Following right on the heels of the The Diamond Age miniseries announcement, Sci Fi Wire reports that HBO has purchased the TV option for GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire:

HBO has acquired the rights to turn George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice [sic] into a dramatic series, to be written and exec produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Variety reported. Fire is the first TV project for Benioff (Troy) and Weiss (Halo) and will shoot in Europe or New Zealand. Martin, a former TV writer, will write one of the episodes himself. The rest will be written by Benioff and Weiss.

The series will begin with the first book, 1996’s A Game of Thrones. Each season to follow will be based one of the subsequent novels, which average about 1,000 pages each. Martin has nearly finished the fifth installment, but won’t complete the seven-book cycle until 2011. The author will co-exec produce the series along with Management 360’s Guymon Casady and Created By’s Vince Gerardis.

GRRM confirmaed of the news on his LiveJournal, grrm.

As with the Diamond Age announcement, I’m pleased that GRRM will be doing some of the writing himself.