Not a Blog

Here There Be Dragons

July 11, 2024 at 7:06 am
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I trust you all caught “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” the fourth episode of season 2 of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON.   A lot of you have been wanting for action, I know; this episode delivered it in spades with the Battle of Rook’s Rest, when dragon met dragon in the skies.

Has there ever been a dragon battle to match it?   I seem to recall that REIGN OF FIRE had a few scenes where a dozen dragons were wheeling through the skies.   So, okay, maybe that was a bigger scene, with more dragons on screen… but a better battle?   I don’t think so.   Our guys knocked this one out of the castle.   I think they took it as a challenge.    And the dragons…

Dragons are mythical, of course.   In the real world, the one we live in as opposed to those we like to read about… dragons never existed… though similar creatures can be found in legends all around the world.   Some believe that maybe the stories were inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones by farmers plowing their fields.   Regardless of where the stories originated, they have been a huge part of fantasy for centuries.  And I’ve been fond of them for as long as I remember.

Hell, I’m named after a dragonslayer — St. George, of course —  and he’s still a saint, when a lot of other saints were thrown out a couple decades back… which I suppose means that dragons have papal approval.   I started writing my own dragon tales long before A GAME OF THRONES.   “The Ice Dragon” and  “The Way of Cross and Dragon” were two of my best.

Every culture has its own version of dragons; Chinese dragons are wingless and do not breathe fire.   They bring good luck.    Traditional western dragons bring mostly fire and death… but modern fantasists have played with that a lot too.   The dragons of ERAGON and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON are very different from mine own.   (Toothless is even cute).

Tolkien’s dragons were always evil, servants of Morgoth and Sauron.   They were akin to his orcs and trolls.   JRRT did not do friendly dragons.   His dragons were intelligent, though.   Smaug talks.   He also has a huge horde of gold, a very traditional dragon trait… and he sleeps on his treasure, for months and years at a time.

Before Peter Jackson’s Smaug, the best dragon ever seen on film was Vermithrax Pejorative in DRAGONSLAYER.    Two legs and two wings, dangerous, fire-breathing, a flyer, does not talk, does not horde gold.   An inspiration for all dragonlovers.

At the other end of the scale is the dragon in DRAGONHEART (voice by Sean Connery).   Fat, four-legged, talking, a good guy who befriends the hero.   A much inferior dragon in a much inferior film.  Bah.

In A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, I set out to blend the wonder of epic fantasy with the grittiness of the best historical fiction.   There is magic in my world, yes… but much less of it than one gets in most fantasy.   (Tolkien’s Middle Earth was relatively low magic too, and I took my cue from the master).   I wanted Westeros to feel real, to evoke the Crusades and the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses as much as it did JRRT with his hobbits and magic rings.

I would have dragons, yes… in part because of my dear friend, the late Phyllis Eisenstein, a marvelous fantasist and science fiction writer in her own right, now sadly missed…  but I wanted my dragons to be as real and believable as such a creature could ever be.   I designed my dragons with a lot of care.   They fly and breathe fire, yes, those traits seemed essential to me.  They have two legs (not four, never four) and two wings.
LARGE wings.   A lot of fantasy dragons have these itty bitty wings that would never get such a creature off the ground.   And only two legs; the wings are the forelegs.   Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry.   No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs.   Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.

Much  of the confusion about the proper  number of legs on a dragon has its roots in medieval heraldry.  In the beginning both versions could be seen on shields and banners, but over the centuries, as heraldry became more standardized, the heralds took to calling the four-legged beasties dragons and their two-legged kin wyverns.   No one had ever  seen a dragon or a wyvern, of course; neither creature actually existed save in legend, so there was a certain arbitrary quality to this distinction… and medieval heralds were not exactly renowned for their grasp of zoology, even for real world animals.  Just take a look at what they thought a seahorse looked like.

Dragons DO exist in the world of Westeros, however (wyverns too, down in Sothoryos), so my own heralds did not have that excuse.   Ergo, in my books, the Targaryen sigil has two legs, as it should.  Why would any Westerosi ever put four legs on a dragon, when they could look at the real thing and could their limbs?   My wyverns have two legs as well; they differ from the dragons of my world chiefly in size, coloration, and the inability to breath fire.    (It should be stressed that while the Targaryen sigil has the proper number of legs (two), it is not exactly anatomically correct.   The wings are way too small compared to the body, and of course no dragon has three heads.   That bit is purely symbolic, meant to reflect Aegon the Conqueror and his two sisters).

FWIW, the shows got it half right (both of them).   GAME OF THRONES gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when Dany’s fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons.   Someone got sloppy, I guess.   Or someone opened a book on heraldry, and read just enough of it to muck it all up.   A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.   A couple years on, HOUSE OF THE DRAGON decided the heraldry should be consistent with GAME OF THRONES.. but they went with the bad sigil rather than the good one.   That sound you heard was me screaming, “no, no, no.”   Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.

RIGHT

WRONG

Valyrian dragons differ in other ways from the likes of Smaug and Toothless and Vermithrax as well.

My dragons do not talk.   They are relatively intelligent, but they are still beasts.

They bond with men… some men… and the why and how of that, and how it came to be, will eventually be revealed in more detail in THE WINDS OF WINTER and A DREAM OF SPRING and some in BLOOD & FIRE.  (Septon Barth got much of it right).   Like wolves and bears and lions, dragons can be trained, but never entirely tamed.   They will always be dangerous.   Some are wilder and more wilful than others.  They are individuals, they have personalities… and they often reflect the personalities of their riders, thanks to bond they share are.    They do not care a whit about gold or gems, no more than a tiger would.   Unless maybe their rider was obsessed with the shiny stuff, and even then…

Dragons need food.   They need water too, but they have no gills.  They need to breathe .  Some say that  Smaug slept for sixty years below the Lonely Mountains before Bilbo and the dwarves woke him up.   The dragons born of Valyria cannot do that.   They are creatures of fire, and fire needs oxygen.   A dragon could dip into the ocean to scoop up a fish, perhaps, but they’d fly right up again.  If held underwater too long, they would drown, just like any other land animal.

My dragons are predators, carnivores who like their meat will done.   They can and will hunt their own prey, but they are also territorial.   They have lairs.   As creatures of the sky, they like mountain tops, and volcanic mountains best of all.  These are creatures of fire, and the cold dank caverns that other fantasists house their pets in are not for mine.     Man-made dwellings, like the stables of Dragonstone, the  towers tops of the Valryian Freehold, and the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, are acceptable — and often come with men bringing them food.  If those are not available, young dragons will find their own lairs… and defend them fiercely.

My dragons are creatures of the sky.   They fly, and can cross mountains and plains, cover hundreds of miles… but they don’t, unless their riders take them there.   They are  not nomadic.  During the heyday of Valyria there were forty dragon-riding families with hundreds of dragons amongst them… but (aside from our Targaryens) all of them stayed close to the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer.  From time to time a dragonrider might visit Volantis or another Valyrian colony, even settle there for a few years, but never permanently.  Think about it.   If dragons were nomadic, they would have overrun half of Essos, and the Doom would only have killed a few of them.   Similarly, the dragons of Westeros seldom wander far from Dragonstone.   Elsewise, after three hundred years, we would have dragons all over the realm and every noble house would have a few.   The three wild dragons mentioned in Fire & Blood have lairs on Dragonstone.   The rest can be found in the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, or in deep caverns under the Dragonmont.    Luke flies Arrax to Storm’s End and Jace to Winterfell, yes, but the dragons would not have flown there on their own, save under very special circumstances.   You won’t find dragons hunting the riverlands or the Reach or the Vale, or roaming the northlands or the mountains of Dorne.

Fantasy needs to be grounded.   It is not simply a license to do anything you like.    Smaug and Toothless may both be dragons, but they should never be confused.   Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper.

Current Mood: thoughtful thoughtful

A Bold New Look for the A Song of Ice and Fire Boxed Set

July 10, 2024 at 10:03 am
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THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MINIONS OF FEVRE RIVER:

Behold, the stunning new covers for the first five books! These covers will be available in a boxed set, available online and in stores this October.

    

The new design tries to capture the vastness of Westeros and the dangerous journey readers will encounter. There is a raw and gritty quality to linocut and woodcut art. A certain starkness that seemed to fit the stories, and a long history to the art form that felt right for this world.

This cover design process paired linocut artist Mark Seekins and designer Tim Green, with art direction from David G. Stevenson. They worked together to develop sketches and carve the designs into blocks of linoleum, where the raised areas were inked and pressed onto paper. The covers feature several colors, which required separate blocks for each color layer. The finished prints were then photographed and incorporated into the covers.

The linocut designs from the front covers are carried over on the spines so you can show off all five designs on your shelf at the same time.

The black and gold case delivers a stark, elegant design that collects this incredible series into a unified set. The design team wanted to place an emphasis on the series name and created a sigil using the initials ASOIAF. This symbol is used on each cover and featured strongly on the box, connecting each of the illustrations to the larger set.

Look for the new boxed sets online and in stores this October!

Jacket design: Faceout Studio, Tim Green

Cover linocut: Mark Seekins

Art direction: David G. Stevenson

On the Road Again

July 9, 2024 at 3:51 pm
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We will be headed across the Atlantic in a week or so for the longest trip we’ve taken in a while, part business and part pleasure.

First stop will be Belfast, where I am planning to visit Ashford Meadow, catch a little jousting and maybe a puppet show, meet a certain hedge knight and his squire, and the rest of the cast of the Dunk & Egg show.   And of course we’ll be having a meal or three with Ira Parker, Owen Harris, and their team.   Really looking forward to that.

We have a few more stops planned after Belfast, including one in London, where I will be getting together with my British publishers from Harper Collins Voyager.

Let me say a few words about that, though.   Last year, when I mentioned seeing my Voyager editor in London, the internet went nuts, throwing up all sorts of theories about how this meant that WINDS OF WINTER was done and a huge announcement was at hand.   Uhhhh… sorry guys, but no.   That’s not how it works.  Making contacts… which often turn into friendships… is a huge part of publishing.  Most of my communication with my editors and publishers is conducted via emails, phone calls, zooms, and texts (in the old days, we had letters written on paper too).   There’s not a lot of face to face, especially when we’re talking about people who live across an ocean… so when I travel, if I have a day or two to catch up with one of my editors or agents, I jump on it.   Every time I travel to NYC, I  get together with my literary agents, and my editors at Bantam and Tor.. along with old friends, family, and the like.   That’s true everywhere I go.   If I fly to Germany for a con or book fair, I will see my German agents, publishers, and translators.  If it’s Italy or Spain or Finland, same thing.   If I ever find myself in Brazil or Japan or Egypt, I’d try and connect with my Brazilian or Japanese or Egyptian publishers.   This is just the standard way of doing business, guys.  It does NOT signify that some momentous announcement is at hand.   It doesn’t signify anything, actually… except a desire to touch base, catch up, renew old contacts or make some new ones… and enjoy a nice meal.  So calm down, please.   When WINDS OF WINTER is done, the word will not trickle out, there WILL be a big announcement… where and when I cannot say.

But back to our road trip…

We will have a week or so in London.   Besides the visit with Harper Collins Voyage,  I also hope to get together with the scriptwriter and director on our stage play… HARRENHAL was our first title, since it is set during the fateful Harrenhal tourney, but now we are leaning toward THE IRON THRONE.   It’s coming along well, I am told.   Young Ned, Young Robert, Lyanna, Rhaegar, Howland Reed… should be fun.  And jousting.   On stage.   The dream is to open somewhere on London’s West End in 2025… but there’s still a lot of work to do.

The writers’ room for HOUSE OF THE DRAGON season 3 is also meeting in London, but I have no plans to attend.

I will he going to Oxford on August 2, for an appearance at Oxford Writer’s House.  The topic will be “Writing Fantasy,” and I will be sharing the stage with Philip Pullman.   I am really looking forward to that.   I have never met Pullman, but I’m a huge fan of HIS DARK MATERIALS, so that will be a treat.   I have never been to Oxford either.   (I was especially eager to have a pint in the Eagle and Child, where Tolkien and the Inklings once drank, but alas, I read that it’s closed to renovations.   Guess I will need to come back again).   Was going to post a link to the event, but, alas, I see that it is already sold out.  Sorry about that.

The last stop on my tour will be Glasgow, for the World Science Fiction Convention.   This will be the first worldcon I’ve attended in a number of years, since the ill-fated New Zealand con in 2020.   I was toastmaster at that one, but covid descended on the world and the con was forced to go all virtual and… well, let’s just say things did not work out well.   (No more virtual panels for me, thanks).   Glasgow has hosted worldcons twice before, and we were at both of those and had a great time.   We are hoping this will be as good.

Anyway… I will be in Glasgow, attending the con, but whether you’ll see me, I don’t know.   I am not on any programming.   It is not for lack of trying, though.   I wrote the con’s programming chair back in January, and again in February, asking for his phone number so we could discuss the details.  No phone number was forthcoming, alas, just a form letter with a link to an application and a warning that while I was welcome to apply, I could not be guaranteed a place on the programme.

I did not give up there, however.   Several months later, when I learned how many of my Wild Cards writers would be at the con (about a dozen, all told), I wrote again and offered to organize a Wild Cards event for them.   (We have done Wild Cards events at a dozen past worldcons, everything from traditional panels to trivia contests to cage matches and the like), and they have always drawn a big crowd.   I got no reply to that one.   A month or so after that, I tried again.  Howard Waldrop died in January, and I thought it would be nice to do a memorial panel honoring the man and his work.   Several other friends of Howard will also be at Glasgow, and said they would be delighted to be part of such a panel.   Alas, no reply to that one either.

As regular readers of my Not A Blog know, I  have also been producing a series of short films based on some of Howard’s classic short stories.   NIGHT OF THE COOTERS was the first done, and won prizes in half a dozen film fests.   MARY-MARGARET ROAD GRADER is hitting the festival circuit this year, and has already won its first prize.   THE UGLY CHICKENS, adapted by Michael Cassutt from Howard’s Nebula-winning short, and starring fan favorite Felicia Day, will follow this year.   Just saw the final cut, directed by Mark Raso, and it’s just lovely.  The films are not in theatres yet, but I offered to screen them in Glasgow, as part of the film programme (if there is one) or that proposed Waldrop Memorial Panel.   No response to that offer either.

So… yes, I will be at Glasgow.   I will check out the art show, as I always do, maybe attend some bid parties, and I will be wandering the dealer’s room (the huckster’s room, as us old timers call it).   The rest of the time I guess I may hang out in the bar, drinking with friends both old and new,  toasting Howard and Gardner and all the other friends we lost.

Maybe I’ll see you there.

Current Mood: restless restless

Yum

July 7, 2024 at 9:57 am
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So… a friend of a friend was in Spain recently, and visited Barcelona.

One of my favorite cities.   In Spain, in Europe, or, well… anywhere.  It has been way too long since I was there.  Many cool things to see in Barcelona.  Including, it would seem, a Chocolate Museum.   I’ve never been there myself, but… well… my friend’s friend DID go to the Chocolate Museum, where they found..

…A chocolate me.

I find myself at a loss for words, but full of questions.

Am I made of dark chocolate or milk chocolate?  No idea.   Am I solid chocolate, or do I have a filling?  Nougat?   Peanut butter?   Nuts?  Does the museum have a display of chocolate writers, where I am to be found between chocolate Tolkien and chocolate Cervantes?  Or other sorts of chocolate celebrities?  Singers, actors, politicians?  (Avoid the chocolate Trump, he’s poisonous).

Or is this item to be found in the gift shop, available for purchase?   That fills me with dread.   So many people are cross with me because of how long it is taking me to finish THE WINDS OF WINTER?  Will they be buying chocolate me by the thousands and biting off my chocolate head in their wroth?

But maybe it’s not me after all.   The guy in the picture is using an Apple laptop.   I use a DOS desktop, so…

 

 

Current Mood: amused amused

Blood, Cheese, and Grief

July 5, 2024 at 9:33 am
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I made a visit to London last November.   Checked in with the editors and publishers at Voyager, my British publisher, saw friends both old and new, caught some plays on the West End (CABARET and THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE among them), had lunch with the playwright and director on our own play-in-progress… and headed out to Leavesden Studio to tour the HOUSE OF THE DRAGON sets.  That part was spectacular.   I have visited real castles that did not look half as imposing as the Red Keep and Dragonstone did.  And they were HUGE.  I could easily have gotten lost, just like Blood and Cheese did.

I also got a sneak peak at the first two episodes of season 2:  “A Son for A Son” and “Rhaenyra the Cruel.”

What a great way to start the season.     The directing was superb.   GAME OF THRONES veteran Alan Taylor directed the first episode, and Clare Kilner the second.   Both of them did a magnificent job.  And I cannot say enough about the acting.    Emma d’Arcy has only one line in “A Son for a Son,” but they do so much with their eyes and their face that they absolutely dominate the episode; her grief for her slain son is palpable.   Tom Glynn-Carney brings Aegon alive in ways we have not seen before; he’s more than a villain here, he shows us the king’s rage, his pain, his fears and doubts.  His humanity.    Rhys Ifans has been splendid as Otto Hightower every time he has been on screen, but he exceeded himself in “Rhaenyra the Cruel.”  His scene with King Aegon and Criston Cole after the ratcatchers are hanged just crackles with wit, tension, drama, a performance that cries out for awards attention.  Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Fabien Frankel, Eve Best, and the other regulars were wonderful as well.  The Tittensor twins were terrific as the Kingsuard twins, and their climactic swordfight is right up there with the Mountain and the Red Viper of Dorne, and Brienne’s fight with Jaime Lannister.

And Phia Saban gave a wrenching, powerful, heart-breaking performance as Helaena Targaryen, Aegon’s doomed, haunted queen and mother to his children.

Saban’s performance is especially noteworthy; very little of what she brings to the part was in my source material. .   Last season HOUSE OF THE DRAGON essentially recreated King Viserys, giving him a much different backstory and far more depth than the jolly party-loving king I created for FIRE & BLOOD.   I talked about that last year, so I won’t repeat myself, save to say it was very well done, and DAMN but Paddy Considine was glorious in the role.   (He should have won an Emmy).

The HotD team have done the same thing here with Helaena.  In the book, she is a plump, pleasant, and happy young woman, cheerful and kindly, adored by the smallfolk.   A dragonrider since the age of twelve, Helaena’s greatest joy in life is to take to the skies on the back of her dragon Dreamfyre.  None of the strangeness she displays in the show was in evidence in the book, nor is her gift for prophecy.   Those were born in the writers’ room… but once I met the show’s version of Helaena, I could hardly take issue.   Phia Saban’s Helaena is a richer and more fascinating character than the one I created in FIRE & BLOOD, and in “Rhaenyra the Cruel” you can scarcely take your eyes off her.

The show added a brand new character as well.   The dog.

I am… ahem… not usually a fan of screenwriters adding characters to the source material when adapting a story.   Especially not when the source material is mine.   But that dog was brilliant.   I was prepared to hate Cheese, but I hated him even more when he kicked that dog.  And later, when the dog say at his feet, gazing up… that damn near broke my heart.   Such a little thing… such a little dog… but his presence, the few short moments he was on screen, gave the ratcatcher so much humanity.   Human beings are such complex creatures.  The silent presence of that dog reminded us that even the worst of men, the vile and the venal, can love and be loved.

I wish I’d thought of that dog.   I didn’t, but someone else did.   I am glad of that.

“Rhaenyra the Cruel” has been getting great reviews, for the most part.   A lot of the fans are proclaiming it the best episode of HotD, and some are even ranking it higher than the best episodes of GAME OF THRONES.   I can hardly be objective about these things, but I would certainly say it deserves to be in contention.   The only part of the show that is drawing criticism is the conclusion of the Blood and Cheese storyline.   Which ending was powerful, I thought… a gut punch, especially for viewers who had never read FIRE & BLOOD.   For those who had read the book, however…

Well, there’s  a lot of be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it.   The issues are too complicated.   Somewhere down the line, I will do a separate post about all the issues raised by Blood and Cheese… and Maelor the Missing.  There’s a lot to say.

For the nonce, I will just say that I really really liked “Rhaenyra the Cruel.”   I liked it in London the first time I saw it, and I liked it even more on second watching.   I hope you did as well.   Maybe it even made you cry.

Current Mood: melancholy melancholy

R.I.P. Kinkster

July 1, 2024 at 10:11 am
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I was saddened to read that Kinky Friedman died a few days ago.

I first encountered his music back in the 70s, and always remained fond of it.   Kinky was one of the originals, one  of  the “Outlaw Country” movement that grew out of Austin, in reaction to the more traditional country music of Nashville.   Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, those were the outlaw kings back then.   Kinky was the court jester.    He was best known for his irreverent satirical pieces, like “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” “Put Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,”  “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Any More,” and the like, which inevitably provoked screams of outrage from the humor impaired, but he also wrote more serious tunes, some of them really fine.   “Sold American,” “Silver Eagle” (a damn fine railroad song), “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” and this one here, a personal favorite.

I saw Friedman perform live twice.   Once way back in the 70s when I was visiting Austin to hang with Howard Waldrop and Lisa Tuttle.  And more recently a few years ago in Albuquerque, when Parris and I joined John and Gail Miller to see him play at the Jewish Community Center.   Fun shows both times.

In between writing and singing songs, he also authored a number of detective novels set around a country bar in New York City.   The detective was the owner of the bar, a musician named… ah… Kinky Friedman.   Those were a lot of fun too.

Oh, and he ran for governor of Texas once, against Rick Perry.   A pity he didn’t win.   His campaign slogan was “How Hard Could It Be?”

 

Current Mood: sad sad