When does George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter come out?
Game of Thrones Season 6 is done. It’s over. It’s caput. We have to wait a year for new episodes, but will we have to wait that long for a new book from George R.R. Martin? The author has written five books in his Song of Ice and Fire series so far, and with Season 6 concluded, all of them have been adapted in some form or another by HBO. Yes, the show has gone pretty far afield of the source material in recent seasons, but still: it’s now officially, completely beyond the books in terms of chronology.
The title of the final episode of Game of Thrones Season 6 is “The Winds of Winter.” That’s also the title of the as-yet-unreleased sixth novel in Martin’s series. Guessing when a Song of Ice and Fire book will come out is often a fool’s game, but we can take a stab at it.
Martin has been working on Winds since 2011, when A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book int he series, came out. Several chapters from A Dance with Dragons were actually moved into The Winds of Winter, since the former was becoming so long, so in a way, he’s been working on Winds for even longer than it first appears. As of this writing, about as much time has passed since the release of Dance (five years) as passed between the release of A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in the series, and Dance (six years). That means we should be getting The Winds of Winter within the next year, and there are other signs that Martin is closing in.
For one thing, Martin has cut back on a lot of public appearances so he can focus on writing Winds. For another, this book may be a bit easier to write than the past two, both of which involved a lot of characters in far-flung locations. Martin had to work hard to keep all the stories and timelines consistent, but because Winds is expected to bring a lot of them back in close proximity, that might not be as big of a problem.
Hopefully, we’ll see The Winds of Winter on bookshelves by late 2016 or early 2017. Here’s hoping.
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