With the season-five premiere of Game of Thrones a little more than a week away, we've been hearing a lot lately from the show's creators and stars, and also from George R.R. Martin, the man who created the basis for the show: A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin's maintained close ties to the hit HBO fantasy series since it launched, scripting an episode in each of the first four seasons and helping showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss with long-term story planning even as they begin to move into territory beyond the five novels in the series Martin's published so far.

Amid all of the Game of Thrones talk this year, though, Martin actually dropped an interesting piece of news that's not tied to the series. Remember a couple of years ago, when Martin signed a new deal with HBO that not only kept him tied to Thrones, but also gave him the opportunity to develop a new series at the network? Well, now we know what that new series is. Martin revealed to EW that it's called Captain Cosmos, and it's tied to both science fiction and the early days of television. Here's the logline:

“At the dawn of the age of TV in 1949, a visionary young writer creates a science-fiction series that tells stories no one else will dare to tell.”

Sadly, that's all we know about the story at this point, so we can't say how much of the show will be science fiction or how much will be a historical drama. We do know that the pilot is being written right now, not by Martin but by novelist, producer and screenwriter Michael Cassutt, who has a long history of work in genre series like The Outer LImits; Beauty and the Beast (the original, not the CW remake); Eerie, Indiana; and, most recently, Syfy's Z Nation.

Hopefully, we'll hear more about Captain Cosmos in the coming months as it continues to develop. Meanwhile, on the A Song of Ice and Fire front, Martin is hard at work on book six, The Winds of Winter, and he's even put aside Game of Thrones scripting and a couple of convention appearances to hopefully speed up his completion of the volume. He hopes to have the book published before Game of Thrones season six premieres next year, and he said he's toying with a new plot twist on a "long-time character."

“This is going to drive your readers crazy, but I love it," he said. "I’m still weighing whether to go that direction or not. It’s a great twist. It’s easy to do things that are shocking or unexpected, but they have to grow out of characters. They have to grow out of situations. Otherwise, it’s just being shocking for being shocking. But this is something that seems very organic and natural, and I could see how it would happen. And with the various three, four characters involved… it all makes sense. But it’s nothing I’ve ever thought of before. And it’s nothing they can do in the show, because the show has already—on this particular character—made a couple decisions that will preclude it, where in my case I have not made those decisions.”

Game of Thrones premieres its fifth season Sunday, April 12, on HBO.

(Via EW)