Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before a Game of Thrones (The Targaryen Dynasty: The House of the Dragon)

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For any fan looking to dive into the adventure of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, there can be no finer reading experience.

There is a simplified family tree of the Targaryens at the end of the book but, as usual, it's too small to see in the e-book so you'll need a print-out. In their vanguard is a horde of mythical Others–a supernatural army of the living dead whose animated corpses are unstoppable. And at first, the author thought of that as a fit subject for a short story, not for a massive series of several doorstep sized novels.

The story of the only family of dragonlords to survive Valyria's Doom is a tale of twisty politics, alliances and betrayals, and acts both noble and craven. An abridged version of The Sons of the Dragon was released in October 2017 titled The Sons of the Dragon in the anthology The Book of Swords. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a collection of three novellas starring a hedge knight named Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk) and his squire Aegon V Targaryen (Egg). This is by design, I think, to make the book feel more authentic, but this works too well as it comes across a bit dry and boring. Robert’s two brothers each seek their own dominion, while a disfavored house turns once more to conquest.

It's almost impossible to follow this story without having to hand a large map of Westeros and the surrounding world and also a family tree for all of those mentioned in the book. R. Martin’s Fire and Blood on its own terms, gauging it for what it sets out to be, rather than what I might have wished. What I mean is that the ostensible narrator is not an omniscient GRR Martin but a master writing several centuries after the event and relying on several contemporary sources of dubious accuracy. And while those books are still in the works from Martin, someone used ChatGPT to finish the series themselves and see what the ending to A Song of Ice and Fire could look like. Excluding the prologue, the point-of-view characters in A Game of Thrones are Eddard Stark, Catelyn Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Bran Stark, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen, whose story unfolds across the Narrow Sea in the eastern continent of Essos.And now the mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure of this magnificent saga come to life as never before.