George RR Martin's new Game of Thrones short story is a tale of two Targaryens
The author's contribution to a fantasy anthology book will be "a history rather than a traditional narrative"
Last week news broke that George RR Martin is planning to publish a Game of Thrones short story later this year. This raised all kinds of questions: Will it be a brand-new story? What will it be about? And has this project dragged him away from finally finishing the long-awaited Thrones tome The Winds of Winter?
Well, the author himself has now penned a post on his Livejournal blog, admitting "I need to set the record straight" – and here's what he told us...
Readers of Gardner Dozois' fantasy anthology Book of Swords will be treated to a short entry from Martin, set within the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. The story will reveal more about the backstory of House Targaryen.
Titled The Sons of the Dragon, it will set out the history of the second and third Targaryen kings who ruled over Westeros after Aegon the Conqueror arrived. These kings were Aenys I and Maegor the Cruel, whose histories will be told "along with their mothers, wives, sisters, children, friends, enemies, and rivals."
However, while there's plenty more to learn from the short story, it's not entirely new: this is drawn from old material created for Martin's fan convention appearances and for lore book The World of Ice and Fire.
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The fantasy author created reams and reams of extra material (we're talking hundreds of thousands of words), but most of it never saw the light of day.
As fans wait for The Winds of Winter to finally be published after a six-year gap, the Game of Thrones TV series has now taken a different direction from Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Season seven will premiere in the summer.
