News stories and interviews with Martin are starting to swirl a bit about a possible 2014 release date for Winds of Winter. Many have noted that Storm and Clash were written in two years, and 2014 would mean a three year writing window for Winds, which might be feasible when one removes the Meereenese Knot that made Dance and Feast so difficult to get through.
Martin has said in many interviews that the steady progress of the HBO show, which ends its season this year about 3/4 of the way through Storm of Swords, is barreling ahead like a freight train and he's worried it will catch up and pass him if he doesn't hurry, and has been writing much faster as a result. So the HBO should could end up being a bit of a boon. I have to figure it will take another four seasons for them to get through the next 2.25 books. If Winds comes out in 2014 and it took him another three years to write Dream, they'd finish about the same time (assuming he actually finishes the series in seven books).
Martin himself has also said that 2014 was when he hoped to finish, though obviously his word isn't the best to take on something like this.
Official reports from the middle of last year say he has 400 pages done, of which 200 are locked (the 200 that were pushed from Dance), out of a probably 1500. 2014 might be optimistic, but not unreasonable.
There's also news out that he's announced an anthology of prequels regarding Robert's Rebellion. In other words, ASOIAF is getting its own Silmarillion! I'm pleased as punch about that, and hope we get it soon, but I wonder how much information he'd be willing to release about it. The trick with the Sil is that while it was an origin story of sorts, it bore little direct impact on the plots of LOTR or Hobbit. But a lot of Robert's Rebellion is seriously cloaked in mystery. I wonder if he'd release any big information, or if such a release would coincide with things we find out in Winds.
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Hasn't HBO said the show will end after seven seasons, no matter what the status of the books is?
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It'll take some pretty brutal culling to get through the next few books in a season each, especially if they couldn't get through Storm in a single season. But if that's the case, I suppose it's still possible that he could finish with them. If he releases Winds next year at the end of season 4, he'd have 2-3 years to write Dream.
I'll say this though, if the seventh season of GoT has information from Dream before the book comes out and I get spoiled because of that show, I'll be furious.
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"[The number of series] is being discussed as we speak. The third season was the first half of book three, season four will be the second part of book three. . . George R.R. Martin has written books four and five; six and seven are pending," Doelger told Radio Times at the BAFTA Awards last weekend. "I would hope that, if we all survive and if the audience stays with us, we'll probably get through to seven seasons."
To me he is just throwing out an arbitrary number, not saying the series will end with 7 seasons.
I'd think they would have to do at least 8 seasons. Books four and five could probably be done in two seasons, since the events all occur during the same time period. Most of the Theon stuff is being shown now so they can cut all of the flashback material.
Season 7 would be Winds of Winter, and Season 8 would be A Dream of Spring.
Condensing books 4 and 5 into one season would be a mistake in my opinion.
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Condensing books 4 and 5 into one season would be silly. If it takes 2 seasons to do Storm, then doing twice the material in half the time is ridiculous, especially because it involves a lot of new characters and new locations.
Weiss and Benioff said they were hoping for either 8 or 9 seasons, if HBO will let them go that far.
I think they need to do 4-7 at a season each, which means it'll have to go at least 8, unless they do some utterly brutal trimming and just say screw the books entirely, which is possible.
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quote:I'll say this though, if the seventh season of GoT has information from Dream before the book comes out and I get spoiled because of that show, I'll be furious.
I also read some quotes saying that assuming that GRRM isn't done by the time the series is ending on HBO, he'll have given them the general outlines of what happens in the series and they'll work with it.
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From what I've read, they already have it. They had a long lunch before the show even began where they say down and basically proved they loved the show to his satisfaction. He made them guess a lot of the outstanding mysteries and they got most of them right, apparently. So they already know a lot. I was also under the impression that he told them what was going to happen, loosely, for the rest of the series.
But I'm still going to be furious, and I imagine people who got into this a decade and a half before I did will be even more furious, because it means, for some people, that decades of waiting for the conclusion is going to be ruined by the spoiler mill that is the internet. It'll be impossible to escape it, unless the show's popularity seriously wanes in the last couple years.
I'm a lot more forgiving and patient when it comes to the wait times for the final books than most people. I don't begrudge him his football watching time, and I look forward to reading a lot of his side projects, but all this comes with the tacit agreement that when I finally get the last installments, it'll be a great experience, not that it'll be ruined years earlier.
I'd rather him not tell them anything and have them make up something totally original, purists be damned, so I'm not spoiled.
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To be fair, there's a huge amount that can be cut from Feast and Dance. Cersei, Brienne, Dany and Tyrion spring to mind as characters who's storylines were drawn out and D&D could do a serious editing job on.
With only a about a third of Storm left, they could take the next two seasons to cover the remaining part of Storm, and much of Feast/Dance. The fifth season would then end with them near the end of Feast/Dance, giving them two seasons to do the last two books, which I think would actually stretch to eight seasons total, provided an end was in sight and the numbers were still good.
Whether GRRM can actually finish his story in seven books is another issue, which I find pretty unlikely. He tends to have an unrealistic idea of how drawn out his writing has become. If he goes back to writing like he did in AGoT, which I think he demonstrated he wanted to do by the end of Dance with the speed of the story progression in the North, then it might be possible.
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I think he can wrap it up...so long as we don't get another book like Feast where he opened up sixteen new storylines. He's already said it's possible that he might go over seven books (which was originally a trilogy...then a five part series...now seven). But it's really all under his control. He can NOT open up new stuff. That's what editing is for.
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quote:Condensing books 4 and 5 into one season would be silly. If it takes 2 seasons to do Storm, then doing twice the material in half the time is ridiculous
If you count by actual events (e.g. characters dying, battles occurring, cities changing control), rather than by number of pages, books 4 & 5 put together are about half the events of book 3, so they could be made to fit in a single season.
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In an interview yesterday, Martin said he isn't worried that the show will pass up the books, and that the books should all be released prior to that happening.
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Yeah, I've seen him say that in a couple of places. If we figure it takes roughly three years to get to Winds of Winter, and four to get THROUGH WoW, it means finishing next year would mean 3 years to do WoW and 3 years to do DoS. He does still have plenty of time if he writes as fast as we know he CAN write.
But he's also said in recent interviews that they're catching up a lot faster than he planned.
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I just don't see how. Of course they have to combine the narratives to make it chronological, but they'd have to cut out a crazy amount, and that's taking into account the huge amounts of fat in both books that needs to be trimmed.
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posted
Although, I bet they have plenty of time to fit stuff into season four. The last third of Storm doesn't require a whole season
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