RAPTURE
What books are fillin’ your Rapture Saturday?
A huge update from George R.R. Martin about A Dance with Dragons. A few of the most interesting tidbits:
Now that the dust is settling at last, I thought I’d take a deep breath and look back at what a long strange trip this has been. If the process interests you, read on. But beware — past this point, there may be some SPOILERS lurking amidst my discussion. Read on at your own peril.
[…]
At 1510 pages, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS come in just slightly shorter than A STORM OF SWORDS, which was 1521 pages in manuscript, with the same software, settings, and margins.
At one point late in the process DANCE was considerably longer. The page count had gone beyond 1600 and was creeping up toward 1700, to my alarm. (At 1700 pages the book could not have been published in a single volume). Several things happened to bring it back down.
Shorter than A Storm of Swords, in the end. With all the fears of the novel being split up into two volumes, it looks like Marting and his publisher did everything they could to ensure that that didn’t happen. Martin solved this problem several ways. The first was moving some chapters into the next volume:
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Earlier this week, I featured a beautiful timeline based on the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, by the designers at Fast Company’s Co. Design. Thanks to Raphael (one of my readers), I was pointed in the direction of another awesome timeline of the movies, illustrated in a decidedly different manner.
This time, the art is by Randall Munroe, the Hugo-nominated artist behind the popular webcomic, xkcd. It seems simple and goody at first, but when you start following some of the character’s paths, the detail and thought put into it (juggling both time and location) is astounding. My favourite part is probably the orc’s tunnel-like timelines sprouting off from Sauron.
A nice, hi-res version of the timeline (along with similar timelines for Star Wars, Jurassic Park and a couple of other movies) can be found on the original xkcd strip.
Shadowheart
Author – Tad Williams
Hardcover
Pages: 672
Publisher: DAW Books
Release Date: November 30, 2010
ISBN-10: 9780756406400
ISBN-13: 978-0756406400
To really understand Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch series, and my ultimate appreciation of it, one must look back to the rocky road of the original conceptualization and execution of its first novel, also titled Shadowmarch.
First conceived as a television show described by Williams as “Hill Street Blues meets Babylon 5 meets Lord of the Rings,” then as a free online serialization, Shadowmarch went through many forms in its infancy. Readers were finally introduced to the story when Williams released Shadowmarch on his website as a free-flowing piece-by-piece novel — an avenue that’s not unusual for aspiring writers hoping to catch the eye of a publisher, but an odd move for an author as well established as Williams. Eventually, due to a lack of readers willing to pony up the cash necessary to read beyond the first five chapters, the project changed course again and was converted into a full-fledged, traditionally published series. At this time, Shadowmarch was heavily re-written, added-to and even saw a shift from present tense to a more traditional third-person past-tense narrative.
Unfortunately, and despite the heavy revisions, these serialized roots left their mark all over the early volumes of the series. Though enjoyable (and the novel that finally convinced me of Williams as a novelist, after several failed attempts to read his classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy), Shadowmarch felt much like a novel looking for a plot. Things happened, characters were introduced, a world was built, but it never quite felt like Williams knew where the road led or had an ultimate plan in mind for the series. The potential was there, the bones were there, but the series was searching for a proper heart and soul.
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From Blastr:
Click for Bigger
I’ve confessed a few times about my love affair with geek culture crossing paths with modern graphic design. This timeline of The Lord of the Rings is no exception.
From Blastr:
This infographic, created by JT Fridsma and posted on Fast Company’s Co.Design, tracks the appearance and journey of each of Lord of the Rings’ main characters on a minute-by-minute basis. It also plots their courses on a map. The result is a sparse yet striking image.
In “reality,” it took J.R.R. Tolkien three books (plus appendices) to chronicle Frodo and friends’ journeys from Hobbiton to Mordor, which, according to more exacting fans, took five and a half months.
From the Fast Company’s Co Design website:
Okay, we admit it: Here at Co.Design, we’re Tolkien geeks. Like straight up read-the-Silmarillion-grew-up-playing-the-RPG Tolkien geeks. So it’s with a flutter of nerd love that we introduce today’s IGOTD, created by University of Florida student JT Fridsma: A minute-by-minute plotting of the various scenes and parallel plots in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation.
Like all good art, I’d love to print this out and stick it on the wall of my office. Lovely stuff.
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