Winds of Winter: Amid release delay, is THIS the real problem with Game of Thrones books?

Is that because the A Song Of Ice And Fire series has simply become, as one fan has argued, “too bloated for its own good”?

Indeed, the five previous novels – and the Game of Thrones TV show they inspired – have opened up a whole world which has probably become deeper and more intricate than Martin ever envisaged; with so many opportunities for new stories and characters.

It’s been seven years since the last ASOIAF book was released, and The Winds of Winter still has no release date, although Martin continues to insist it’s a work in progress.

He has openly admitted that he has a full slate of projects he’s working on, and he also confesses to being a slow writer.

But could the sheer scale of the whole thing also be a factor in its delay?

In a dedicated Reddit discussion on the matter, user Journey95 writes: “I think he expanded ASOIAF way too much and we are seeing the consequences now.

“The first three books were better crafted and more streamlined. They only took like 4 years to release, Martin clearly had a plan back then.

“But then Martin needed five years for [A Feast for Crows, 2005] and again six years for [A Dance with Dragons, 2011] & TWOW shows no signs of finishing. The series has gotten too bloated for its own good [in my honest opinion].”

The post has been 89% Upvoted by Reddit users, and one person, Bjammin3339, replied: “I think he would love to be finished with the series and move on with other projects.

“But, it can’t be easy to tie up all the loose ends he has created in a satisfactory way. He doesn’t want to leave fans hanging on what happens to major or minor characters, but also wants the last two books to be as well written as the first five.”

Another, cactuslegs, wrote: “I think we shouldn’t forget that he’s promised us just two books.

“That’s a lot of space, for sure, but I think GRRM [George RR Martin] could easily fill two books without resolving half the plot lines.

“I imagine he’s written and deleted enough content to fill four books by now, but he’s struggling to constrain and curtain his work to fit into two books and also wrap the most storylines.”

But another user, Amarnanumen, offered a different perspective.

“A Song of Ice and Fire has grown much larger in scale than it began as, but the knots in the writing seem less like GRRM having no plan but instead trying to coordinate all of his moving pieces to arrive where and when they need to be,” they argued.

“The reason that Feast and Dance took so long, I think, is that they were mostly travel narratives, and GRRM wanted to flesh out the world rather than skip over the adventures. There were just too many stories he wanted to tell, and he couldn’t let go of them all.

“The Essosi stories are a good example of this. We have the unpublished chapter where Tyrion meets the Shrouded Lord. We have two unpublished chapters of Quentyn arriving at Meereen both long before and long after Dany’s wedding. We have a presumed unpublished first Quentyn chapter. These are all places where GRRM knows the endpoint, but not the full way to get there.

“Furthermore, GRRM has always been something of a slow writer. Bear in mind that he spent 5 years working on A Game of Thrones before it was published, and that work contributed to the rate at which Clash and Storm were written.”

There is something for ASOIAF fans to look forward to, though: Fire and Blood, a companion book, releases just next month.

And Game of Thrones airs its final season in 2019.