For the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, book readers loved nothing more than to lord it over us lowly show-only watchers that they knew exactly what was going to happen in a show where you can pretty much never guess what’s going to happen. But after season six, the show writers ran out of material from the books and had to venture out on their own, only knowing what the book ending is roughly gonna be, courtesy of George R.R. Martin. So really, none of us, apart from Martin, know what the hell is going on right now book-wise.
Martin says he’s planning on writing two more installments in the Song of Ice and Fire series, for a total of seven books, but he released his most recent one, A Dance With Dragons, all the way back in 2011, so WTF has he been doing all this time? Even earlier than that, in 2010, he said that he had already finished five chapters of the planned sixth book, The Winds of Winter, so are we supposed to imagine it’s taken NINE years to not even come up with the remaining chapters?
Technically, he did take some time off in there to write Fire & Blood, a book with the complete history of House Targaryen, and I can appreciate how complex these books are to write, but when he left readers with some pretty crazy cliffhangers in A Dance With Dragons, setting the next installment to the side to write a 700-page history book just seems mean.
Some people had thought the new book would be released before the sixth season of the show aired in 2016, with the 70-year-old author himself saying in 2015 that an end-of-year deadline was doable. But if he’s missing deadlines and just has a partially finished sixth book, Lord of Light only knows when the seventh and final book, A Dream of Spring, is going to come out. Will books even still exist by then?! And more importantly, will George R.R. Martin live long enough to see it through?
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Martin says he’s dropped all his other TV writing and editing projects to focus on the books, but we’re gonna need some receipts on that, cause just last year he said in an interview that he’s been “struggling” with Winds of Winter. He then went on to say that even if he actually does finish Winds of Winter, he might do a follow-up to Fire & Blood before diving into the final book of the series.
A Chinese translator for the book series gave book readers a little bit of hope by teasing that we can probably expect Winds of Winter to come out in 2019, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Personally, I think Martin could be waiting out the TV series to see how people react to the storyline there and then making tweaks to his own plot lines. But as with most things related to GoT, only time will tell.
