From The Hollywood Reporter:

An image from HBOs A Game of Thrones

Winter is, indeed, coming.

HBO has greenlighted highly anticipated fantasy series “Game of Thrones.”

The premium network has picked up the project for a first season debut next spring (below is the first released photo from the series). Nine episodes plus the pilot have been ordered. Production will begin in Belfast this June.

From the moment the project was first announced in development, the series based on the George R.R. Martin novels has generated enormous, perhaps unprecedented, online interest for a series at such an early stage.

The sprawling tale set in the mythical land of Westeros tells the story of the noble Stark family who become caught up in high court intrigue when patriarch Eddard (played by Sean Bean) becomes the king’s new right-hand man. The four-and-counting books in the series would each be used as one season of the series.

Unlike many fantasy novels, the “Thrones” series largely avoids relying on magical elements and instead goes for brutal realism — think “Sopranos” with swords. Martin, a former TV writer (“Beauty and the Beast”), writes each chapter as a cliffhanger, which should lend itself well to series translation.

Well, now that’s good news.

Discussion
  • neth March 2, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    meh

    I know I’m in the minority in these parts, but I’m not really thrilled by this. I don’t watch much TV, I don’t get HBO and I doubt I’ll ever get around to watching this. So, to me it’s just a potential distraction to get in the way of Martin finishing the series soon(er).

    I know many will say that this puts the pressure on to Martin to finish faster, but from what I’ve seen, that’s not how he works.

    Oh well, I suppose I can be happy that som many others are happy about it and that it will raise the profile of Martin even further and possibly give all SFF literature a little bump.

  • Vyskol March 2, 2010 at 1:38 pm

    So.. he’s got 4 years to finish Dance With Dragons… :P

  • Shawn March 2, 2010 at 3:24 pm

    You know, Neth, that you can RENT these HBO seasons now, right? haha It’s called NetFlix. ;)

  • neth March 2, 2010 at 3:33 pm

    well, we actually cancelled Netflix becaue it just too common for us to have a movie for 1 month or 2 before getting to it.

    I do buy/rent/borrow shows occasionally (like Firefly), so maybe this will be one of them. We’ll see. One plus toward that is that my wife has a new-found interest in GRRM when she learned that he and Dianna Gabaldon are friends and at recent signing she went to Dianna was pimping GRRM pretty hard. When she got home she snagged my ARC of Warriors of the shelf and said ‘why didn’t you tell me there’s a Dianna Gabaldon story in here’. I haven’t seen it since.