Just make sure that Martin takes decent notes so that Sanderson can be tapped to bring the story home. Sanderson did a marvelous job finishing Robert Jordan's giant story.
I love Sanderson, he is my favorite fantasy author, and you are correct about his marvelous job finishing WoT, but he is just not the right fit tonally for ASOIAF. He doesn't even write swear words, and GRRM's books are fairly liberal with the fucks and the cunts. I would however be in favor of Joe Abercrombie or someone with a bit of a darker bent to their writing taking over if needed.
He doesn’t even write swear words
Kelek's breath, man. He swears all the storming time.
Rust and ruin, I knew someone would bring up this crem.
Not to mention his Mormonism may be at odds with the sex scenes.
Just add more women - polygamy was all the rage in Mormonism back in the day.
I hear he plans to bring in Patrick Rothfuss to pick up where he left off and also not finish the story.
I was perfectly fine with the amount of annoyance I felt before I read this comment but you just had to bring up another unfinished series didn't you? Now I'm all flustered.
Brando Sando has answered the question a bunch of times, and said he's not interested at all. Also, GRRM previously said he would never allow it to be finished by anyone else. Who knows? Maybe the publisher will force it.
Also, GRRM previously said he would never allow it to be finished by anyone else
If I remembered correctly, Jordan had also expressed similar thoughts, look how that turned out.
You think the ending of the show sucked? Imagine how he felt watching that shit.
I would suggest that it was the broad outline of the same ending he planned and shared with DnD just implemented badly. He's probably more pissed that they made his ending so unpopular by completely botching the landing as he now can't use that same ending without risk of rejection. I still maintain it would have sucked as an ending even if it had been implemented at the same standard as series 5, but what we got made it far far worse.
Yeah, he basically spoiled the ending with the tv show and now he needs to come up with a new one. Not that he actually will. He'll never finish the series
The reason he hasn't finished (or isn't even trying any more) is because he's written himself into a corner. There are a lot of loose ends and parts that don't make sense, and that's not even counting the parts that the show left out!
He probably felt dread, because he was probably hoping that they'd fix some of the mistakes he made, and make writing the book simpler.
He probably couldn't see the tv due to the big pile of money sitting between him and the screen covering his view.
So no one read the article? Just the headline?
This references a statement he made in 2023 which itself references a statement he made in 2022 saying he had the same number of pages completed.
This is an assumption that he has done nothing, rather than the far more likely situation of rewrites and editing.
People seriously some basic media literacy lessons.
rather than the far more likely situation of rewrites and editing.
At this point that feels like the bigger assumption
I honestly don't know why this guy doesn't just hire a couple ghostwriters to finish things, proofread them himself, publish them and be done with it
Or credited writers even...
Who wouldn't want to work with him to finish ASOIAF for a co-author credit?
Or a mention in the foreword even...
Or better yet... The pagecount on the next book is somewhere around 1,100 pages at last count which is more than enough to publish.
Find a natural breaking point around 700 or 800 pages, go to print and reset the clock.
Then you're already up 300-400 pages on the next book.
Pride mostly.
There might also be some contractual obligations for him to be the one to right it. Also, he probably doesn’t have a clue where to take them.
We know.
I'm actually surprised he was still working on them two years ago.
Imagine you're writing an epic tale that gets converted into the world's most popular TV show, then flown into the side of a mountain by some shitty director. I'd imagine the hate mail and public ridicule he probably got would make anyone lose the drive to finish.
Be honest, do you think he's worked on them at all since the show started?
He may have done a chapter, maybe two since then? That's probably it, though.
He has no intention of finishing, especially now that the show is done and people are left with negativity surrounding the ending. It's the worst possible situation for him, because even if he wanted to finish the books there's just no way he can do it.
IMO, the best thing he can do is acknowledge this, and draw a line in it. Either hand it off to a protégé or writer friend that is happy to continue the story, or outright say that ASOIAF is done.
Or just hire a ghost writer. Nobody needs to know and even if it comes out, nobody would care.
This is probably not the place to discuss just how fragile IRL feudalism was to actual runs of bad winters and sub-par summers, which were notorious for causing famines that spread across nations. I can't speak about how it works in Westros, but volcanic winters and bad solar weather shifted the tides of history here on earth.
Considering the notion of decades long winters, the people of Westros would likely be forced to be migratory much like the Dothraki.
That all said, it still was a rich world, and I suspect Martin just wrote himself into a bunch of corners.
Eventually winter came and they all rolled over and died. The end.
George R. R. Martin
at this point this is a HL3 situation and it's better if he never finishes the series. it will never live up to expectations. leave it be. if you enjoyed the story so far, celebrate that and move on. it's about the journey, not the destination.
He's never finishing the series. He's going to be 76 in a month, he still has probably most of Winds to finish after 13 years, the math doesn't work out to getting A Dream of Spring, let along the fact that this story is way too big to satisfactorily conclude in 2 books at this point, and even if it could be done it would be complex and difficult and take longer than usual.
I'm irrationally still hopeful we get Winds. But that is it.
I'm entirely unsurprised.
D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I've never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that's going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn't manage to tie it all together, neither can he.
D&D's biggest problem is they did a good job adapting pre-existing material, but couldn't adapt a PowerPoint deck.
IIRC from some article or interview way back then, Martin had provided D&D an outline of all the major plot points he intended through the end of the series. So while they might not have had the specifics, the major points would have been there.
If that was true, then it would make sense that they used those major points for the basis of the rest of the show. After the abysmal reception of those points by the fans, I would imagine Martin would have stopped to think about his plans, possibly losing interest entirely.
That assumes that he did in fact provide those major points to D&D in the first place to have adapted however.
I always felt that one of the main problems with GoT/ASOIAF was that it was a nuanced, political fantasy with top class world-building, but the overarching plot was pushing everyone towards a massive final confrontation (or 2 really). There was not really a good way to resolve the confrontation without a massive battle (or 2). So the ending was always going to have to move away from what made the series interesting/successful (book and TV), i.e. plot, characters, intrigue, shades of grey.
There were other problems as well, but that was something baked into the whole series by GRRM, and I'm not sure he can really find a way to do it differently. He might come up with a different outcome of the final confrontations, but it still has to be done with epic battles.
On the other hand we have Brandon Sanderson with 20 year roadmap and consistent release coupled with all the secret novels that he wrote.
I have this sneaking suspicion that he has this black magic power to suck all the creative will of writers, including GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss.
With Brando the Mando Sando it boils down to work ethic and process.
He has said in lectures that while writing a first draft, an author should be able to push out a thousand words an hour. That's pretty reasonable if you're a decent typist and you're just focusing on getting rough ideas down. Once he's got a draft, he throws it to his editor(s) who gets to work. If he's gotten a draft back from them with notes, he gets on that. Otherwise, he's cranking away at the next first draft.
The man is prolific because he's got his team dialed in and treats it like any other job. He shows up with a plan and executes.
Remember when GRRM was so pissed that people criticized his friend Robert Jordan for faffing around for over a decade and never finishing the Wheel of Time series? Yeah, same.
He should just get Brandon Sanderson to finish it for him prehumously
Shocking.
GoT's final half and definitely last season pissed me off to no end at the time, but in retrospect I'm glad I don't have to care about this anymore.
How to kill your fan base by making them wait decades: a GRRM story
Twist the knife with that God awful last few seasons to the show, too. Really kill any good will you had with your fans.
The last published book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, was published in July 2011, now 13 years ago.
The whole of Malazan Book of the Fallen was released over 12 years. I think he just needs to admit he's not going to finish at this point.
Him and Patrick Rothfuss need a writing camp or something.
he's an old man, who finally enjoyed some success late in life, let him enjoy his last days in peace ffs.
You can't say "I wish they were done" and on the other hand include in his will that the manuscripts be destroyed if he dies and can't be finished by anyone else.
Is this community ok with confusing fantasy and science fiction? I thought it was a snob librarian's thing.
I know some stories mix both, but I don't think ASOIAF has anything to do with sf.
I sometimes go months or years before picking a project back up, so I can relate.
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