Ik heb mijn Feast for Crows en Dance with Dragons opengesleurd, en in mekaar geduwd.

Dit is hoe Feast eindigde, in 2005, namelijk:

Hey, wait a minute!” some of you may be saying about now. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Where’s Dany and the dragons? Where’s Tyrion? We hardly saw Jon Snow. That can’t be all of it…”

Well, no. There’s more to come. Another book as big as this one.

I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I wrote lots about them. Pages and pages and pages. Chapters and more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that the book had become too big to publish in a single volume… and I wasn’t close to finished yet. To tell all of the story that I wanted to tell, I was going to have to cut the book in two.

The simplest way to do that would have been to take what I had, chop it in half around the middle, and end with “To Be Continued.” The more I thought about that, however, the more I felt that the readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. So that’s the route I chose to take.

Tyrion, Jon, Dany, Stannis and Melisandre, Davos Seaworth, and all the rest of the characters you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance with Dragons, which will focus on events along the Wall and across the sea, just as the present book focused on King’s Landing.

En dit is hoe Dance begon, in 2011 (dus niet “next year”, grrr):

It has been a while between books, I know. So a reminder may be in order.

The book you hold in your hands is the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire. The fourth volume was A Feast for Crows. However, this volume does not follow that one in the traditional sense, so much as run in tandem with it.

Both Dance and Feast take up the story immediately after the events of the third volume in the series, A Storm of Swords. Whereas Feast focused on events in and around King’s Landing, on the Iron Islands, and down in Dorne, Dance takes us north to Castle Black and the Wall (and beyond), and across the narrow sea to Pentos and Slaver’s Bay, to pick up the tales of Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and all the other characters you did not see in the preceding volume. Rather than being sequential, the two books are parallel … divided geographically, rather than chronologically.

But only up to a point.

A Dance with Dragons is a longer book than A Feast for Crows, and covers a longer time period. In the latter half of this volume, you will notice certain of the viewpoint characters from A Feast for Crows popping up again. And that means just what you think it means: the narrative has moved past the time frame of Feast, and the two streams have once again rejoined each other.

Next up, The Winds of Winter. Wherein, I hope, everybody will be shivering together once again.

Twee boeken dus die eigenlijk één groot boek zouden kunnen geweest zijn: het internet zou het internet niet zijn (en de fans van Song of Ice and Fire niet de fans van Song of Ice and Fire) als er geen alternatieve leesvolgorde zou in elkaar gebokst zijn.

Meer dan één, zelfs. Ik ben een fan van de volgorde van Sean T. Collins en Stefan Sasse, de mannen van Boiled Leather Audio Hour (en All LEather Must Be Boiled, en Rolling Stone, en Tower of the Hand and Nerdstream Era en en en en): volgorde voor wie het al gelezen had en volgorde voor wie het voor het eerst leest.

’t Zal voor deze zomer zijn.