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Fire & Blood (HBO Tie-in Edition): 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones Audiobook
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Plot Summary
Fantasy lovers, and fans of Game of Thrones will love this novel set in the same universe as George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice. It tells the alleged history of the Targaryen dynasty, in chronological order from Aegon's Conquest to the ascension of Aegon III.
The novel’s key takeaway theme is imperialism and colonialism. The Targaryens are a group of conquerors and invaders, no matter how sympathetic the individuals are. Their invasion was purely driven by hurt pride and desire for power. When King Argilac Durrandon requested Aegon to help defend him against King Harren, he offered his maiden daughter to Aegon. Aegon deflected the offer of the king’s daughter to his bastard brother, which offended the king. After the king refused, Aegon decided to invade Westeros.
Dragons were used as weapons of mass destruction and were the reason for Aegon’s successful invasion. This makes for a fascinating and dramatic invasion. Yet, readers may want to sympathize with and like certain Targaryen family members. The cool dragons and the likable characters blurs the lines in Martin’s narrative, making it difficult to see the dragons as weapons and the Targaryens as forceful invaders. Martin shows his audience his discontent regarding imperialism and colonialism, reminding us how easy it is for society to decide who rules based on bias. Even within the text, the maesters, who wrote the in-story histories, show their bias to the Targaryen reign. Martin uses propaganda, and the power of words to convince both the readers and the Westerosi of the Targaryen legitimacy.
Fire and Blood is the first installment of the fictional history of Westeros. It details the series of events, including war and colonialism, and the Targaryen family’s ability to ride dragons that propelled them to power. With the backdrop of an extensive fantasy world, Martin plucks through real world themes of war, pageantry and the European Renaissance to explore how imperialism and colonialism can be accepted by society when done so with enough sympathy, propaganda, and brute force.
Publisher Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The thrilling history of the Targaryens comes to life in this masterly work, the inspiration for HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon “The thrill of Fire & Blood is the thrill of all Martin’s fantasy work: familiar myths debunked, the whole trope table flipped.”—Entertainment Weekly Centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones, House Targaryen—the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria—took up residence on Dragonstone. Fire & Blood begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart. What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why was it so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What were Maegor the Cruel’s worst crimes? What was it like in Westeros when dragons ruled the skies? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel and featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley—including five all-new illustrations exclusive to this edition. Readers have glimpsed small parts of this narrative in such volumes as The World of Ice & Fire, but now, for the first time, the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed. With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire & Blood is the the first volume of the definitive two-part history of the Targaryens, giving readers a whole new appreciation for the dynamic, often bloody, and always fascinating history of Westeros. Includes a bonus PDF of illustrations from the book Praise for Fire & Blood “A masterpiece of popular historical fiction.”—The Sunday Times “The saga is a rich and dark one, full of both the title’s promised elements. . . . It’s hard not to thrill to the descriptions of dragons engaging in airborne combat, or the dilemma of whether defeated rulers should ‘bend the knee,’ ‘take the black’ and join the Night’s Watch, or simply meet an inventive and horrible end.”—The Guardian
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Fire & Blood (HBO Tie-in Edition) Listener Reviews
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Robert Cook, 6/21/2024
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Patricia McLaughlin, 9/17/2022
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Michael Barrett, 3/2/2021
About George R. R. Martin
George R. R. Martin sold his first story in 1971 and has been writing professionally ever since. He spent ten years in Hollywood as a writer-producer, working on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and television pilots that were never made. In the mid ’90s he returned to prose, his first love, and began work on his epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. He has been in the Seven Kingdoms ever since. Whenever he’s allowed to leave, he returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with the lovely Parris, a big white dog called Mischa, and two cats named Augustus and Caligula, who think they run the place.
About Simon Vance
Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.