Book Review | Rogues, ed. George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois

If you’re a fan of fiction that is more than just black and white, this latest story collection from #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois is filled with subtle shades of gray. Twenty-one all-original stories, by an all-star list of contributors, will delight and astonish you in equal measure with their cunning twists and dazzling reversals. And George R. R. Martin himself offers a brand-new A Game of Thrones tale chronicling one of the biggest rogues in the entire history of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Follow along with the likes of Gillian Flynn, Joe Abercrombie, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Cherie Priest, Garth Nix, and Connie Willis, as well as other masters of literary sleight-of-hand, in this rogues gallery of stories that will plunder your heart—and yet leave you all the richer for it.

***

Give genre fiction fans a fat fantasy novel each and they'll read for a week. Give 'em an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois and they could be rolling in stories forever more.

Rogues is the latest in a long line of collaborations by the pair, and like Warriors and Dangerous Women, it represents a commingling of forms of fiction. Fitting insofar as the rogue is "a character archetype that cuts across all mediums and genres," (p.xii) as the author of A Song of Ice and Fire asserts in his introduction, thus the fantasy narratives forecast are accompanied by stories of historical heroics, replete with romance, ghosts and gunslinging. Which is to say there are Westerns as well, in addition to efforts emblematic of a small army of other categories, including horror, mystery and the mainstream. Herein, expect to see science fiction rubbing shoulders with the traditional thriller.

In that regard, Rogues is rather a throwback.

As a matter of fact, Martin begins the book by looking to his youth. In 'Everybody Loves a Rogue,' he reflects on the good old days when "everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn." (p.xv) "I liked it that way," he goes on to say:

I still do. But in the decades since [...] publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that's a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to place we have never been and show us things we've never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered. 

We think we have some good one heres. (p.xv)

And we do, to be sure.

Letters From America | Week Three: The Cabin In The Woods

I've had a hell of a time in America, this past month. There've been good bit and bad, but of course -- as ever, the great and the terrible come together. Given which, it might be a trifle disingenuous of me to say I wouldn't trade a second of my many and various experiences here - there are a few I'd be glad to get shot off, in all honesty - so I won't. But by and large, I've had the time of my life.

Hard to believe, then, that it's almost over. But it is. Come Monday I'll be back in my proper place, installed before the curious control panel of The Speculative Scotsman, reading and writing and teaching - and talking about reading and writing and teaching to anyone who'll listen - just as if I'd never been gone at all. But I was. Gone. And I was gone a long time.

You haven't even heard the half of it, either. In the last of my Letters From America, dated near enough a fortnight ago now, we talked about New Orleans, and touched on Panama City Beach. So what happened after that? Hell, only everything! But let me cast my mind back...

In brief, simply because there's so much I want to burble about: from Panama City Beach the other half and I saw the third member of our impromptu party off to the airport for a quick hop along the panhandle; to Fort Lauderdale, where we'd be catching up with her again shortly. But not before more than 1000 miles of driving on the wrong side of the road, the perfect storm, a legion of oversized insects, and at long last, rather a lot of reading.

The thinking was, smack bang in the middle of our hectic month in America, we might just need a holiday from our holiday... a little downtime, to catch our breath and consider what we could and should expel it on next. To wit, we booked a couple of nights in a cabin in the woods between Dogtown and Fort Payne in innermost Alabama.

Surprisingly, this worried everyone we made mention of it to - though it's worth noting that none of them had ever been to Alabama themselves - and I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the names of the towns on either side of our quaint little cabin didn't help matters. We were told to make doubly sure we had appropriate plates on our rental car, and our Texan friends also insisted we stick to main roads wherever possible. Furthermore, we were advised to keep ourselves to ourselves. Basically to keep our mouths shut unless we couldn't possibly avoid it. Oh, and no taking the lord's name in vain!

As it happened, however, the most perilous thing about Alabama was the weather. Our cabin in the woods was far enough removed from it all that we only met a few folks, and those that we did meet were perfectly friendly. That said, several of the locals we encountered in the midst of our holiday-within-a-holiday essentially echoed the advice we'd been given earlier. So yes, we were careful. We hardly left the house, except to see a few incredible natural landmarks, and forage for foodstuffs. But then, that's all we'd planned on doing anyway, so our time in the cabin went off without a hitch, excepting the huge bugs that ate perhaps half of my body mass.

We weren't so lucky getting to the cabin in the first place, I'm afraid: the mildly strenuous six hour drive from Panama City Beach turned into an stressful eight hour affair when we hit massive traffic, and alas, almost immediately after that, we drove right into what I'm going to call a tropical storm... though I sincerely doubt it was anything out of the ordinary for Americans.

For wee British people like my pocket-sized traveling companion and I, it felt a lot like I imagine the end of the world would: in a matter of minutes, it went from late in the day but still quite light to night as thick as pitch. The sweltering warmth we'd almost gotten used to erupted into thunder the likes of which I'd never ever heard, and with it spikes of lightning that seemed to split the sky. To add insult to injury, seconds later huge hailstones started attacking us.

It was truly terrifying - certainly the scariest thing that I encountered in the six states I saw - but at the time, I thought the thing to do was push on through it. Me and my pride! I only pulled over when all the other drivers I'd been keeping pace with took to the hard shoulder themselves... then I happily hit my hazards and called a momentary halt to our adventure.

Nor was the drive up to Fort Lauderdale any laughing matter at the time, though I have had call to look back on it since, and laugh. On this occasion, ambition was my deadly sin. We were going to do two six to eight hour over a pair of days, but so close to the end of our time in America - or so it seemed to me - I didn't want to drag the thing out. I wanted to do it all in a day so we could get on with the last leg of our trip, and I did.

More's the pity.

But between one gargantuan drive and the other: happy days. Relaxing days. Also excruciating, exhilarating days. And why such a spread of emotions? Well, because I spend most of them reading, at long last, A Game of Thrones... which was magnificent. I did this ostensibly in readiness for the second season of the TV series, which I now plan to watch when it's concluded, and I've had the time to take in A Clash of Kings too.

Because once you pop, you can't very well stop, can you? :)

On which note, I'd better get packing, but I'll back on Monday with one last installment of Letters From America -- though truth be told it won't be a letter from America at all, because by then I'll be home again, home again.

Jiggety jig?

Sadly no... not so much.

Guest Post | Nathaniel of The Hat Rack Reviews Nightflyers by George R. R. Martin

I've had my eye on Nathaniel Katz for long enough that it probably qualifies as creepy.

But for good reason. He's consistently one of the most intelligent and insightful reviewers we have in our darkly sparkling corner of the blogsphere, and his site, The Hat Rack, is a bookmark waiting to happen, if it hasn't already.

From time to time, Nathaniel also writes for Strange Horizons, which should give you a good sense of the quality of his criticism. Meanwhile his short fiction has been published a bunch in the last little while. You can read a bit more about that here. Or perhaps here. Even here!

He's a good dude, too. As evidenced by the fascinating short story review which follows this little thing I've written. What the premiere of the much ballyhooed-about second season of Game of Thrones airing here in the States yesterday, how awfully timely it is too. :)

Why, it's almost as if someone planned this whole thing...

***

I hope I won't be surprising many of you when I say that George R. R. Martin's career did not begin with A Game of Thrones. Decades before that novel's publication, Martin was releasing and winning acclaim for his early novels and short stories, many of them, the subject of our discussion today no exception, a blend of Science Fiction and Horror. Judging by the date at the story's close, "Nightflyers" was first written in 1978, but it first saw publication in a 1980 issue of Analog before becoming one half of Binary Star #5, starring as the title story in a collection (from where I'll be getting all the page numbers to come), and reappearing in two more of the master's collections (Songs the Dead Men Sing and Dreamsongs, for those of you playing along at home). It's worth every one of those reprintings.

At the story's center are the volcryn, sailing towards the galaxy's edge below the speed of light. To understand something  so alien, we must begin with scale: When Jesus of Nazareth hung dying on the cross, the volcryn passes within a light year of his agony, headed outward. (p.1) That's not enough, though. It's not just our modern perception of time that's so dwarfed here. We proceed, sailing past future history rendered irrelevant backdrop by time, past the Fire Wars and a great man named Klerenomas and the time when "Klerenomas was dust" (ibid). And so we come to this present that's so far ahead of ours, and the volcryn continue their voyage, paying no more attention to our time than they did to any of those that preceded it.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we pay no attention to it. A group of academics – xenobiologists and xenotechs and telepaths and more – has assembled to draw close to this passing specter and learn the truth. They're a friendly bunch, even if they haven't yet had a chance to become close, and they're ready for success, even if they've not yet met the captain of their ship. I don't think I'm blowing your mind when I say that things don't turn out so hunky-dory. The book's back, after all, does so-subtly shout in its bolded typeface: MASS MURDER IN DEEP SPACE. The Nightflyers' eccentric captain is the cause of their troubles, coming to them as a "ghost," as a "hologram" (p.4), his true form – whatever it might be – cut off from the others by a wall that divides the ship. He's amiable, but he'll tell them nothing about himself. And those that dig deeper begin to die. There is nowhere for those left to go, of course. They're in the middle of space, and they can't get back without their captain's cooperation. But his protestations of innocence, needless to say, grow harder to take as the days go on, as the second death follows the first, and as they near the implacable volcryn fleet.

The building of tension is, and has always been, one of Martin's strengths, and the escalation aboard the Nightflyer – the speculation, the theories, the fear, the accidents as they begin to happen – is superb. I should warn you, though, that "Nightflyers" doesn't have the same emotional, close up point of view that Martin uses in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Much of the story actually seems to be from the captain's own perspective, but that reveals nothing at all about who he is. As we learn: "He watched them work, eat, sleep, copulate; he listened untiringly to their talk. Within a week he knew them, all nine, and had begun to ferret out their tawdry little secrets" (p.5). And so much of the novella's first half is comprised of terse description and observed conversations, which leads to a group of carefully rendered characters, each of which is viewed too consistently and from too far away to be anything but sullied or detached.

I won't give away the captain's precise identity, but I will say that isolation is key to it. At the novella's end, we get a glimpse of the volcryn we've been following this whole time, and we learn that all those who thought they knew them before had really only "sensed a bit of the nature of the volcryn […] and fashioned the rest to suit themselves" (p.96). These legendary unknowns become a mirror of sorts, turned back to humanity and all the other beings that have glimpsed them. In that sequestrated mirror, one of the things that we might glimpse is the distance and isolation between us, even without the depths of space to support it. As the captain says, "you are all aliens to me" (p.37).

This isn't, mind you, the first time that Martin's turned to a ship hurtling through space, its crew of academics gradually fraying on their way to some colossal other ship, their eccentric captain watching and shaping the conflict from its midst. "Plague Star," the novella that kicks off Martin's fantastic fix up novel Tuf Voyaging [reviewed on The Hat Rack here - Niall], covered similar ground – and couldn't have been a much more different story if it were a romance novel in another language altogether. "Plague Star" was filled with strife, yes, and the victor found himself at the center of a destructive monolith, but that monolith was a marvel of human ingenuity and engineering. It showed us our manifold promise, our ability to create things both wonderful and terrible. "Nightflyers" is not quite so empowering. Trapped in the Nightflyer's crazed and deadly confines, nearing an inscrutable and impossibly ancient race, this is a story of claustrophobia and fear, a glimpse of man as a "helpless" and "ignorant" (p.95) creature apt to destroy himself at every turn at the hands of something so much incomprehensibly vaster than he. Here, "it is not wise or safe to be too many moves ahead" (p.61). And, here, joy may be found in "grand gorgeous lies" (p.84) and, maybe, nowhere else, something that's rather reminiscent of Martin's story "The Way of Cross and Dragon" from Sandkings [which Nathaniel has also written about on his site - Niall].

The last word of "Nightflyers" is "ever," (p.103) and so it ends much as it began: with the infinite. For a novella just over a hundred pages, it has a lot of that in it, in addition to a whole lot more. "Nightflyers" is a locked-door gem of building tension and imagination, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

***

Well that's your marching orders, folks!

Thanks again to Nathaniel for chipping in with this terrific short story review. You can and you should find him blogging - all too occasionally for my tastes, but in this case I'll take what I can get - at The Hat Rack.

As to tomorrow on The Speculative Scotsman? Well, as of the time of this writing, I'm not exactly sure yet, so let's just say it'll be a pleasant surprise... because it will be, one way or another.

Cover Identity | The Flames, They Are A-Flooding

In a shockingly fast reaction to yesterday's GRRMblings - among a long and storied history of other such posts, of course - it seems George R. R. Martin and his Stateside publisher Bantam have agreed to unceremoniously kill A Song of Ice and Fire dead.

Many shall mourn - because damn it all, George, you promised us at least two more books! How very dare you?

Some shall celebrate - for at last, an end!

But invariably, others shall discuss poop, and sexing.

So all is as it should be. :I

Thanks to the Yeti What Stomps for the huge scoop, and congrats too to his significant other Jennifer for winning the design contract on the preliminary cover art represented above. Quite the big break there!

Do stay tuned for the UK cover of A Flood of Flames...

...any minute now.

###

Source: Stomping on Yeti

Opinionated Speculations | A Deal With The Devil?

So the press were all over George R. R. Martin in advance of HBO's hugely anticipated of A Game of Thrones, and needless to say, after starving for years on occasional tidbits of news from Not A Blog, when it rained, as the pilot's airdate approached, it poured.

In fact it poured such that a few comments well worth further discussion were rather lost in the downpour provoked by certain provocative pieces, which I'll comment on no further than to say: what utter bloody nonsense.

To wit, then, an incidental bit from The Guardian's chat with the man who would be king.

"Hopefully, the last two books will go a little quicker than this one has, but that doesn't mean they're going to be quick," says Martin. "Realistically, it's going to take me three years to finish the next one at a good pace. I hope it doesn't take me six years like this last one has. I have a million ideas. I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story. But I've got to finish this first and then I'll decide what I'm inspired by at that point. If I'm not in some old folks' home." And if he is, no doubt his fans will be haranguing him even there.

I've bolded what particularly interests me from that paragraph. Which is to say, George R. R. Martin wants to be writing other things than A Song of Ice and Fire. And oh, how I wish he could!

Because it's a deal with the devil, isn't it? The series. The saga. On the one hand, real breakthrough success in speculative fiction only seems to come with multi-volume opuses like The Wheel of Time, The Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Kingkiller Chronicles. What is, for some, and will be for others, a lifetime's work. Rarely does a book from a mere trilogy hit The New York Times' list of bestsellers, after all, and still less often will you see self-contained science-fiction or fantasy sell half as well. For speculative fiction to stand a chance of such widespread success, all indicators point to volume seven or eleven of such and such a series being a more likely prospect for bestseller status than even new China Mieville... for what is really no better reason than inertia, as I see it.

Though I expect some might take me to task on that.

Anyway, whatever the cause and effect, that's a pretty darned shady state of affairs. Variety is the spice of life - surely we can agree on that - and while one understands that the industry must supply as demand dictates, the import it puts on sequels and series, and so the dispersal of the same marketing dollars that might help elevate a standalone novel to the realms of runaway success... that over-valuation, and not just on the part of the publisher, serves to stifle innumerable other avenues of genre literature.

Take a minute and think of all that could have been.

What, for instance, might J. K. Rowling have written if she hadn't spend a decade and change on Harry Potter? Or Robert Jordan if The Wheel of Time hadn't taken over his writing life?

Loathe though I am to even mention Robert Jordan, I do so for a dual purpose: both to illustrate the question I'm asking here - shouldn't authors be able to write what they want rather than what readers are seen (and indeed heard) to want? - and equally to demonstrate what happens when an author doesn't acquiesce to the demands of certain elements of his or her readership. For instance when an author has the gall to "pull a Jordan."

You've heard the phrase said, haven't you? Needless to say it's disgusting; absolutely sickening. For the innocents out there, it means to die before you've finished telling your tale, and I'm with George R. R. Martin on this, when he says in The Independent (via a message board post on Fantasy Faction) that "anyone who uses that phrase... is an asshole."

But for all that, it's used often enough. In fact of late, and here we come full circle, it's been put to the aforementioned author as regards A Song of Ice and Fire, a series which George R. R. Martin has spent 15 years of his life writing as is. And of course the guy's getting on - what of it?

It's a credit to the gent that he's as dedicated as he is to the series in question. "I have a million ideas," he writes. "I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story. But I've got to finish this first." The long and short of which is, he's 62, it's taken him five years to write the last two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, and he's prioritising this one narrative over all the others he'd like to write largely to satisfy the unfathomable sense of entitlement certain very vocal readers feel. Because "nothing is as savage as a horde of starved fantasy fans."

Well, I say: the hell with them.

We all know I've not yet read A Game of Thrones - though I'm loving the HBO series based on the book thus far - but I have read, and adored, Fevre Dream, Dreamsongs and many of Martin's recent anthology contributions. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd spent several years on tenterhooks, waiting to see what Winter finally brings, but... you know, I doubt it. All stories are created equal. That these days some stories seem more equal than others is perhaps a truth, but a harsh truth, and a sad one - symptomatic of a very specific problem in a very specific area of very specific era and we're going to need to get over it quick smart, guys. Because it's just as wrongheaded as heads come.

Or are we - I shudder to think - thus entitled? Was that the bargain struck?

Clearly, I don't think so. I believe authors should be able to write what they want when they want rather than writing to a timetable dictated by the whims of what a particular sphere of readers are seen and indeed heard to want. Surely this pressure George R. R. Martin feels should not exist. Surely the vitriol he's been on the receiving end of, simply for taking a little longer than usual to put out A Dance With Dragons, is as outright unreasonable a thing as getting angry at scientists for not curing cancer a bit quicker.

What do you think?

One the one hand you have your sequels and sagas, which come hand in hand with the shot at mainstream success apparently inherent in such things, and on the other you have the freedom to write whatever you please on your own timetable, to no guarantee of sales or even much in the way of support from your publisher. Are these trade-offs fair? Or do I sound like a child here, worrying about what's fair and what's not?

In short, is this particular deal with the devil worth the paper it's written on, far less the blood price of signing the hellish thing?

###


Source: The Guardian

First Impressions | Game of Thrones

Winter... has come.

I'd add to that: and about bloody time, too!


Though the urge has been in overdrive since HBO began promoting the latest addition to their many-studded slate of sophisticated adult dramas, I never did get around to reading any of A Song of Ice and Fire. This despite my quite adoring Fevre Dream and those short stories I cherry-picked from the compendium of all things early George R. R. Martin that is Dreamsongs. This despite my deep-seated fondness for intelligent epic fantasy and all things grim, which I understand now - as I intuited then - the great Game of Thrones indubitably is.


So for me it's been a long road, though not half, nor even a quarter - I'd say somewhere around a sixteenth - as long a road as I'm assured it's been for all those vocal devotees who've hung on every word of every instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire so far. Well, here's hoping this series helps tide those anxious souls over some. For myself, I come to HBO's sumptuous adaptation from a perspective unaffected by any knowledge at all of what's on the horizon, but for the received wisdom that it'll be pretty awesome, probably.


On the strength of this first episode of Game of Thrones alone, then, just this one time, I might be inclined to believe the hype. Tell no-one!

Game of Thrones opens with what appears to be a Wahlberg - though appearances are in this case deceiving - riding through The Wall which divides the South of Westeros from the tortuously frosted North. He and his Night's Watch companions come upon a bleak forest clearing full of dead people, yet the dead seem to have a little life left in 'em still, for they rise up as if they'd never fallen at all and commence beheading the men. The encounter's sole survivor escapes to Winterfell, where he's declaimed as a deserter and a lunatic for his dire rantings about beings thought dead for centures, and decapitated for his trouble.


On the other end of the offending sword, we meet Ned Stark. As Sean Bean. Or perhaps it's the other way around? Let's say that. Certainly, Bean is utterly at home in the role: as the would-be hand man of the King of the Seven Kingdoms he brings grizzled gravitas and a stout-jawed resolve many will remember fondly from The Fellowship of the Ring, while as the powerful patriarch of House Stark he evinces a warmth I hadn't expected - and a coldness, too. His character seems a fascinating one, neatly encapsulated in a couple of this first episode of Game of Thrones' most memorable lines. "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword," he tells his youngest son after insisting the boy Bran witnesses the aforementioned execution; I would imagine that a fitting mantra for Ned Stark - lifted directly from the novel, perhaps? Later, upon finding a pack of Direwolf cubs huddled around the butchered remains of their mother, he allows to his spread of sons - the bastard Jon Snow and all - the following: "You will train them yourselves, you will feed them yourselves, and if they die, your will bury them yourselves."


Indeed, Westeros feels every bit a world in which the dead - and I would wager there will be many dead when all is said and done - must either resolve to somehow bury their own bodies or be content to decay in the open air. From the chill and forbidding feel of Winterfell alone, where much of this first episode's action occurs, it is too a lavishly realised location: it and its sister continent, Essos across the narrow sea, which with its rugged golden coves and sun-bleached Mediterranean sensibilities appears the polar opposite of Westeros, one bleakly blue-white and the other orange, and earthy. But though in its first 30 seconds alone there is enough stunning fantasy imagery to secure the undying devotion of many a genre fan, Game of Thrones doesn't really seem to be about the sightseeing, for in Essos we're offered an opposing perspective on the struggle for the Iron Throne one imagines will own the day across the narrow sea. Silver-haired siblings Daenerys Targaryen and her banished brother Viserys are all that remains of Westeros' former royal family. Between them they mean to reclaim their rightful place by amassing a vast army, but Essos' forces are a barbarian horde, and the only way into their good graces seems to be by marriage. Thus, Viserys demands Daenerys give herself to Dothraki leader Khal Drogo like a prize pony, and though the prospect does not please her, what other option does she have?

All this and I haven't even mentioned House Lannister - composed of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, a double-talking dwarf whose "greatest accomplishment" is to be the Queen's brother; the Queen herself, Cersei, to whom Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' Lena Headey brings the same pained nonchalance she seems to visit upon her every role; the King, of course; and Cersei's brother and lover Jaime, a dirty great meanie by all accounts, however little seen in the first episode of Game of Thrones.


All this and all that and there's more, I gather, and much more still to come. Yet Game of Thrones is not, at the outset, nearly so unwieldy as I'd feared. Pulling double duty as showrunners and head writers, David Benioff and Dan Weiss wisely opt to offer a throughline into this desperately complex world via the Night's Watch man, who passes along the narrative torch to Ned Stark when the latter unceremoniously beheads the former. Only when this hour-long first episode veers too far from Winterfell and the trials ahead of House Stark did I find my interest beginning to slip - and even then David and Dan have the decency to keep such seeming digressions as the incestuous manoeuvring of Cersei and Jaime as brief at this point as the source material will allow.


We're being broken in gently, then. Well thank the heavens for that!


Such restraint means we've had time to align our sympathies just so - though I don't doubt they'll change a great deal in the weeks and months to come. Such focus equates to the natural establishment of certain crucial characters and relationships that could easily have overburdened the narrative's developing momentum. The showrunners clearly have a lot of love for George R. R. Martin's series, and I found that their affection shone through, glinting like a knife in the night even during the darkest moments of this terse introduction to Westeros.

Which isn't to say Game of Thrones is in any way without its share of drawbacks. Headey's lazy imitation worries me already, and though Emilia Clarke does a terrific dazed and confused as Daenerys, there seems precious little dimension to her performance. But perhaps it'll come. I hope so, for hers is a character I am fascinated by already - what with the way she wilfully scalds herself in too hot a bath. The only personage who interests me more is Michelle Fairley's Catelyn Stark, who I dearly hope has more to do in future, for she positively smoulders with tempered frustration in some of her scenes with Sean Bean, while near every other cast member is content to either smirk or sneer.


Then there's the score, which seems dreadfully overbearing during certain key scenes - a relentless racket of dramatic drums that quite ruined a few moments for me - though the theme itself is solid, I'll say that. And oh: and I could do without the contrived cliffhangers in future, thank you very much. The first such - Bran's "fall" from the walls of Winterfell - already strikes me as a cheap way to elevate stakes in no need of elevation.


But we're talking small potatoes, because assuredly Game of Thrones does a great deal with what I'm sure is very little in the grand scheme of things. I was won over in moments - not quite despite myself, for I had been looking forward to this series, but there were no guarantees of quality going in, and coming out, I find myself struggling to restrain my excitement for all that's to come. We'll be looking at a fantasy for the ages here if Game of Thrones continues anything approaching as impressive as it's begun.


Truly, Gods be good that it does.

News Flashing | Seeding The Endgame in A Game of Thrones

A week tomorrow and A Game of Thrones will be gracing your screens and mine. I can hardly wait, needless to say. No, I still haven't made a bond of my word and read the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire - though I did finally buy a copy - but I can't imagine that'll last long, once the show's worked its magic on me. I just don't want to spoil it for myself, not now we're so close. Does that make any sense?

Anyway.

In an interview with D. B. Weiss and David Benioff on TV Guide the other day, ostensibly about all this back-and-forth between George R. R. Martin and Damon Lindelof of Lost fame, the executive producers of HBO's near-as-dammit adaptation of A Game of Thrones went to lengths to assure readers they were't planning on "pulling a Lost" come the last episode of the series. That's the last episode of the last season.

And they know this... how?

Why, because they've been in consultation with the man himself: they've read most of A Dance With Dragons and the author has told them, in so many words, how it all ends. And not just A Dance With Dragons, but A Song of Ice and Fire entire.

A neat nugget of news, in the first. Of particular interest because of the following comment, from Benioff:

"Getting to read that is incredible. It's so much fun, but it's also really helpful for us because George had created such an immaculate beautiful world and we want to make sure that if there are going to be major developments in future seasons, we make sure we seed it properly in the first season."

In short, you GRRM devotees might want to keep your eyes peeled, because these folks, they know. And perhaps what scenes above and beyond the events of the books they deem to add in will be in service to certain story threads pivotal to the end of A Song of Ice and Fire.

You lot'll be better set to spot them than I, no doubt. But bear in mind I totally called Fauxlivia's baby. There really might be something to this...

Screen Shot | A Game of Images of Thrones

A quartet of gorgeous new images from A Game of Thrones, HBO's forthcoming adaptation of a certain George R. R. Martin novel - you've never heard of it already, have you? - just went up over at TVGuide.com. You guys and gals should totally look at them. You'll probably know what they're of and everything.

Me? I just think they're purdy.

Here's the two I've saved as fodder for potential desktops - loathe though I'll be to leave behind the exquisite art from The Way of Kings that's been gracing my screen through 2011 so far:

The other pair, you'll find over here, where embiggening opportunities await.

Hell with it. You know what I'm going to do? By gum, I think I'm going to read this book!

Starting just as soon as my coffee's good and brewed...

Opinionated Speculations | A Dance With Dragons and A Storm of Bloggers

What happened late last week was, some guy - I hear he's pretty popular - announced a provisional release date for a book he's failed to hand over for five years running, and the blogosphere went bananas.


Because of course this date is the real date. Even though the last four have probably seemed pretty real, too. I don't know; I wasn't really paying attention then either. Even though the real date is only four months from now, and the manuscript still isn't finished, and even if it were, it's the length of three or four normal novels, and how something like that goes into one end of the publishing machine and comes out the other so speedily without some serious shortcuts being taken is a feat beyond my powers of imagination.


I'm talking about the new Haruki Murakami, of course: IQ84, coming this Autumn from Harvill Secker. And about damn time, too!

Ach, but I wish I were.


Not that I've any reservations at all about the quality of A Song of Ice and Fire, the latest volume of which - A Dance With Dragons (but you all knew that) - is what I'm actually using as a platform from which to rant atop today. Of George R. R. Martin's back-catalogue I've only read Fevre Dream and the first few pages of the very first book in said saga; enough nonetheless to know I'll surely adore A Song of Ice and Fire whenever I can find the time to get properly stuck in.


Anyway. As I was saying, after half a decade of holding pattern, dear Mr Martin announced on his blog, Not A Blog, that A Dance With Dragons would be coming out July 12th, 2011. Thereafter, the blogosphere imploded. And in a way I think bears some discussion, before we all move on to the next Next Big Thing.


Now I keep up with The Wertzone and Pornokitsch and A Dribble of Ink and all my favourite blogs via an RSS reader: used to be it was Feed Reader, but Newz Crawler has been much better behaved when handling the massive backlog of posts I manage to rack up every week. So on the day of the re-announcement aforementioned, I'm scrolling through my unread folder in Newz Crawler, and what do I see but 40-odd reiterations of what might as well have been a form letter?

George R. R. Martin Sets A Date to Dance With Dragons

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS Release Date Announced

Release Date For George R. R. Martin's "A Dance With Dragons"!

A Dance With Dragons Coming July 12th, Honest It Is

...and so on.


I'm sure you can all imagine. We look at a lot of the same blogs, I would wager. And I'm perfectly happy with the blogs I do follow. But this sort of thing comes up far too often, and it really rubs me the wrong way.


A few of the guilty parties, I can sympathise with. There's the urge to be "first" with big news; I've done as much myself, on those rare occasions I'm on the ball enough to get in before the last whistle for breaking news sounds. There's the guaranteed bump in traffic that comes with even the sort of tangential mention of GRRM that there's been in this post. And there is of course the desire to inform one's audience.


That lattermost rationale... to a point, I can get behind it. The others, no; not really at all, I'm afraid. But even then, we're none of us - Pat perhaps excluded - io9s or Suduvus or even SF Signals. However many folks we might hope to reach, we can hardly cast a net as far and as wide as the aforementioned sites. And I think it's a reasonable presumption to make, that those of you reading this will also be hitting up io9 every few hours. Certainly more often than you are The Speculative Scotsman.


And I'm just fine with that. I update once or occasionally twice a day. In that timeframe io9 with its paid specialist staff will have put together more than 25 tidbits to entertain or inform you. So by the time I'd heard the news, thought about it long enough to have something to say, and found the time to say it, it would already have been - had I done so - old news. And old news, by its very definition, is hardly even news any more.


So what's the fucking point?


Is my point.


As far as I can see it, The Point is to offer a different - dare I say original - perspective on those announcements and developments one's readers might have an inkling of an interest it. We're not newshounds, however much we might play in a similar sandpit - though of course some bloggers have a better nose for news than others (here's looking at you, your Wertness) - and to simply repeat and repeat and REPEAT a certain few sentences is not. Blogging.


At least not as it I believe should be. Not from where I'm sitting.

Let me be clear here: I'm not calling out every blogger who blogged about the release date of A Dance With Dragons being announced. Far from it. In point of fact several of the blog posts resulting from the release of the release date - and that's all it was, in the end: a veritable Russian doll of teasing - were priceless:

• James thought, as indeed I do, that all the fuss was pretty ridiculous
• Amanda poked some well-deserved fun, as I might have done had I been a tad quicker off the mark
• And Adam, the Godsend, clarified a few uncertainties

Not every blogger, then. And not just those bloggers, either; if I've missed your erudite rebuttal I'm sorry, Newz Crawler and I are still playing catch-up. But those bloggers who couldn't even care to stop themselves long enough to offer a particular perspective on the news - and FYI, "YAY!!!" is not the sort of opinion I mean here - exactly what have they achieved except to waste your time and mine, not to mention their own?


I love bloggers. And there are a lot of bloggers I hold in the sort of esteem no-one writing for io9 gets from me - that sort of reporting is all very BBC News ticker, and though it has its place, I don't know that it's a particularly personable one. That's why I read blogs as well as news aggregators. For personalities. For perspectives. Not for facts. And certainly not for the same fact, forty times over.


Nobody did, but if you ask me, we either we need to shape up, get ourselves some actual opinions to go alongside all the bloody press releases, or learn our place, and steer clear of those sorts of posts. I tend to think the blogosphere would be a better entity either way.


Agreed?


I really do want to know. Should bloggers be blogging about news, do you think? Or would our time be better spent doing something more... productive?


###

Also: no doubt A Dance With Dragons will be totally effin' sweet, but you guys really need to get some IQ84 love on the go too.

Book Review: Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin

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"Abner Marsh has had his dearest wish come true - he has built the Fevre Dream, the finest steamship ever to sail the Mississippi. Abner hopes to race the boat some day, but his partner is making it hard for him to realise his ambition. Joshua York put up the money for the Fevre Dream, but now rumours have started about the company he keeps, his odd eating habits and strange hours. As the Dream sails the great river, it leaves in its wake one too many dark tales, until Abner is forced to face down the man who helped to make his dreams become reality."

***

Abner Marsh has lived his life on the river. "A big man, and not a patient one," he has worked his way up the chain of command, from hand to mate to captain. As of 1856, he was proprietor of the moderately successful Fevre River Packet Company, named after the river in his home town, and though grossly overweight and alone, Abner was as happy as such a man could hope to be. His dreams were of racing the fastest ship on the Mississippi, the glorious Eclipse, and beating her. But the year since has been hard. In July, the "Mary Clarke blew boiler and burned, up near to Dubuque, burned right to the water line with a hundred dead. And this winter - this was a terrible winter." An ice jam has destroyed four of the Company's steamboats; including the Elizabeth A., brand new at a cost of $200,000 and the apple of Abner's eye. It's been a run of bad luck rather than any fault of his command or management, but it's left the captain near to ruin. Near to ruin, and further than ever from the great liner Abner had hoped to challenge.

Enter Joshua York, an enigmatic benefactor who offers Abner a chance to turn things around. For part ownership of the Fevre River Packet Company and co-command of its most prestigious vessel, York is prepared to pay for the construction of a new ship - and the Fevre Dream, as the captain has a mind to call it, will be "the finest steamship ever to sail the Mississippi." All York asks is that neither Abner nor the crew challenge his behaviour, which, he explains, might seem "strange or arbitrary or capricious" at times. Curious conditions and no mistake, yet to Abner they seem a small price to pay for an opportunity long thought lost to outsteam the Eclipse.

A deal is struck. The Fevre Dream is built; Abner and York set a course for New Orleans and push off into the river, with high hopes and great expectations. Right about then, of course, everything goes wrong.

Fevre Dream is an early-80s vintage Masterwork, and it's a novel about a place and a time. A time "when the river swarmed and lived, when smoke and steam and whistles and fires were everywhere," a time George R. R. Martin evokes so masterfully you'd be forgiven for thinking he grew up on the banks of the muddy Mississippi a century and a half ago. Fevre Dream is also a novel about people; about hope, friendship, trust and betrayal. At the arterial pivot-point of this place and this time is the story of Abner and York, men whom could hardly be less alike, yet find themselves bound together, for good or ill, each with his own impossible dream to realise.

Fevre Dream is also a novel about vampires. A fact which, sadly, is as like in this day and age to throw its readers off as it is to draw them further in. York and the unusual company he keeps don't call themselves vampires, of course, and they're not your run-of-the-mill fang-bangers in any case: surround them with mirrors, as on the main deck of the steamship they commandeer, and you will see their reflections; they don't immediately turn to dust in sunlight (though the UV will eventually cost them a dear price); many of them find garlic to be a fine addition to a meal. Martin posits that they're a race entire in and of themselves, rather than one derived of our own. They feed from us simply because they believe themselves higher up the food chain than mere humans; as Damon Julian so memorably observes, we are as cattle to them.

Fevre Dream is a historical novel, by all accounts. Its period and setting positively sing, Martin brings each out so beautifully. We are with the hands as they venture out to sound the treacherous river's depths; we are in the pilot room as dawn breaks to see the silt-laden Mississippi stretch out, orange-brown, into the heat-hazed distance ahead. Some nights, a thick fog descends upon the river, reducing visibility so near to zero that the Fevre Dream must dock till it passes. And so we see New Orleans, gaudy yet magnificent, the den of sin that is Natchez Under-the-Hill; we hold over in Bayou Sara, St Louis and Memphis to take on freight. Fevre Dream is an exhilarating whistle-stop journey through a period of history alive with possibility, potent with the promise of technology, innovation, progression and revolution. It is a fascinating study of a time and a people and a way of life, all lost to us.

In short, Fevre Dream is a masterwork. It meets the very definition, in fact: it is an outstanding work or art, a spare and superlative piece of fiction amongst a horde of has-beens and hopefuls who can only aspire to its effectiveness. Its only failing a somewhat rudderless calm before the storm that heralds its chilling climax, George R. R. Martin's third novel, near enough thirty years old as of this writing, well and truly deserves its place in the canon of great fantasy. Plotted with such precision as to feel inevitable, parsed by the most spare and elegant prose, driven by a striking cast of flawed yet relatable individuals - some tragic, some comic, some outright horrific - and heady with such atmosphere you can just about smell the river stink and taste York's alcohol and laudanum blood substitute, Fevre Dream is testament to a place, a time, a people... and to the enduring power of fantastic literature.

***

Fevre Dream

by George R. R. Martin

August 2008, Gollancz

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