George R.R. Martin's Blog, page 21

I have a lot of stuff.

I can’t deny it.   I got the bug when I was still a kid.   The collecting bug.   Books, comic books, magazines, trading cards, toys… all sorts of weird stuff.  And y’know, it piles up over the years… and I have seen a LOT of years now.

Thankfully, I am not the only one with this odd affliction.   Ryan Condal, the showrunner on HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, collects movie and television props, and he and his friend David Mandel of VEEP and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIAM fame have a wonderful ...

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

((with thanks to T.S. Eliot))

Well, that was a kick in the balls.

I really thought that the Giants and the Jets would be much better this season.   They had (I thought) strong drafts and good offseasons.

A week and a half into the new season, they are a combined 0-3.

Life is meaningless and full of pain.

There’s a lot of strange stuff on YouTube.   I never know what I’m going to stumble on.

Sometimes I stumble on myself.   As in this interview from 1991 (or so it says), where I pontificate about science fiction and fandom.

(In those days, five years before A GAME OF THRONES was published, science fiction was what they asked about when they interviewed me.   When they bothered to interview me at all).

I have absolutely no memory of this interview.   Where I was, who was intervieweing me, why…  n...

DEATH DRAWS FIVE is one of the rarest of the Wild Cards series.

The series started with a twelve-volume run at Bantam Spectra, then moved to Baen Books in the early 90s for three books.   (Not the brightest decision I ever made as editor, but that’s a long story for another day).  The Baen books — the Card Sharks triad — were among our strongest, I thought, but for various and sundry reasons they did not sell nearly as well as the Bantam twelve, and afterward Wild Cards was without a publisher. ...

The year was 1986.

Was that a lifetime ago, or last week?  Sometimes I am not sure.

For me, it was a pretty good year.   I had my first job in television, writing for the CBS revival of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.   I had gone through a very rough time financially the preceding couple of years, but now things were turning around.   In the NFL, the Giants were looking damn good and winning a lot of games.   And in baseball… in baseball, we had the Mets.   After teasing us in 1984 and 1985, the Mets caught...

On August 24th Random house officially made the mass market paperback of FIRE AND BLOOD available to the public. You can get your copy at your favorite book seller OR pick up a signed copy at Beastly Books.

LINK to Beastly Books

This message has been brought to you by the minions of Fevre River.

Howard Waldrop will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention in Montreal a few months hence. It’s well deserved. There has been no finer short story writer in all of science fiction and fantasy in the past half century than H’ard. No one else writes like Waldrop. And Howard never writes the same story twice.

His best story? Damned hard to say. So many classics.

But one of them, surely surely, is “Night of the Cooters,” a finalist for the Hugo Award and Locus Aw...

I am very saddened to report that we have lost another of our Wild Carders.

I received word yesterday that Steve Perrin, the writer/ creator who gave us Mistral, her father Cyclone, and the ace reporter Digger Downs, died at his home in California.   I am told that he died painlessly in the night, from an atrial fibrillation.

Steve had been part of Wild Cards since the beginning… BEFORE the beginning, actually… though he never actually wrote a story for us until the triptych in our latest volu...

Long before I ever dreamed of Westeros, I had another setting I returned to again and again and again in a long series of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and even one novel (DYING OF THE LIGHT).   The Thousand Worlds stories spanned centuries and light years and had their own cast of heroes, villains, legends, and colorful characters… none of them more colorful than the trader (and ecological engineer) Haviland Tuf, the protagonist of a long series of stories I collected together in the fix...