No, George R.R. Martin still hasn’t finished A Dance with Dragons, dammit, but he’s bequeathed us a “Dunk and Egg” novella, set in the ancient past. It’s in the short story collection Warriors, edited by Martin and Gardner Dozois, and is called “The Mystery Knight.” Anyone else read it yet?
ARGH. Why is he doing this shit instead of writing his goddamn book? I’m about to go all Misery on his ass.
Amen, sister! But it’s nice to have something…
Just finished it. It’s pretty good! Dunk and Egg attend a tourney to mark the wedding of a relatively minor Westeros lord and his young bride. Dunk learns, however, that there’s more going on than meets the eye. The unsuccessful Blackfyre Rebellion from a few years before is an important background detail.
I recently read all three of the Dunk & Egg novellas. I thought they were okay, but not as good as I was expecting. This third one was the best, though. I thought they were set only about 100 years before Game of Thrones?
Did you like the rest of the *Warriors *collection? I was a little disappointed in it. I’ve got to stop buying these collections, because I find that I don’t usually like standalone short stories. There’s too much investment in characters and setting for too little payoff.
Wiki says you’re right - the Dunk and Egg stories begin 89 years before the A Song of Ice and Fire books.
In the Warriors collection, other than “The Mystery Knight,” I especially liked “Soldierin’” by Joe R. Lansdale, about Buffalo Soldiers fighting the Apache in post-Civil War Texas - funny and sardonic, with great atmosphere. Although I’m a big Joe Haldeman fan, his “Forever Bound” wasn’t all that good. I skimmed some of the other stories but they didn’t hook me - I got the book from the library only for the GRRM story, really. I rarely buy a book this big, or this expensive, nowadays.