a song of ice and fire by george rr martin

We all know the HBO series was never supposed to pass the books and was likely never meant to reveal the ending of Martin’s story before he had time to write it himself. A Song of Ice and Fire, for good or ill, will be Martin’s legacy, and if he was still concerned about that, well… we’d be reading Winds already. Or at least he would be treating it like the biggest priority on his admittedly gargantuan to-do list. Despite all his protestations to the country, the fact is if he wanted to finish Winds, he would be finishing Winds.

So maybe it’s time to face facts: Martin is clearly struggling with-if he hasn’t outright lost interest in-the end of this story. If A Dream of Spring also takes a decade to write, Martin would be well into his mid-80s before its publication arrived. And not to be morbid-truly, I hope Martin lives forever-but the man is 73 years old. And that’s assuming, of course, that A Dream of Spring is actually the final book in the series and doesn’t get split into two volumes because of the increasingly unwieldy nature of the story that Martin is telling. (No matter how we feel about the way the HBO series presented Daenerys’ descent into madness.)īecause, let’s be honest: Even if The Winds of Winter arrives sometime in the next handful of years, that still leaves one more presumably gargantuan novel left to go. After all, it’s been over 25 years since A Game of Thrones was first released, and it’s understandable that fans are starting to feel a bit anxious about whether we’ll ever get to read Martin’s take on the end of his story. Are we all likely to watch House of the Dragon and read the next installment in his Fire and Blood Targaryen history? Probably! But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t rather be reading Winds. (I mean, Bran? Really? Sansa is right there.)Īt this point, the jokes practically write themselves, especially given that Martin is so openly engaged in what feels like a dozen other projects that aren’t the one that most people so desperately want to see him complete. But it’s been over a decade since A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in A Song of Ice and Fire, hit shelves, and in the intervening years, the blockbuster HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones has come and gone, spoiling Martin’s apparently long-planned ending and souring many viewers on the purported conclusion of his long-running tale. These are words that are all technically true and correct, of course.

I made a lot of progress on WINDS in 2020, and less in 2021… but “less” is not “none.” I have stated that a hundred times in a hundred venues, having to restate it endlessly is just wearisome.

“Yes, of course, I am still working on THE WINDS OF WINTER. Sure, according to a March 2022 blog post, Martin claims that “of course” he’s still working on Winds and he complains tetchily about the “wearisome” fact that people have the nerve to keep asking him about it.

A song of ice and fire by george rr martin