Game of Thrones, the HBO series, zoomed past George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels a while ago. A Dance with Dragons, which was published in 2011, ends with Jon Snow getting stabbed by the Night’s Watch and Daenerys in Dragonstone; on the show, those characters are boinking and about to find out they’re related. Martin has famously struggled to finish The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, especially in light of Game of Thrones‘ massive success. “The show has achieved such popularity around the world, the books have been so popular and so well reviewed, that every time I sit down, I’m very conscious I have to do something great, and trying to do something great is a considerable weight to bear,” he said last year.
Martin is “in hiding” to finish writing and had to turn down a cameo for the final season, which he says he has no idea how it ends. “I haven’t read the scripts and haven’t been able to visit the set because I’ve been working on Winds,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I know some of the things. But there’s a lot of minor-character [arcs] they’ll be coming up with on their own. And, of course, they passed me several years ago. There may be important discrepancies.”
Years ago, Martin told co-showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the broad strokes for his intended ending, but “George discovers a lot of stuff while he’s writing,” Benioff noted, and things could change. (The show has made numerous departures from the books.) “It’s the end for a lot of people,” Martin said. “It’s not the end for me. I’m still deeply in it. I better live a long time because I have a lot of work left to do.” Save the death talk for the books, George.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)