Winter may have been and gone on the telly but the real big chill is still to come on the page. Fans will certainly be hoping it is rather more satisfying than the recent divisive HBO adaptation which reduced the end of Winter to a lucky trick with Arya’s dagger. With no Night King in the books and no ‘one stab kills all’ anticlimax it will hopefully be far more epic and hopefully a lot more of the background mythology. How much of that will start to be revealed in (possibly very imminent) The Winds of Winter?
George RR Martin finally gave fans hope (if with another delay) earlier this year.
He promised the book would be on sale by the time he made it to WorldCon in New Zealand next August.
Then, just a few weeks ago he blogged he had been in New York and checked in “with all my publishers (I have several), my agents (I have several), with my editors (past and present).”
Many fans took this as a sign the book was finished and Martin was discussing edits and publishing details. And then a new tweet this week appeared…
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The official HBO Game of Thrones site tweeted one famous phrase.
It simply said: “Winter Is Coming.” It has already had over 400,000 ‘likes’ – vastly more than most posts on the HBO page.
Sure, this could be a teaser for news about the upcoming House of The Dragon – but what does that entire storyline have to do with Winter?
Could it really be hinting that major book news is about to drop?
That’s right, the sad news is that a sudden appearance of Book Six seems very unlikely.
Even if it just the formal confirmation of the release date for The Winds of Winter, fans will be overjoyed.
It has been a very, very long and often frustrating wait. Even Martin has admitted he never expected the TV show to race past the books.
The only upside to the immense backlash for the HBO Season 8 is that fans will now look to the books to make sense of major plotlines and the reinstatement of other ones which were entirely missing.
However, the announcement that Martin will be much more involved in the next HBO show bodes well for the show but not so good for the final book, A Dream of Spring…
Martin has confessed that he found the HBO Game of Thrones shows added to his pressures writing Winds of Winter and even slowed him down.
He also said; “First I have this book The Winds of Winter. I have to finish that, and then I can write another Dunk and Egg story, and then I write A Dream of Spring, and then I write another Dunk and Egg story. At some point in there, I have to write the second part of Fire and Blood, so I have my work cut out for me.”
It’s now likely the second Fire and Blood will come before A Dream of Spring.
Add to that his involvement in the new HBO show, which presumably will last many seasons and his hopes to write some scripts. There was a nine-year gap between Books 4 and 5 – and that was when Martin was apparently less involved with the HBO production.
If Winds of Winter does come out in 2020, will fans be waiting the entire decade for the final book in A Song of Ice and Fire?