Game of Thrones has come to a visually stunning, but substantively unsatisfying end. After a decade of warnings that, “Winter is Coming,” Winter came… and was over… in one episode. All the build up, all the human remains arranged in weird spirals, all the character development… just over, in a logically incoherent way.
But before that disaster of a series finale was released, Ian McElhinney — the former Barristan Selmy on the show — claimed that GRRM has already finished books six and seven and was waiting for the HBO series to finish in accordance with an agreement made with the network.
Beginning at 31:40 McElhinney states:
George has already written books six and seven and, as far as he’s concerned, there only are seven books. But he struck an agreement with David and Dan, the showrunners on the series, that he would not publish the final two books until the series has completed. So if all goes well, in another month or two we might get books six and seven.
GRRM immediately took to his NotaBlog to claim that he has not finished WINDS, and hasn’t even started DREAM. But, if there was, in fact, an agreement with HBO then surely an NDA would prevent GRRM from revealing that information. Also, given GRRM’s track record on project completion statements, I can’t help but take GRRM’s statement with a grain of salt.
Further, in his most recent blog post — at the time of this writing — GRRM indicates that WINDS will be completed in time for his trip to New Zealand for WorldCon in July and August of 2020. Granted, this isn’t the first time GRRM has made claims about the release date for WINDS. In 2011, he claimed WINDS would be finished by 2014. Then, in 2014 he said it would not be coming that year, but set a target for 2016. In 2017, he indicated that the project was expected to be finished that same year, but later in the year claimed it was — yet again — months away from finishing. Given the repeated deadlines and extensions, I doubt GRRM would make another careless declaration.
So, based on all of this information, I think two things are possible. 1. GRRM did make an agreement with HBO not to release the final books, and now that the show has ended he will be releasing WINDS *soon. 2. He did not make an agreement with HBO, but has had WINDS more or less finished for a few years, and was holding off, independent of HBO. This could have been for a couple of reasons. First, he may have wanted to hold on to WINDS as he began working on DREAM to avoid writing himself into a corner without being able to change plot elements — something the showrunners were unable to avoid. Second, he may have wanted to see how the show would handle the story before completing his own. Either way, I imagine at this point he should be close to wrapping up WINDS. And, though he has stated that writing has not begun on DREAM, I find that unlikely. However, I still think we’ll be in for a wait before DREAM is finished.
But for now, I see hope that WINTER is coming… Maybe.