I can´t believe it.  The postman brought me "A Dance with a Dragon" one minute ago. 5 1/2 year waiting time. I´m shocked and excited.     

EDIT/

From G. R. R. Martins Blog...

wheeee....

I never read the books, but decided give it a try 2 weeks ago, during easter, watched the entire first season with my bro....

TBF i am not much into fantasy genre, although i quite enjoyed reading/watching LoTR, i prefer sci-fi and things like Diablo III currently, WoW, Witcher, etc... leave me uninterested. So i approached this with bit of a scepticism, but need to say, was very pleasantly surprised. Its really, really great, i love the story, the characters (Peter Dinklage FTW! ),  basically everything....its very well done, does not feel cheap, like it happens sometimes with this kind of stuff... i even started thinking about getting those books, once i finish reading Lovecrafts anthology...

Only one thing, i keep saying to myself, how utterly brilliant would it be, if the setting was sci-fi instead of fantasy, it would have probably babylon 5-esque potential....  

It's funny the horrible stuff people can digest. Battlestar Galactica and this... Scary mindless stuff. No plot. No acting. No characterization. Nothing except the same cheap story told over and over again.

Give it a chance!

Oh but I did. That's why I say so. I forgot, in between the characteristics, that the show introduces some public scenes of sex (like Spartacus and others before it) to give an atmosphere of "fantasy" debauchery. What sadness.

What shows do you find to be better? 

Stargate Universe was decent, for example, although barely. The problem is that the overall quality of entertainment products available today is very low and it is maintained ssuch because this helps the market through a continuous renewal of offer based on the quick boredom produced by such inadequate forms of "artistic" (the term media celarly shows there is no art involved) expression.

Essentially, a consequence of the decadence of our culture.

Yours, maybe....ours down here can't be buggered to put in the effort to be decadent....

Indeed, as you can see by the current brilliance of world economy.

Worst show ever. I agree that some shows could be better, but I think you may have ridiculous standards.

You guys like to exaggerate a little.

Well, you see, not that I am enthusiastic about it, but SGU at least can be seen without having a sense of cognitive dissonance. You may consider it "the worst show ever", but I am not quite surprised, Infact, this is the way someone living in the contemporary dark age sees entertainment.

In SGU for example, there's unity of time and space ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities ), whereas both in the (monstruous, undreadable) book series and in the tv show A Game of Thrones, there is none. Fact is, that to sell more books, lately, one of the stratagems has been eliminating the concept of main character and spreading the role of protagonist between different (scarcely defined and often incoherent) characters instead. These are spread between continents, generally, too. Wheel of Time, and other examples of garbage literature, intended for a consumerist market, do it largely, because this improves the chance that the reader might identify with one or the other and so, get attached to the saga. So the audience has been educated (conditioned) not to expect unities in tales anymore.

It's also like a chinese menu or a macdonalds list: the more stuff inside dishes, the better.

In SGU there's an underlying mystery ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_wonder ) whereas in current tv shows there is none. These are more like japanese anime, in their repetitive reproposition of the mechanistic antagonist-difficulty-confrontation-victory (or defeat, in the case of pessimist plots), without there being any reason for the confrontation besides some bad guy/good guy stereotype.

In SGU characters actually have a personality. In aGoT, they just oscillate around their generic quality (this guy is very honest, the other is very rash, etc.). In Galactica they are a bunch of borderlines or even multiple personality disorders, and everyone does everything and its opposite.

So, in reality, no wonder that SGU has been cancelled. It has been cancelled because it isn't as bad as what the audience has been conditioned to expect, and like. In the age of Lost, beauty is ugliness, and vice-versa.

I enjoyed both reading the Game of Thrones series of books and watching the TV series enormously. The last two books weren't as good as the first few but still enjoyable. I've been trying to find a similar series to pick up but nothing comes close so far.

I tried reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen series but didn't enjoy it much at all. Too unbelievable. The thing I really liked in Game of Thrones was how beliefs and superstition are handled - that is, it doesn't necessarily mean its real. Most fantasy books are full of superstitions that are always real and central to the plot. Game of Thrones reads much more like historical fiction than fantasy.

If anyone has any recommendations on similar books I'd be interested in hearing about them.

I would recommend Abercrombies "First Law Trilogie". Very good story and some great characters. The closest thing to Martins "Game of thrones" that comes to my mind.  I enjoyed this trilogie very much.

Nobody has to like Game of thrones. But calling it mindless stuff without plot is either only provocation or you haven´t understand anything. Sry.

Nah, only highlights of the SGU was the Rush character and few episodes around the end of the first/beginning of the second season. The show lacked otherwise any sense to urgency to its main backplot, you say something about underlying mystery, but in 2 seasons this was tackled rather scarcely, we knew basically nothing about what was going on... in regard to GoT, does it have not its "mysterious" backplot with all that "Winter is coming" and white walkers and stuff? Or its not worthy to be a backplot as its nothing new?

Anyway. i wonder, which shows (when clearly even SGU is kind of one-eyed king) are in your opinion good and worthy of watching?