George R.R. Martin pushed back publication of ‘The Winds of Winter’… again!
George R.R. Martin will never meet a deadline. I hope everyone accepts that by now. As we discussed in January 2016, the Game of Thrones author has been pushing back the publication of The Winds of Winter, the latest book in the Game of Thrones series. Winds of Winter was supposed to be published YEARS ago. The last book in the series was A Dance with Dragons in 2011. Before that, A Feast of Crows was published in 2005. Book readers had to wait six years for A Dance with Dragons, and now they’re going to have to wait seven years – or more – for Winds of Winter. It was widely believed that HBO pushed back the past two seasons, Season 6 and 7, just to give Martin a little more time to finish the book before they ruined all of the storylines for the book-readers. He still didn’t finish. In 2016, he pushed back the publication and WoW was supposed to come out this year. Now Martin says it will probably be 2018. From his website:
And, yes, I know you all want to know about THE WINDS OF WINTER too. I’ve seen some truly weird reports about WOW on the internet of late, by ‘journalists’ who make their stories up out of whole cloth. I don’t know which story is more absurd, the one that says the book is finished and I’ve been sitting on it for some nefarious reason, or the one that says I have no pages. Both ‘reports’ are equally false and equally moronic. I am still working on it, I am still months away (how many? good question), I still have good days and bad days, and that’s all I care to say. Whether WINDS or the first volume of FIRE AND BLOOD will be the first to hit the bookstores is hard to say at this juncture, but I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018… and who knows, maybe two. A boy can dream…
[From GRRM’s Live Journal]
The Fire and Blood book he’s referencing is a “history” of the Targaryen kings, basically a secondary material to the main series. He notes in the same post that he has a ton of material for that, because of course he does:
Speaking of fake history… regulars here may recall our plan to assemble an entire book of my fake histories of the Targaryen kings, a volume we called (in jest) the GRRMarillion or (more seriously) FIRE AND BLOOD. We have so much material that it’s been decided to publish the book in two volumes. The first of those will cover the history of Westeros from Aegon’s Conquest up to and through the regency of the boy king Aegon III (the Dragonbane). That one is largely written, and will include (for the first time) a complete detailed history of the Targaryen civil war, the Dance of the Dragons. My stories in DANGEROUS WOMEN (“The Princess and the Queen”) and ROGUES (“The Rogue Prince”) were abridged versions of the same histories.
No publication date has been set yet, but it’s likely that we will get the first volume of FIRE AND BLOOD out in late 2018 or early 2019. The second volume, which will carry the history from Aegon III up to Robert’s Rebellion, is largely unwritten, so that one will be a few more years in coming.
[From GRRM’s Live Journal]
Here’s the thing… I understand that he’s literally created this entire universe, which includes centuries of fake history, out of whole cloth. It’s amazing to think about, honestly. His level of imagination and world-building is incredible. I would completely understand if he wanted to write all of those secondary fake-history books… AFTER he finished the main series. But he’s doing all of it concurrently and I feel sorry for the book-readers who really wanted to know how the story ends by the man who created the story. Like, who gives a sh-t about the history of Targaryen kings when people still want to know what happens to the characters that Martin introduced, nurtured and made us care about? Anyway, I think the book readers should just resign themselves to the fact that the HBO series is going to spoil everything, and that the HBO series will likely end before Winds of Winter ever gets published.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Source: George R.R. Martin pushed back publication of ‘The Winds of Winter’… again!
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