No less than eleven years after the publication of the last novel in the Iron Throne saga, George RR Martin gave some news of the next installment.
Accused (rightly) of having cheerfully botched its conclusion and ruined the eight previous seasons, Game Of Thrones continues to shed many tears and ink… with the exception of George RR Martin, whose pen seems to have dried up for a few years already. While the serial adaptation of his novel Fire and Bloodwhich retraces the significant episodes of the Targaryen dynasty, will soon land on the screens, the sixth and penultimate volume of the literary saga is still slow to invest in bookstores.
Here it is now some eleven years that aficionados of Iron Throne patiently waiting for the release The Winds of Winter. Initiated in 2010, the writing of the famous novel has since suffered the blow of multiple delays, and amply exceeded the publication date initially planned for 2016.
Since then, the series has had time to chain the seasons, to deliver one of the most divisive finales in television historyand now the producers are working on multiple spin-offs derived from the original story (including a spin-off devoted to the return of Jon Snow). And still no novel.
“It’s been 84 years”
Enough to work on the expectations of many fans who are impatient with the idea of knowing the rest of the events (and being able to wash from their minds the memory of the final season). Very active on his blog, soberly titled Not a blogthe author, thus insisted on give some news about the work in questionspecifying in passing the inevitable comparisons between the series and the book:
“Recently, I noticed that my gardening [métaphore employée par le romancier pour décrire son processus d’écriture, ndlr] I’m getting further and further away from the series. Yes, there are elements of Game of Thrones that could be found in The Winds of Winter (albeit under potentially different circumstances), but a lot of the story will be quite different. And when you think about it, it’s quite normal. The novels are much larger, and much more complex than the series. Some events depicted in the HBO production will not occur in the books, and vice versa.”
The prequel was still released before the end of the saga
True to form, the novelist finally says little about the status of the next novel. Martin, however, wanted to point out that having survived or succumbed to the series broadcast on HBO in no way guarantees a character that the same fate will be reserved for him in the books, but that was to be expected.
Given that Martin himself does not know how the saga will end, and that he responds all the same to an annoying tendency (by his own admission) to change course as soon as a narrative arc begins to take shape, so it’s hard to know when exactly The Winds of Winter will reach completion, let alone when it appears. Until then, the serial adaptation of Fire and Blood, House of the Dragonwill be available on OCS from August 22.
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