Werthead

It's not necessary to re-order Season 1, and is a little silly. The Season 2 changes are much more important: A Race Through Dark Places sets up Soul Mates (at least Talia's storyline). Same for Knives, which directly sets up In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum. It's actually nonsensical to watch it in broadcast order. Both were only flipped on initial broadcast because they both needed an extra week for the CGI to be done, which clearly isn't a problem now. The changes in Seasons 3 and 5 really aren't too necessary either.

Warner Brothers and JMS did get into discussions at one point. WB wanted to remake it as a TV show, which JMS didn't want to do (he'd been there, done that). JMS wanted to do a series of movies instead, but WB weren't keen on that. JMS put the movie into development with his production company and, although it didn't go anywhere, it forced WB to back off. WB let JMS keep the theatrical film rights to the series, something I suspect now they rather regret.

That's six of the main cast, one major recurring actor and the creator of the show's wonderful CG designs (and who pretty much got the show on the air with his demo reel) who've all passed away, all well before their time. This completely sucks. This did inspire me to mount another rewatch project for the show. Yes, I did it once before and I didn't think it was that long ago, but it turns out it was, er, nine years ago. So time to do this again.

Yes, this is making the forum borderline unusable.

There's an obnoxious Google video ad that pops up at the top and bottom of the thread. It insists on playing, won't pause or stop and I can't scroll away from it to post. Obviously, highly annoying. I have to refresh the screen until it vanishes and is replaced by a passive text ad.

Huh. I guess some survived The Purge. * grabs flamethrower and heads out *

A Song for Arbonne is probably the next-best book in that mode from Kay, followed by Children of Earth and Sky and The Last Light of the Sun (which is good, but possibly Kay phoning it in a bit). The Sarantine Mosaic I found good but "cold" by Kay's normal standards, where the warmth of the characters (even the antagonists) comes through more clearly. I also found it overlong: I think he could have done the same story in one novel with a bit more focus and clarity. Under Heaven and River of Stars are very good, probably somewhere between his European books in tone and the coldness of the Sarantine ones.

That's the same figure as a decade ago. Huh. Also, updated list linked in the OP.

I spent the day coallating the new list. There were 237 authors on last year's list, we're now up to 344, so this has been a lot of work. Mostly from Jussi, obviously, but also AncalagonTheBlack and TerokNor, who provided some solid figures for German authors. I think we'll have to look at introducing some lock, maybe around the 200 mark, to keep this from spiralling out of control. With tons of indie authors now selling tens of thousands of copies I think trying to catch everything in the genre is futile. December 2018 updated version

Sad way to kick off a new thread, but Ron Thornton has passed away at the too-young age of 59. Thornton worked on Blake's 7 and Doctor Who in the late 1970s before moving to Hollywood and working on a bunch of movies, including (hooray!) Spaceballs and Critters. Thornton was the primary CGI designer on B5, being the head of Foundation Imaging. It was Thornton's 30-second CG reel showing Babylon 5 orbiting Epsilon III that convinced Warner Brothers to pick up Babylon 5 in July 1992. Thornton was the designer of Babylons 4 and 5, the Minbari warcruiser, the Vorlon and Shadow ships and the White Star, as well as lots of secondary spacecraft (such as the Drazi Sunhawk, which he based on the Liberator on Blake's 7, on which he also worked as a young visual effects technician at the BBC). He didn't design the Starfury, but he did suggest the original concept to Steve Burg, suggesting he look at the Gunstar from The Last Starfighter for inspiration. Foundation Imaging was effectively fired from working on Babylon 5 so the executive producer could steal a bunch of his staff and set up his own, cheap-as-shit effects team, Netter Digital (Straczynski - eventually - realised this was shady as hell and regretted it, but about fifteen years too late) who took over for the last two seasons. You can tell the difference: Thornton and FI put a lot of thought into shot composition, doing things off the horizontal plane and making sure everything worked in accordance with Newtonian physics. The other guys didn't. After B5, Foundation Imaging worked on the big fleet battles in the last two seasons of Deep Space Nine and became the main provider of CG effects on Seasons 4-7 of Voyager, along with the first season of Enterprise. They also worked on the remastered edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Foundation Imaging went bust in 2002, after which Thornton worked on shows like The New Captain Scarlet and (that notoriously CG-heavy show) Nashville. Some of Thornton's colleagues went on to work on shows like BSG and Lost. Sad news. B5 had some of the best-ever spaceship designs, period, and Thornton was behind a lot of it. The Babylon Curse continues...

The Guardian points out that Dylan is not the first songwriter to win the prize. Indian songwriter Raindranath Tagore won it in 1913.

The award isn't for novels alone though, is it? Plays and poetry are eligible, so why not lyrics? It seems a bit of a arbitrary distinction to draw. That said, I do wonder if they Nobel Committee thought the chances of Dylan coming down with a case of 2016 was getting pretty high so they decided to give some recognition whilst he's still alive.

Paul's staying, Mary's already said she's not moving to Channel 4.

In negotiations, but apparently they are not expecting them to sign up either.

Incredulity from the TV production people interviewed on the BBC today. They find it beyond ludicrous that Channel 4 didn't attach all four of the presenters to the format, as that's the only way the deal would be worth the money. Even better: Channel 4 can't show their first series proper until 2018 due to a two-year exclusion clause in the previous deal with the BBC, and all the BBC would have to do to get around it is to simply drop the tent and make the format identical to MasterChef (which the BBC has owned since forever) and they'd be absolutely good to go.

They've lost two of the presenters. If the other two go, then Channel 4 has just spent £75 million on a big tent

It's weird. A nation called Khitai certainly exists in the Sarantine/Lions/Children world, but the world has a different number of moons in the eastern novels. So either the sky is different (like in Elizabeth Bear's excellent Eternal Sky trilogy) or they're set in slightly different parallel versions of one another.

Euron can't conquer much on the mainland, but he doesn't need to. Take out the Redwyne fleet and there's nothing left to stop him, unless Braavos chooses to get involved. He can keep the coasts bottled up indefinitely - well, a year or two - whilst he waits for Victarion and Dany to show up. Another possibility is that Cersei blows up King's Landing as some have speculated (maybe taking fAegon with her?). Maybe Euron sweeps into KL and takes control of the city - or what's left of it - before Dany and the Dothraki show up?

Half the Iron Fleet doubling back and hitting the Redwynes from behind would be a good way to help destroy the Redwyne fleet. That remains the biggest challenge to Euron so far: the Hightower, Lannister and Tyrell fleets are fairly negligible and the Royal Fleet has mostly been destroyed (and Aurane Waters has legged it with the rest), so the Redwyne is the only sizable fleet in Westeros capable of opposing Euron. It needs to be neutralised for Euron to have any chance of doing what needs doing. Of course, with a ship full of crazed warlocks and red priests, I just assumed he was going to smash them with magic, but this would be a viable alternative.

Last Light is certainly not a bad book at all, but it's not amongst his best (which would probably be The Lions of Al-Rassan).

All of the books take place in the same universe, but not the same world/timeline. Fionavar is set in the First of All Worlds, and there are some hints that both Tigana and A Song for Arbonne take place in remote regions of the same planet. However, they could also take place on a different planet, or each in their own individual worlds. The Sarantine Mosaic, Under Heaven, River of Stars, The Lions of Al-Rassan, The Last Light of the Sun and Children of Earth and Sky all "appear" to take place on the same alternate Earth. I'm pretty certain this world is 100% an alternate version of our world, and the maps appear slightly different because Kay is going for the same simplified style of the particular periods. One issue with this is that the planet is noted as having only one moon in Under Heaven (I can't remember if this is still the case in River of Stars), compared to the two of all the other books. This is anomalous as the setting for UH and RoS, Khitai, is mentioned in many of the other books in this world and some of the western nations are mentioned in UH and RoS, so they seem to be the same planet. The one moon may either be a mistake or confirming that UH and RoS take place in a parallel universe version of the same planet.

I am certain that House Whitehead would behave in the most honourable and yet badass way possible at all times. Winterfell is surrounded by two massive walls, one of them 100 feet tall, separated by a moat and with strong defensive walls. A full-scale assault on Winterfell would be extremely costly and victory would be dubious. It's probably less defensible to direct assault than Casterly Rock, the Eyrie or Storm's End because, as Theon found out, Winterfell is so spread out you'd also need quite a lot of men to effectively hold it. But at its height, Winterfell would be extremely hard to take in battle.

Yup. There are basically now two continuities, the TV show and the books, and they each have their spin-offs. The Telltale game draws on the HBO TV series (it uses multiple TV actors) and not the novels. The Cyanide RPG game occupies a kind of oddball middle-ground, where it draws on the book continuity but also drops in a couple of the TV voice actors. The chances of either the TV show or books mentioning the events of their respective video games is pretty close to zero though. It is worth remembering that House Forrester is mentioned in the books (in ADWD, I believe) but all the information on them in the games come from Telltale, not George.

They are referring to the Telltale adventure game series (the last episode of which is called "The Ice Dragon"). However, the Telltale adventure game is canon only to the TV series, not the books, so shouldn't be on the book wiki as a source of canon information.

The Grand Khalif, I suppose, and maybe the Duke of Seressa and a Sarantine rebel who has been fighting the Osmanlis for decades and is now a grizzled old badass. There is a semi-self-contained story set in Sarantium itself which takes up the final 100-150 pages of the book and involves the Khalif, but it's not the main focus of the story.