Game Of Thrones author admits he won’t finish book this year
GEORGE RR Martin has confirmed our worst fears and admitted the long-awaited sixth book, Winds Of Winter, will not be published until 2019 at least.
GEORGE RR Martin has confirmed our worst fears and admitted the long-awaited sixth book, Winds Of Winter, will not be published until 2019 at least.
Writing on his blog, called Not A Blog, the A Song Of Ice And Fire writer said: “No, winter is not coming … not in 2018, at least. You’re going to have to keep waiting for The Winds Of Winter”.
There has been a fair bit of fan speculation that Martin wants to see the end of the television series Game Of Thrones, which has now overtaken his writing, before he releases another book, to keep the two separate.
In the books, Jon Snow is dead, ostensibly murdered by Ser Allison and the rest of the Night Watch. So it will be quite a jump backwards from the timeline of the TV show.
While the TV show has been written off Martin’s notes, the books may change things, either as part of the writing process or even as a deliberate attempt to alter the ending.
However, Martin did promise to release a book about Westeros this year, what he calls an “imaginary history” of the Targaryen dynasty called Fire & Blood.
“I do want to stress, indeed, I want to shout that Fire & Blood is not a novel,” he wrote.
“This is not a traditional narrative and was never intended to be. I love reading popular histories myself, and that’s what I was aiming for here. Not historical fiction, not fantasy, no … but something more akin to Thomas B. Costain’s monumental (and wonderfully entertaining) four-volume history of the Plantagenets. But with dragons.
So: Not a novel. Everyone clear on that? Though there are enough stories here for twenty novels. Battles, bloodshed, betrayals, love, lust, horror, religious wars, politics, incest, historical revisionism, all the fun stuff.”
Martin was also careful to address the natural conclusion that at least some of this will appear in one or more of the five prequels to Game Of Thrones being developed.
“The only answer I can give is … ah, well, no one is sure yet, and anyway, I am not allowed to say. So let’s move that to the side,” he wrote..
Fire & Blood will be out through HarperCollins on November 20.
“As for me, I’m returning once again to The Winds Of Winter,” Martin wrote.