The man is 74, and by his own admission, not exactly healthy. A Dance with Dragons came out almost 12 years ago. There are rumors that The Winds of Winter will come out later this year, but it’s still a rumor and even if it is true, he has postponed many times before. I don’t know what I’ll do if he sadly passes before A Dream of Spring comes out.
by darkysix
33 Comments
No. If he cancelled all his other projects and he lived to be 100 we might have a chance but neither is very likely.
No. We’ll be lucky to get Wind of Winter- and who knows if Winter & Spring will even be the last two volumes at all- 4&5 were originally the same book
No.
And if by some miracle he does get 2 more books out to ‘finish’ the series, I expect it to be unsatisfying because he really needs at least 3 more to do it justice. Finishing in 2 books would seem to require hitting ‘fast forward’ on many storylines.
I’ve made peace with my ‘divorce’ from the series, as painful as it was.
No. If he wanted to finish the story, he would’ve by now.
It would be so nice if he has an outline written down in his notes, so after he dies his heirs can enlist a writer or two so the story can be finished. Because George just don’t want to go on.
He certainly won’t finish it after his lifetime!
No. Not unless he did what Stephen King did when he realized he had too many characters and plotlines in The Last Stand… King just started killing off characters left and right. Bam, boom, done. That allowed him to tie up the remaining plotlines and finish the book.
So in theory, George R.R Martin could write another three to five weddings and thin the herd down to manageable levels, but he likely won’t.
To be honest, I really don’t care anymore.
I think we’ll probably get The Winds of Winter but unless he’s writing both books at the same time I don’t think we’ll get A Dream of Spring.
I’m still holding out hope, but I also know it’s pretty delusional
Yes, he’s gonna use ChatGPT.
Based on what he’s said in the past, I don’t think he’s particularly interested in doing so.
Remember when he himself said that fans should “chain [him] to his desk” if he wasn’t finished Winds by 2021 (just the latest in a series of endless promises)?
Reading his blog, it’s pretty clear he’s given up on ever actually finishing the series and is just stringing fans along while he collects his HBO paycheck. The timeline he presents doesn’t add up. At one point, the book so close to being done that it’s only a few months away. It gets delayed, which is understandable. But this repeats over and over for years until eventually he stops giving deadlines. Again, this is rough but perhaps understandable. You want the best product, right? Then, years after this string of excuses including a pandemic where he claims to have been writing nonstop, he says that the book is apparently roughly halfway done. So, the book that was supposedly so close to coming out almost a decade ago is only halfway done now? Most of his fans are still inoculated in his defense – he’s just rewriting every chapter over and over! You don’t understand, he’s a “gardener” (you see, that’s why he has to spend his time on countless other projects from HBO and other works)! Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. Personally, I think he’s written himself into a corner with the amount of open yet interconnected plot threads and realized he has no idea how to properly end the series.
I remember starting ASOIAF in 2012 wondering if I’d finish before the next book came out.
> there are rumors that The Winds of Winter will come out later this year
This has been true since at least 2014
We will see Winds of Winter. I don’t think he’ll ever finish the last book
My conspiracy theory is that D&D were faithful in their HBO adaptation and that after it was universally rejected and reviled by fans and cast members alike, GRRM started shitting himself.
The blowback forced him to abandon whatever he had already written of Winds and he’s been attempting to re-tool and rewrite since then.
grain of salt as always with these things, but FWIW, I have a friend whose aunt is pretty high up in GRRM’s publishing company. per the aunt (via my friend), he’s definitely not scheduled to release anything this year and they don’t really expect him to ever finish. that could change if by some chance he does miraculously finish something, but all signs currently point to no.
I do not think he will finish it. He spoke to Stephen King about how King publishes a book a year. King said something along the lines of “I shut myself in a room and treat it like a job”. Meanwhile, George is like “Oooh, more cash from TV. I’ll write another side project nobody wants”. Thanks George, not sure if he even has an idea of HOW to finish it.
I don’t. He has enough money to bring in assistants to his writing if the issue is that the plot is too complex. In fact, he already did that with The World of Ice and Fire and The Rise of The Dragon (the cowriters on these books manage the Tower Of The Hand website afaik). My point is he could have brought in people to help him tie his web of plotlines together, and so he just doesn’t finish his series because he’s either stubborn or apathetic towards the books. Nothing to do with age.
Brandon Sanderson, for example, has no qualms saying he has a writing staff.
No. He’s lost interest in the series. The first few did what he intended to do from a literary standpoint. At 74 I could imagine him having a very difficult time doing something he doesn’t actually want to bother doing.
Perhaps what he ought to do is pick someone to partner with who could complete the work at his direction. Say… Abercrombie, but he might find it surprisingly difficult to give up his baby like that, even if he isn’t all that motivated to live in that world for himself anymore.
I don’t think so.
It’s funny how time works now that I’m older. I remember being in a B&N and the person in front me was buying the then newly released *ADWD*. A few weeks later the show grabbed my attention & now here we are — the show is done and here still is no *TWOW*. It doesn’t feel like that much time has passed…
I have been waiting for 12 years but now I really do not care anymore. I might read the book if it comes out but other than that I am done with the franchise as a whole. I still like discussing stuff about it, though. It is kinda sad, because I honestly think George wants to finish but simply cannot because the way he wrote the last two books makes it impossible.
Here’s what I know, being someone who knows him a bit and his writing process. He’s very close to finishing the new book, just purely by word/page count. I believe he’s written more pages than can even fit into a book, which means some of those pages will get pushed into the last book. Will he finish WINDS? Absolutely, I firmly believe he will.
What about SPRING? Life is fickle. Anything could happen to him. Hell, anything could happen to Brandon Sanderson or Patrick Rothfuss or Jacqueline Carey or me, for that matter. This is the nature of life. George is healthier now than when I met him, in my opinion, so that’s a good thing. He is taking care of himself more but he’s also older. So talking about age and what not is worthless to me in these discussions.
I will say, as a writer, that when I come to the end of a story everything speeds up. Because there are only so many places the story can go the closer you get to its end. Is this true of George? Not sure. But I hope by now that he has a solid understanding of where events are going and how they are going to unfold. It should be easier for him to finish now than 16 years ago, as an example. But again, every writer’s process is different. George and I do not write the same way — he is a gardener and I’m an architect, so take what I say with a huge boulder of salt.
I don’t think so but I also don’t care anymore. The last time I culled my library GoT went on the donate pile. If he doesn’t respect his fans enough to be realistic with them, I don’t have space on the shelf for him anymore.
I like the fact that we had a world stopping pandemic and he stills couldn’t make significant progress
no chance
Barring an extremely unlikely event (like GRRM releasing both books essentially back to back and explaining the delay that way), I highly doubt we ever get an ending on paper. Maybe we get 1 more book and no ending.
I know I’m late to this, but no. I would bet my life savings on it. We will not get his ending to this series. We might get someone else’s, like in the case of Berserk, but we will never see his ending.
Since it seems obvious now grrm won’t finish is there another writer who people think could step in (prob after grrm is gone) and finish the story and do it justice?
Yup, he has the money in now so his motivation to finish is gone. I love fantasy but glad I’ve never started his books. Authors like Joe Abercrombie, Raymond E Feist, Janny Wurts, AE Rayne, Mark Lawrence, they write great stuff and finish! In fact Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold is being turned into a film and Feist’s Riftwar cycle and his excellent collaboration with the talented Janny Wurts on the Empire Trilogy are both being made into tv series’. When David Gemmell passed away whilst writing his finale trilogy book about the fall of Troy, his wife finished the book and did a great job, helped she said by his extensive notes on the direction it should take to conclusion. She has continued as a writer herself.
In short, I don’t trust Martin to finish while he’s alive. Abercrombie could probably finish his story and Martin is full of praise for him. But he’s happy writing his own stuff. A real shame he created that world (Westeros) then just abandoned it
No I don’t. I don’t believe he wrote any of those books. He found the manuscripts and published them under his name. I don’t think he foresaw how popular GOT would become and now he is in the position of confessing his plagiarism or delaying.
This thread didn’t age well lol
i feel like there’s a possibility it could be completed by someone else, like Dune and its eventual sequels and prequels