"A Dance With Dragons" Will Be Released on July 12

I got an e-mail from Borders yesterday afternoon stating that A Dance with Dragons, the next book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, will be released on July 12.

At last!  Some people on my message-board said they remember reading in editions of the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, that "Dance" would be out in 2006!  People have wondered if the series would ever be finished and even speculated on Martin's health.

Someone theorized that this has been timed to cash in the upcoming HBO series A Game of Thrones, which is based on the first book in the series.  I'm seriously considering getting HBO just to watch that.  Someone called A Song of Ice and Fire "The Sopranos in Middle-Earth" and it actually depicts how utterly horrific a realistic fantasy world would be.  You've got massacres of peasants, women being passed around for political reasons, and to drive the point home, a nobleman makes the following comment about a woman he murdered:

"Catelyn Stark sleeps with the fishes."

(Maybe--I haven't read that far in the series, but I've heard this.)

Let's hope subsequent books come much faster now.