Good news for those of us impatient for more from the Game of Thrones author: he's busy compiling a companion 'GRRM-arillion'
News from the blogosphere for all you fellow George RR Martin fans out there - the author has been hammering out the pages of his companion to the Song of Ice and Fire series. According to a blogger at a recent convention attended by Martin, "he was supposed to write 50,000 words – he wrote 250,000", and "the premise of the [World of Ice and Fire] book is that it is a copy of a tome presented to [the character Robert Baratheon] just after the Rebellion".
I thought I'd check the details with Martin's publisher HarperCollins, and they tell me that actually, "the book's only likely to be around 100,000 words in length". Still sounds like fun, though, and as a Tolkien fan, and one who has even gone so far as to read some of The Silmarillion, I'm particularly pleased that, according to the blogger, the extra words "have been put in a file for a project they are now calling the 'GRRM-arillion'. ".
Martin himself has described the book as "the concordance … a compendium of the history and legends of the world of Westeros. A coffee table book, lots of gorgeous art from such talents as Ted Nasmith, Justin Sweet, and others", and said last summer that he was "making good progress on this one of late, lots of great historical stuff that I think my readers will enjoy. Never-before revealed details of Aegon's Conquest, the War With the Faith, The Dance of the Dragons, the Paramours of Aegon the Unworthy, etc."
His co-author Elio M García, meanwhile, of the fan site Westeros, said earlier this month that the compendium "won't be out this year … but that's because it's becoming rather cooler. More pages, more new history and details, more art. Like the story of the fall of the Tarbecks and the Reynes, the surprising person from whom the Lannisters are descended, more history of the Vale and the arrival of the Andals, and a good deal more. We're working quick as we can, but there's also more art to commission and that means it'd be safest to aim for next year."
The official line from Martin's publisher Jane Johnson is that The World of Ice and Fire will be out in spring 2014 – a bit of a delay, but "more to do with illustrative complications and global publishing schedules than the writing, and I certainly wouldn't want fans getting the impression that George is working on [it] at the expense of The Winds of Winter" – the next novel in the series and the book we're really all desperate for.
So there's a while to wait. In the meantime, I will comfort myself with a reread of The Winds of Winter chapter Martin provided online earlier this year. Winter is definitely coming - we just have to be patient.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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