At its very simplest, several powerful noble houses battle for control of the Seven Kingdoms whilst at the same time a supernatural threat arises to the far north and a previously-deposed family makes a bid for power by raising fresh armies on the eastern continent. Complications are caused by the fact that on this…

Didn't Worf and Dax get married in the middle of the Dominion War? In Season 6, I believe, right after the battle to seal the wormhole against the Dominion fleet.

B5 compares very favourably with DS9. A lot of people will say that B5 is better or DS9 is better and this leads to Internet Flamery, but to be honest they're pretty comparable in quality. B5 is far more ambitious, but DS9 was arguably more consistent. B5 had the best actors (Katsulas and Jurasik) but the 'average'…

JMS did it again in Season 4 :-) He actually wrote every episode of the series from 'In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum' (Season 2, Ep 17) through 'Secrets of the Soul' (Season 5, Episode 7), an unbroken run of 57 episodes in a row. It would have been the entire rest of the series, but he made an exception to let Neil Gaiman…

I see no major problems with this. We have the Cushing movies, the stage plays (some of them featuring TV Doctors like Pertwee and Colin Baker), the computer games, the web series (Richard E. Grant as the Ninth Doctor, which has clearly been de-canonised) and dozens and dozens of novels, which seem to have been…

He's said he doesn't want to do it, as he doesn't want to deal with the problems of typecasting and recognition. Although that was about the TV series. Maybe spending a few weeks on a movie version every few years would be more appealing, but the same problems would apply.

New BSG Season 4. 'Deadlock' is as bad as anything in GALCTICA 80, frankly.

I don't think this can be a contender. The game was rushed and left unfinished at LucasArt's urging, but even given that the first 90% or so of the game is excellent. Not as good as the first KotOR and the opening asteroid sequence is very weird in tone, but for doing something different with the Star Wars mythos, and…

There's a new Christopher Priest book out this month as well, THE ISLANDERS. His first novel in nine years (and his previous book, THE SEPARATION, was brilliant). AFAIK, only a UK release, though.

Why do people assume that the rest of the world is just like their own experience and complain when it isn't? Britain is a very multi-cultural country with people of different cultures, backgrounds and ethnicities living right next door to one another, especially in the big cities and especially in poorer-class areas…

Book 5 extends quite a bit past the ending of Book 4 and some Book 4 storylines continue in Book 5, which wouldn't make any sense if you read them the other way round. I'd stick with the publication order, at least first time around, and wait to see if fan sites can put together a combined Book 4/5 reading order.

You mean a certain character whose name starts with 'A' whose appearances was foreshadowed by a vision Daenerys had in the second volume and fan forums have been discussing at some length since about 1998?

It was pretty faithful, they just dropped a few scenes for time. Sadly, the wicker dragon didn't make it in, or the gully dwarf who develops a crush on Raistlin.

There is already a DRAGONLANCE movie, an animated thing with the voices of Kiefer Sutherland and Lucy Lawless. It is not very good, but worth watching for the completely unplanned hilarity. The producers using CGI to depict the dragons and draconians even when they are in disguise takes some tension out of scenes,…

I'm starting to wonder if GRRM is being a little too subtle in his writing.

Doomsday Book is a much stronger novel (though Future Oxford is very much a cliched image of the place modelled on how it worked in maybe 1925, and rather wince-inducing to anyone actually living in 21st Century Britain) than Blackout, not to mention more focused, considerably shorter and much better-researched. I…

The problem is that I've never heard this complaint before, not in six years of hearing people talk about A FEAST FOR CROWS on several different forums. I didn't pick up on everything in the prologue first time through (the identity of the character from Book 2 who unexpectedly reappears is something I missed, though…

"Interesting that GRRM has yet again changed his story about whether the book that eventually became "Dance" was finished or not when "Crows" was published. He's said everything that the book was finished but the combined Crows/Dance was too long to publish to that after the publication of "Crows" he decided to junk…

No. The House prequels were the best of the lot, but that's like saying getting herpes is preferable to the ebola virus. It's 'preferable' but you'd be best off avoiding both.

Given the quality of most Hugo/Nebula winners, that's not saying much. For example, everyone's expecting Connie Willis' BLACKOUT to win the Hugo this year, despite the fact that in the 1,200 pages of the book (when combined with its sequel) there are about 200 pages of things actually happening and 1,000 pages of…