Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin has reassured fans that he will complete the sixth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, despite working with screenwriters on five new TV spin-offs. But he has admitted that the TV commitments had pushed the hotly anticipated book down the agenda.
“Yes, I am still working on Winds of Winter and I will continue working on it until it’s done,” Martin wrote on his blog. But fans, who have already waited six years for the latest instalment in the fantasy series, should not hold their breath. “I will confess, I do wish I could clone myself, or find a way to squeeze more hours into the day, or a way to go without sleep. But this is what it is, so I keep juggling,” he added before listing his commitments: The Winds of Winter, five new TV shows for HBO, and four new Wild Card books.
Martin’s comments came after HBO, producer of the Game of Thrones TV show, announced he was working with them on four spin-offs from the blockbuster TV series. Explaining that an additional fifth show was also planned, and that all of them were prequels, he told fans that they wouldn’t follow up on Game of Thrones like other famous spin-offs, citing Joey from Friends and Frasier from Cheers. “What we are talking about are new stories set in the ‘secondary universe’ (to borrow Tolkien’s term) of Westeros and the world beyond, the world I created for A Song of Ice and Fire,” he wrote.
Martin said that he had been working with HBO on the projects since August 2016, when he pitched two possible shows – one of which is among those in development. Max Borenstein, Jane Goldman, Brian Helgeland and Carly Wray are working with Martin on screenplays for the pilots, while an unnamed fifth person has been pulled in for a fifth pilot, Martin said.
Martin’s fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons, was published in 2011 after a five-year hiatus. The series was launched in 1991 and was inspired by the Wars of the Roses and Walter Scott’s epic Ivanhoe. Though originally intended to be a cycle of three books, the writer extended the series to seven volumes. The final instalment will be called A Dream of Spring.
Fans frustrated by the long wait between volumes are unlikely to be comforted by the knowledge that Martin is working on the TV shows. Apart from taking him away from the novel, Martin admitted the scripts in development may never see the light of day. “Decades of experience in television and film have taught me that nothing is ever really certain,” he said, adding that he thought it unlikely all five new shows would be commissioned to feed fans’ appetite for his brand of swords and sorcery. “How many pilots will be filmed, and how many series might come out of that, remains to be seen,” he added.
