George R.R. Martin's Blog, page 22

Let’s Go Mets

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...

Mass Market Paperback of Fire & Blood Release

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.

 

 

The Cooters Are Coming!

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...

Farewell to an Ace

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...

Tuf Is Coming… Back

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...

Lords of Fantasy

The upcoming World Fantasy Convention has just announced the winners of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards:

MEGAN LINDHOLM and HOWARD WALDROP.

I could not possibly think of two more worthy winners.

Megan Lindholm, writing under the name Robin Hobb, is one of the premiere fantastists of the last thirty years.   Her Farseer novels, featuring Fitz and the Fool, are classics of high fantasy.   If you have not read them, you don’t know what you are missing.   She has also done some great work u...

New Wild Cards original on Tor.com

There’s a brand new Wild Cards original from a brand new Wild Cards author up on Tor.com.

“Skin Deep” is from Alan Brennert.   Who is not a new author at all, of course (( though he was back in the mid-70s, when he was a Campbell Award loser just a few years after me )) but he IS brand new to the world of aces and jokers.   I first had the honor of publishing Alan when I was doing NEW VOICES, the Campbell Award anthology that was my first foray into editing.  A decade or so later, he and I worke...

Back to the Midwest

I am so far behind in my Not A Blogging.   This post should have been posted back in June,  but…  better late than never, right?

ANYWAY… I was on the road for ten days back in June, to Evanston (where I went to school, 1966-1971), Chicago (where I lived after school, 1971-1976), and Dubuque (where I taught school, 1976-1979).   It was the first time I’d left home and/or cabin in a year and a half, since the start of the pandemic and the quarantine.   I have to say, it was great to get away from ...

Rockin’ With the Aces

(And the jokers too)

Hey, Wild Carders.   Jason Powell has another of his excellent essays up on Tor.com, this one about the history of rock n roll in the world of the Wild Cards.   Check it out at:

https://www.tor.com/2021/06/28/music-making-mutants-rock-n-roll-in-george-r-r-martins-wild-cards-series/

A DARK WIND Is Rising

I moved from Iowa to New Mexico in late 1979.   A few months later, Roger Zelazny took me down to Albuquerque to First Friday, the monthly writer’s luncheon at the Albuquerque Press Club, where I met the bestselling mystery writer Tony Hillerman, one of the founders of the group.  Tony was a delight, a great lunch companion and a born storyteller… and, as I soon learned, a marvelous writer.   Once I tried one of his Joe Leaphorn novels, I was hooked.   I read as many as I could get my hands on, ...