George RR Martin comes clean on internet rumours of a new book

George RR Martin has hit out at internet rumours saying Winds Of Winter will be out in October. He sets the record straight on just what it will be.

WINDS of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book of A Song Of Ice And Fire, better known as Game Of Thrones, will not be coming out this October, author George RR Martin has confirmed in a lengthy blog post.

The internet was going crazy over a “new story” from Martin that is coming out in October. While he does have a story coming out in an anthology called The Book Of Swords, published in October, it’s not Winds Of Winter, he hasn’t been “wasting” his time editing an anthology instead of writing WOW and the story has actually been heard before.

“I had intended to write this post a few days ago, when Bantam gave me the green light, but I got busy, and we had Carrie Vaughn coming to town, and a worldcon/ Hugo deadline approaching, and all that seemed more time-sensitive, so I wrote those instead. Unfortunately, that meant the news below broke from other sources, and inevitably, all sorts of weird distortions crept in, and now the internet is rife with rumours and false reports and misinformation. Pfui. I need to set the record straight,” Martin wrote on his blog, Not A Blog.

“I have a story in the book. The Sons Of The Dragon is the title. A history rather than a traditional narrative. A lot of telling, only a little showing. (The opposite of what I do in my novels). But if you’re fascinated by the politics of Westeros, as many of my readers seem to be, you should enjoy it. As the title suggests, The Sons Of The Dragon chronicles the reigns of the second and third Targaryen kings, Aenys I and Maegor the Cruel, along with their mothers, wives, sisters, children, friends, enemies, and rivals. If you’re read something to that effect on the web, good, that much is right.

“However, there is a lot that’s wrong out there as well. The Book Of Swords is not my book. I didn’t write but a small part of it, and I didn’t edit it, nor even co-edit it.

“The anthologies, much as I loved them, were taking too much of my time, so I stepped back from them ... until I finish Winds Of Winter, at least. Once that’s done, maybe I can sneak another one in ...

“As for my own story ...

George RR Martin has come clean about internet rumours about his new book.

“Long-time lurkers on this site will recall that several years ago, when we were working on the gorgeous illustrated worldbook/ concordance that was eventually published as The World Of Ice & Fire, I wrote a number of sidebars about Westerosi history. Actually, I got rather carried away, until I found I had written 350,000 words of sidebars for a book that was supposed to have only 50,000 words of text (it ended up having a lot more than that, actually). Since I had only reached the regency of Aegon III the Dragonbane, and had largely skipped over Jaehaerys I the Conciliator, however, it became apparent that my sidebars were going to burst the book.

“So we pulled them all out, including only severely abridged versions of the main events in The World Of Ice And Fire. The full versions, much longer and unabridged, will eventually be published in a fake history tome to be called Fire & Blood (and sometimes just the GRRMarillion), but since that one is years away, I included excerpts (again abridged, though not as severely) in (anthologies) Dangerous Women and Rogues.

The Sons Of The Dragon came from the same place. (Fwiw, though “Sons” has never been published before, some of you may have heard me read it at one convention or another. I think I’ve read it twice, though offhand I do not recall when).

Anyway ... that’s the story of the story. Don’t believe any other weird crap you may encounter on the web.”