I’ve heard that the illustrated Game of Thrones novel is something that George R. R. Martin has always wanted. Whether that’s true or not, the one thing that matters is that it looks incredible, and it’s out next month.
The book, which will become available in hardcover from October 18, is being made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of A Song of Ice and Fire.
And over the course of 73 illustrations, that’s what the Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition will do. Ten images have been provided to Vanity Fair, a few of which you can see below.
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What’s interesting is the difference in the depiction of, say, the Iron Throne as opposed to how it’s cast in the HBO series. Anne Groell, who has edited the entire Song of Ice and Fire series, recalled how she had to cajole Martin to explain what the Iron Throne looked like in the mind’s eye of the author.
“He finally said, ‘It’s 10 to 16 feet off the ground, with steps going up to it like a slide.’,” she said. “I said, ‘OK, nowhere in the books does it say that!’ It’s what I like to call the ‘invisible-head syndrome,’ that authors always think you can see into their head and see the vision that they’ve got.”
You can see the rest of the images, as well as an interview with Groell and the differences in how the illustrators and writers saw Game of Thrones over at Vanity Fair.
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6 responses to “The Illustrated Game Of Thrones Novel Looks Incredible”
It’s striking to go back and watch Season 1 not be able to film a battle sequence (Tyrion gets knocked out so he conveniently misses what would have been a difficult scene for the show back then). The early stuff with the $ that the later seasons had to play with sounds very interesting, this is kinda that.
Apart from calendars or similar I don’t think I’ve seen official art of some of main characters as they are described from the books.
That’s a much more impressive (much more vertical) iron throne than the one on the show!
this one is actually how Martin envisioned it in the books.
Now I’m just imagining people climbing up the stairs and sliding down again on a shield.
The throne is made from the swords of fallen enemies so you’d want to be DARN SURE you didn’t fall off that shield on the way down!
Can see why the throne was changed. That would be a terrible plot to try and film with.