Game of Thrones Love

I realized that it is a little odd that I have posted nothing about the new HBO adaptation of A Game of Thrones, given that George R. R. Martin was primarily responsible for inspiring me to actually begin writing a book. I consider his A Song of Ice and Fire series to be the best fantasy by a living writer (in second place for me would be A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin).

The reason, I suppose, is that I feel the need to dampen my own excitement over the show, because I won't be able to watch it for many months. Living in Azerbaijan, I have no legal means of watching it until it is released on DVD.

I was saddened to read today about some generally high-quality news media allowing fantasy-hating reviewers to bash the show while smearing women in general. I won't go into detail since others have done much better, but if you haven't read about it, try this link or this one on Tor. It would be better, in my opinion, for these news sources to have people who actually enjoy fantasy do such reviews. That way we could get an honest opinion on how well it was done.

Oh, and while running about the web today, I came across a Gene Wolfe essay on Tolkien and found this great quote (apologies for being off topic):

"Terry Brooks has often been disparaged for imitating Tolkien, particularly by those reviewers who find his books inferior to Tolkien's own. I can say only that I wish there were more imitators -- we need them -- and that all imitations of so great an original must necessarily be inferior."

I'd like to tell all of my readers who love fantasy and sci-fi about The Silver Key, which I just discovered. The writer is far superior to me, yet sadly he has few followers (perhaps he needs to move his Followers widget higher on his page!). I found it well worth my while to spend a couple of hours reading through old posts there, and I imagine many of you would, too.