Rise of the Dragon: George RR Martin announces new book ahead of HBO’s House of the Dragon series

Book is billed as a ‘lavish’ visual history to accompany the author’s 2018 epic novel

George RR Martin has announced that he is releasing a new visual history of House Targaryen, one of the main families from his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

The Rise of the Dragon is billed as a “lavish” visual history of “the iconic family at the heart of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon”.

According to a post on Martin’s blog, it will include over 180 new illustrations and serve as a “reference book”, in which the infamous family and their dragons come to life.

Fire and Blood was released in 2018 and provided the back story upon which HBO’s forthcoming series is based.

Billed as a history of the Targaryen Kings, from Aegon the Conqueror to Ageon III, the events of the book take place 300 years before those in the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Unlike those books, Fire and Blood is written as an in-universe account (purportedly) by the Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel, in a style that Martin’s publisher described as possessing the “scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.

“Fire and Blood is ideal for fans of the stories who love to obsess over the most minute of details, and it’s fun to see the ancestors of other popular characters – from the Starks to the Lannisters – turn up along the way,” The Independent’s two-star review said. “But the sheer scale and exhaustive detail in Fire and Blood makes reading it feel more like you’ve been assigned a mildly interesting, but often tedious, piece of homework.”

Emma D’Arcy as Rhaenyra Targaryen and Matt Smith as Daemon Targaryen in HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ (HBO)

The Rise of the Dragon will be available from October this year and is available to pre-order now.

Last week, Martin announced that production on House of the Dragon had wrapped.

In a blog post published on 9 March, Martin wrote: “House of the Dragon has wrapped in London and is now in post-production. What I have seen, I have loved. I am eager to see more.”

No release date has yet been announced, but House of the Dragon is expected to debut on HBO Max in the US this year, with a UK release expected around the same time.