who has her own web channel covering her attempts to save endangered species using an airship. The plot initially appears rather diffuse, with the kidnapping of two computer programmers from the building providing a dramatic spine but the book moving away from this for lengthy tangents on matters material, political and financial, but eventually the sprawling plot threads come together for a fascinating conclusion.

Robinson is that rarest of beasts, a hard SF author who can actually write. His prose is vivid, flows well and changes tonally between narrators (hedge fund manager Frank gets his chapters written in first person, unlike everyone else, just because Robinson likes mixing things up a bit). New York 2140 is simply a tremendous pleasure to read from start to finish for this reason. Robinson is also a bit on the light-hearted side of things here. That's not to say there isn't serious drama and incident (there is, especially when a tropical storm hits the city), but Robinson mitigates this with a sense of humour and an genuine outsider's appreciation for the city.

Really, New York 2140 is a love letter to a city that you'd think doesn't need any more, but works anyway. The city is peppered with anecdotes from the city's history, most of them true. It's startling to learn that Met North (the building adjacent to the Met Life Insurance Building) was supposed to be a supermassive skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building but was abandoned after 30 floors for financial reasons, or that in 1903 an elephant made a break for freedom from Coney Island and swam three miles across the Narrows to Staten Island before being recaptured. Robinson's list of sources and stories will have readers hitting the internet to check out the awesome 18th Century British topographical surveys of the mostly-unsettled Manhattan Island, or confirm that Manhattan is actually sloped with the southern part of the island much lower than the northern. Most insane is the story that a British warship carrying gold to pay its troops, HMS Hussar, sank in New York Harbour and was never recovered. The money on board would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today, but since the Bronx has been extended over the site of the wreck it can't be recovered. Implausibly, but entertainingly, this becomes a major plot point in the novel.

The book is mostly successful but occasionally flounders: the novel is a little too consumed with economic history and a few jokes wear thin ("sunk costs" is a term that takes on a new meaning), but these points remain minor.

New York 2140 (****½) is more than a well-written profile of the city. As the book continues it gains drama and urgency and ends on a note which moves the story far beyond New York's borders to take in the entire world. It's a little bit too neat and maybe too optimistic, but the book's (unnamed) narrator acknowledges this and points out that the great social transformation which results from the book's events may be temporary. But overall New York 2140 is Robinson at his best: brimming with verve and humour and hope, taking all the knocks that politics and economics and cold science can throw at us and showing that humans can always adapt, change and prosper. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Storyline of The Solo Han Solo movie revealed

The Solo Han Solo Movie (which should really be its title) now has a storyline. Well, you'd hope it already had one given they're shooting it now, but the story has now been made public.

The film will span six years in the life of everyone's favourite smuggler, starting with him on Corellia as a 18-year-old and ending eight years later with him in possession of the Millennium Falcon, having met Lando and Chewbacca along the way. This is an interesting new turn for the Star Wars movies, which have typically been tight, focused affairs. This new, multi-year epic is a new approach.

The Solo Han Solo Movie is currently scheduled for release in May 2018. It is directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street) and written by Jake Kasdan and his father Lawrence (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark). Alden Ehreneich stars as Han Solo, with Donald Glover as Lando, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, Woody Harrelson as Beckett (Han's mentor) and Emilia Clarke, Michael K. Williams and Thandie Newton is as-yet-unnamed roles.

Chris Wooding announces major new fantasy trilogy

Chris Wooding, the author of the Tales of the Ketty Jay and Braided Path series (amongst many others, like the superb The Fade), has confirmed that his new fantasy trilogy will be published by Gollancz. The series starts with The Ember Blade, which will be published in February 2018.

Wooding has been working on this novel for over two years and seeks to meld the complexity and nuance of modern fantasy with the adventure of the classic late 20th Century genre. The blurb is as follows:

A land under occupation. A legendary sword. A young man’s journey to find his destiny.Aren has lived by the rules all his life. He’s never questioned it; that’s just the way things are. But then his father is executed for treason, and he and his best friend Cade are thrown into a prison mine, doomed to work until they drop. Unless they can somehow break free . . . 

But what lies beyond the prison walls is more terrifying still. Rescued by a man who hates him yet is oath-bound to protect him, pursued by inhuman forces, Aren slowly accepts that everything he knew about his world was a lie. The rules are not there to protect him, or his people, but to enslave them. A revolution is brewing, and Aren is being drawn into it, whether he likes it or not. 

The key to the revolution is the Ember Blade. The sword of kings, the Excalibur of his people. Only with the Ember Blade in hand can their people be inspired to rise up . . . but it’s locked in an impenetrable vault in the most heavily guarded fortress in the land. All they have to do now is steal it. . .

On a Reddit AMA a couple of months back, he described it thusly:

The new book is my first attempt at doing, er, I suppose you'd call it 'traditional' fantasy. I grew up on Shannara, LOTR, Dragonlance and that kind of thing; they were the books that got me into fantasy. And I realised in almost 20 years of writing I'd never actually tried a fantasy story in that kind of world: the kind of pseudo-European environment that most readers identify as fantasy. My big series were always set in weird environments: in Broken Sky everyone had a 'superpower' through their spirit-stones; The Braided Path was Oriental flintlock fantasy shading into science fiction; Ketty Jay was dieselpunk fantasy. This new one, I'm not throwing out all the tropes at the start as I usually do. I want this one to feel like a fantasy, like the books I loved when I was a kid. And then I'm going to tell a story working within that format, and try to make it all fresh and new, using all the ensemble casting and characterisation skillz I honed during the Ketty Jay books. It's not going to be like the fantasy of the 80s and 90s, with its black and white morality and clear-cut heroes and villains; nor is it going to be grimdark. It's a pretty lo-magic setting. Beyond that, all I can tell you is that I'm having a total blast writing it. There's a certain freedom in being able to employ the assumptions and traditions of fantasy fiction and concentrate on story and character, instead of starting everything from scratch.

Wooding is currently working on the sequel. Given the very high quality of Wooding's previous novels, this immediately joins my "most wanted" queue.

Movie poster for THE DARK TOWER revealed

Columbia Pictures has released the first poster for The Dark Tower, its upcoming movie adaptation of Stephen King's eight-volume novel series of the same name. The film stars Idris Elba as Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger, and Matthew McConaughey as Walter Padick, the Man in Black (in this version of the story, anyway). The film is flippable, focusing on Roland from one angle and on the Man in Black from the other.

The film is both an adaptation of, and sequel to, King's books* (see below, but SPOILERS). The plan is for this to be a multi-film project, with the first film drawing on elements from the first three novels in the book series. There will also be a TV series exploring Roland's backstory as revealed in the fourth novel, with Elba appearing in framing sequences for the flashbacks and a younger actor playing the teenage Roland.

The film is directed by Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) and also stars Tom Taylor, Katheryn Winnick and Jackie Earle Haley. It will be released on 28 July. The TV series will air in 2018.

SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP

A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE tabletop wargame announced

Dark Sword Miniatures, who have been producing high-quality miniatures based on George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels for a decade, are now working on a tabletop wargame with CMON Games.

The new game will initially pitch Houses Stark and Lannister against one another. Later expansions will add the other houses and factions. The game will feature military units but also "heroes" (characters from the novels) who will add bonuses and special abilities to their armies.

This is the second ASoIaF miniatures game. The first was Battles of Westeros, based on the BattleLore rules and released by Fantasy Flight Games. Despite FFG's high profile and their proven success with the ASoIaF board game and collectable card game, Battles of Westeros never really took off, was fairly low-key and is no longer available. Dark Sword and CMON are promising much greater support for their new game.

There will be a Kickstarter campaign later this year for the game and a full release is expected in Spring 2018.