Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.
Remember Game of Thrones? Well the series of novels that it was based on – George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – remains conspicuously incomplete more than five years after the show finished its run. Recent comments by Martin – and his evident lack of progress on the next book in the series, The Winds of Winter – have left some fans of the books feeling quite worried and even angry. I thought we could get into that today and consider whether A Song of Ice and Fire will ever be complete – and if not, why not?
For context, here’s what George R R Martin had to say about writing The Winds of Winter in an interview in December 2024. In his own words: “That’s still a priority. A lot of people are already writing obituaries for me. ‘Oh, he’ll never be finished.’ Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m alive right now! I seem pretty vital!”
Photo Credit: Henry Söderlund; CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Firstly, I think some people have seized on this idea of Martin “admitting” that he might never finish A Song of Ice and Fire based on that statement. But for me, there’s a world of difference between saying “maybe those people are right” and something like an admission of defeat. Martin is clearly still dedicating at least some of his time to The Winds of Winter, and in my view, headlines proclaiming that “George R R Martin says A Song of Ice and Fire might never be finished!!1!” are overstating things in a pretty clickbaity way.
But that isn’t all there is to say, obviously.
A Dance With Dragons, the most recent novel in the series, was published in 2011. For context, the television adaptation of Game of Thrones had only just finished airing its first season at the time of the book’s arrival in shops, and there was an expectation from fans, from broadcaster HBO, and everyone involved that The Winds of Winter would take at most three or four years – putting its publication in 2014 or 2015, in time for Game of Thrones’ fourth or fifth season. That did not happen!
Game of Thrones was not a totally faithful adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, and the show diverged from the books more and more as it went along. There are whole characters and storylines that are absent from the series, a couple of characters were amalgamated or changed entirely, and there were other alterations made as the story was adapted for a new format and a new audience. But Game of Thrones still followed the basic outline of Martin’s story, and showrunners David Benioff and D B Weiss have said on the record that Martin gave them an outline of where the story was headed and where most of the characters were supposed to end up.
It was this story treatment that formed the basis for Game of Thrones’ latter seasons once the material available in the books had been used up. And if you’re familiar with the timeline of criticism and reaction to Game of Thrones, you might notice something! Around the show’s fifth season, more and more fans started voicing concerns about the quality of the writing, and particularly the direction of character arcs and major storylines. When the show reached Season 7, this had escalated a lot, and by the time it ended its run a year later… a lot of people were disappointed, upset, and even downright angry at the direction the story ultimately took.
For George R R Martin, I can only imagine that this was pretty devastating. Martin continued to work on Game of Thrones for all eight seasons, being credited as an executive producer. He’d written the books upon which the show was based, and he’d given the writing team his story treatment or outline for where it was going to go after the show overtook his novels. And fans hated it. Game of Thrones went from being the most popular show of the decade to something that seemed to have pissed off basically its entire audience.
And then, as I’ve noted before, Game of Thrones disappeared. The show, which had been at the forefront of our collective cultural conversation for close to a decade, vanished almost without a trace. No one wanted to go back and re-watch it; the ending was so universally panned – for a wide range of reasons – that it tainted the entire series. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a television series collapse and lose its fanbase as quickly and as spectacularly as Game of Thrones did in 2019. And for George R R Martin, the man who created the world, the characters, and the story… that’s bound to sting.
I’m not pretending to analyse George R R Martin’s mental state from thousands of miles away. But I know that, speaking for myself, if something I’d written or created had been received so universally poorly… I’d be pretty upset about that. It might even cause me to reevaluate what I’m working on. And because The Winds of Winter was unpublished at the time of Game of Thrones Season 8 and all of the backlash… part of me wonders if that’s exactly what George R R Martin has done.
More than five years ago, Martin claimed that he was “three-quarters” of the way to completing The Winds of Winter, but later seemed to suggest he was revising or re-working some of what he’d already written. Could that be in response to the backlash? And if so, how much of the story would he really be willing to change? If he was genuinely upset by what happened with Game of Thrones, he might almost have to start from scratch, re-doing entire character arcs and storylines to change the outcome.
Image Credit: zippo514 on DeviantArt.
Beyond the end of A Dance With Dragons, it’s hard to say to what extent Game of Thrones may have continued to diverge from Martin’s original story. So he could reasonably make the case that the “book ending” is the true way the story was supposed to go, even if that wasn’t even close to the story treatment he gave to the Game of Thrones production team! I think we are gonna see significant differences if The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring are ever published – partially because the books were already on a different trajectory. But also, at least in part, because of the reaction to Game of Thrones.
Whenever this conversation crops up in fan communities online, it isn’t long before you’ll hear some variation of the following expression “well, George R R Martin doesn’t owe you a finished book!” And I gotta be honest with you: I find that to be an incredibly petty and asinine argument. Sure, technically there’s no binding legal contract. But Martin started writing a series of novels and hasn’t finished them; there’s an unsaid expectation on the part of readers and fans that the story will, one day, be complete. That doesn’t mean The Winds of Winter needs to be published next Thursday… but fans want – and reasonably expect – to see Martin continuing to work on it.
And that brings me to the next issue: George R R Martin is, apparently, quite easily distracted. Since A Dance With Dragons in 2011, Martin has published ten books, worked on at least four potential and ongoing television shows, and even found time to contribute to the development of the video game Elden Ring. It’s great to be busy, and no one is really demanding that Martin lock himself away and do nothing except work on The Winds of Winter. But it does raise eyebrows when he’s clearly procrastinating and doing other stuff – especially when a lot of what he’s doing seems to be, to put it bluntly, pretty unimportant fluff.
Imagine if J R R Tolkien had published The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers… then spent the next fifteen years working on side-stories with titles like The Baggins Family Tree, Gandalf: The Man, The Myth, The Legend, or 101 Hilarious Quotes From Grima Wormtongue. As time wore on, fans would begin to wonder whether The Return of the King was even still being written, or whether Tolkien planned to publish it at all. That’s basically where we’re at with A Song of Ice and Fire, if you’ll forgive the rather crude analogy.
With his interviews, photoshoots, and public appearances, it’s clear that Martin likes being in the public eye; a “celebrity,” for want of a better word. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all – after a lifetime of toiling behind the scenes, it must be cathartic to have the level of recognition that the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones won him. But could his celebrity status and public image also be a contributing factor to his writing slowing down? It seems an odd coincidence that 2011 – the year Game of Thrones premiered – is the last time Martin published a book in the main series.
Martin strived for a long time to work in Hollywood, moving to California in the ’80s with the hope of working in film or television. And he’s finally able to do that now, thanks to the success of Game of Thrones. Perhaps the appeal of writing a complex multi-novel saga has diminished for him in light of belatedly achieving that career objective. It would certainly explain why Martin has spent so much time over the last decade-plus working on television pitches, serving as an executive producer, and even contributing to unrelated projects like Elden Ring.
I think fans have every right to be upset with George R R Martin. He started writing a saga; his magnum opus. But for a variety of reasons, he now seems pretty uninterested in finishing it. Having built up an audience and seen huge numbers of people get invested in his characters and his world, to then spend years procrastinating and putting it on the back burner was always going to lead to a lot of people feeling disappointed.
I don’t want to be seen as “attacking” George R R Martin personally. He’s a great writer in many ways, and he’s created a world that will outlive him – something very few people can really say. But he also hasn’t been totally up-front and honest with his fans and readers since Game of Thrones premiered – and especially since it ended. While it’s totally understandable to think he’d feel upset or disappointed at the reaction audiences had to the show’s final season, there’s been a lot of time since then to re-work The Winds of Winter and make changes. But Martin still seems distracted by other projects.
I think my little Tolkien analogy above is an interesting one. But you could also make the same argument using any number of popular series and stories. Imagine if Lucasfilm took a fifteen-year break after The Empire Strikes Back, working on the prequel trilogy, the Clone Wars TV series, and other such things instead of getting to work on Return of the Jedi. Martin has left his fans on a cliffhanger for more than a decade – and part of that cliffhanger has already been spoiled for a lot of people by what was seen on screen in the final seasons of Game of Thrones.
Writer’s block is awful – trust me, I know! And it can’t be nice to feel an ever-growing amount of pressure from a fan community that’s clearly losing patience and losing trust. In some ways, that makes working on The Winds of Winter even harder, I expect. But Martin does himself no favours with his public appearances and by working on so many other projects, books, films, TV shows, and video games. He invites that criticism by those actions, unfortunately.
My personal read on the situation is that Martin has been working to re-write either huge chunks of The Winds of Winter or possibly the entire book. In large part that’s because of the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the way Game of Thrones ended – an ending that will have contained at least some ideas and storylines that Martin intended to use in his remaining books. That’s why a book that was allegedly three-quarters of the way to being finished almost a decade ago is still unpublished in 2025.
But Martin is also enjoying his life in Hollywood and working in television, and his newfound fame and status basically gives him carte blanche to ignore deadlines and do what he wants, when he wants. No publisher or editor is able to make demands of him anymore or set deadlines – and that means he’s been freed up to write other things and dedicate his time to other pursuits. On an individual level, you can’t begrudge a seventy-six-year-old man for that!
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore; CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
But as a fan, I get where the dissatisfaction is coming from. I’m not getting any younger, and with my health issues, I don’t know for sure whether I’ll be around by the time The Winds of Winter is ready – let alone A Dream of Spring! If it takes another fifteen years to get that book ready, well… I’ll probably have checked out by then. I don’t think it’s wrong for fans to feel the way they feel and to ask questions about The Winds of Winter. I also think, to be realistic, fans of A Song of Ice and Fire should begin preparing for the eventuality of the saga never being completed.
At least Game of Thrones Season 8 told the final chapter of the story, right?!
I hope this wasn’t too depressing and didn’t come across as a personal attack. I’ve seen a lot of discussion of The Winds of Winter over the last few weeks since George R R Martin was quoted in that interview, and I wanted to share my two cents on why I think the book is taking so long. I hope he’s still working on it and I hope that, one day, A Song of Ice and Fire will be complete. But at this point… I wouldn’t bet on it.
A Song of Ice and Fire and all other books and novels mentioned above are the copyright of George R R Martin, HarperCollins, and/or Bantam Books. Game of Thrones is the copyright of HBO/HBO Entertainment. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 