A Game of Thrones: HBO TV Series

I have just recently discovered the TV series “Game of Thrones”. As far as I know, series one, which comprises ten episodes, has just completed airing in Australia so I am a little bit late discovering it. I probably wouldn’t have discovered it at all had I not needed a hair cut.

As all my family and friends know I like to have a regular hair cut. Every six months, whether I need it or not, I have a wee trim. Actually I have more than a wee trim—I have about as much taken off as can be removed using comb and scissors. That usually gets me through about six months until the next trim.

As it happens my nephew’s wife is a barber, or maybe that should be ‘hairdresser’. Whatever; and she is kind enough to shear my locks off every six months or so and make me look almost presentable again.

On this particular visit over to my nephews for my twice yearly haircut he happened to bring up the fact he was getting into a TV series on Fox (pay TV) called “Game of Thrones”. The name sounded different so I showed some interest and he played a few minutes of one of the episodes he had recorded.

It looked like something I could get into so on returning home I looked a little further into it. At this stage you can’t buy the series on DVD (in Australia anyway) but—as always—there are ways you can watch it using the Internet.

It is awesome. Seriously awesome, and following my strict policy of “if I like it I buy it” you can be sure I will purchase the DVD copy once it becomes available.

It is produced and released by HBO (Home Box Office), the same outfit that produced and released Deadwood—one of my all time favourite TV series along with Twin Peaks.

So, after researching it a bit I can tell you that “Game of Thrones” is the first book in what was going to be a trilogy called A Song of Ice and Fire. But then the author, George R. R. Martin (often abbreviated to GRRM or grrm), then decided he would need five books to tell the story; but now it seems he has changed his mind again and is thinking it will take seven books.

We know the name of the first five books because they have been written—they are:

• A Game of Thrones (August, 1996).
• A Clash of Kings (November, 1998).
• A Storm of Swords (August, 2000).
• A Feast of Crows (October, 2005).
• A Dance with Dragons (July, 2011).

The working title of the sixth book is “A Dream of Spring” but it has not been finished or released yet so there is a chance the final book title might be different.

The first season of ten episodes covers the first book: A Game of Thrones. Hence, presumably, the second season of Game of Thrones, due for release in April this year, will actually be called “A Clash of Kings”.

Game of Thrones is what I guess would be called medieval fiction. It is about knights and lords and kings and the seven kingdoms of the imagery land of Westeros where “summers span decades and winters can last a lifetime”.

From the way the first series finished we can expect to see dragons in the second series because, although we are repeatedly told during series one that dragons went extinct “hundreds of years ago” at the end of series one three ‘petrified’ dragon eggs hatch. You can see the outcome of that in the picture above. Yep! A baby dragon sitting on the shoulder of a naked queen (well she was a queen until her husband died, but you will need to watch series one to see how all that comes about).

If I have got you interested then you will need to get creative on the Internet, obtain the series from someone who recorded it from Fox, or wait until the DVDs come out. If you take option one and you enjoy it then I plead with you to do as I do and purchase the DVDs when they are released.