Theon's father led a rebellion against King Robert about 9 years before the TV series started. He thought that the other lords would not fight for Robert, a usurper, but was wrong. The ironborn made a good start by burning the Lannister fleet at dock (mentioned by Tyrion in Season 1) but lacked the numbers to make any…

Believe it or not, the replacement High Septon will also be played by another Doctor Who veteran.

I'd have much preferred a longer season (12-14 episodes) to capture the whole thing at once. The problem with the two-season solution is that they're going to reach the end of ASoS halfway through Season 4, losing that great ending as a season finale, and then finish on a somewhat arbritary point from AFFC/ADWD.

No love for Peter F. Hamilton's GREAT NORTH ROAD? His longest novel since the NIGHT'S DAWN TRILOGY, but also a stand-alone. Looks good (er, but not out until September). [thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk]

About halfway through it and it's either directly set in the same timeline as THE MARS TRILOGY or is very, very close to it. You do not need any familiarity with the earlier trilogy at all though, as 2312 doesn't involve Mars apart from a single chapter.

Indeed. It should be out in the first half of 2013 (* touch wood *)

Whoops, replying to the wrong comment, sorry.

"there's no reason why you can't mod a movie like The Phantom Menace. "

I think the reason they're not recasting is so we get them back later on :) I think the Greatjon is out for Season 2, but hopefully Shagga will be back before the end of the season.

Great recap, but a couple of points:

I always thought Rahvin was, but closer inspection reveals that he's only 'dark of complexion'. So actually Semirhage is the only indisputably non-Caucasian Forsaken.

I think people were annoyed by the ending itself, though. If you had Fawkes with you - a mutant invulnerable to radiation - you couldn't get him to go into the radiation chamber and turn the thing off. If you asked, he'd just say, "You need to do this, boss." The player, understandably, is somewhat confused by this:…

It's notable that PROMETHEUS's promo material uses the date for ALIEN which can only be reached by comparisons with ALIENS (i.e. 2179-57=2122), which I think is a hint that PROMETHEUS will not outright de-canonise ALIENS, though I think some fanwanking may be required to make it all fit together.

Favourite ALIENS story: British fantasy author Terry Pratchett is a huge ALIENS fan and whilst at a collector's fair in the USA had a chance to buy an original pulse rifle prop. He wimped out though, embarassed at having to take it through customs and explain it to the officials :-)

In ALIEN they only had a rather rubbish homemade flamethrower. In ALIENS they had armour-piercing pulse rifles with built-in grenade launchers. I'm not surprised the aliens were more easily killed. In fact there's a logical reason for it: Ripley told them to come fully loaded. Hell, they even had nukes :-) Y'know,…

Yeah, I think it was Alan Dean Foster - who novelised the first three movies and thus had to keep them in canon with one another - who came up with the idea that the aliens would use the 'melting people into eggs technique' when there was no Queen around. I believe the idea was that the first facehugger out of the new…

Obligatory mention of the absence of WARHAMMER 40,000 fiction from the list. It's a notably British, semi-satirical take on war, military SF and fascism, with you not really sure who to root for. It also features, by far, the funniest military SF character of all time in the shape of Comissar Ciaphas Cain (Flashman by…

I liked it: [thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk]

Some books and series do better at this than others. Pratchett's DISCWORLD books feature no human-on-human racism and he uses the troll-dwarf conflict as a way of lampooning racial prejudices in real life. However, he still doesn't have many black DISCWORLD characters of note (NATION has some interesting thoughts on…

There's four or five Summer Islander characters of note in the books. The crew of the ship Daenerys meets in Qarth (and which Sam and Gilly later catch a ride on in AFFC), Jalabher Xho and Chataya and her daughter. All have been depicted as 100% straight-up and relatively honest characters. However, their combined…