“The Winds of Winter” Rumor Mill Going Into Overdrive

(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

"“The waiting is the hardest part” – Tom Petty"

Game of Thrones Season 6 is over. Game of Thrones Season 7 is so far away from us right now that even filming hasn’t seriously kicked into gear—no one is flying to Belfast for table reads yet, and the audition reports have only just begun (and most of them are, let’s face it, not all that major.) In fact, our only real news we have is that filming for some scenes is still six months out.

So what do fans do? They start speculating about the books.

Last year, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin still had it sort of easy. The show hadn’t caught up to him yet. Although his every move was scrutinized, most fans were still expecting that an announcement regarding The Winds of Winter, the next book in his series, wouldn’t come until closer to Christmas….or the New Year….or the debut of Season 6. We could wait.

And then on New Year’s Day we learned the truth—The Winds of Winter wasn’t coming. Or at least, it wasn’t coming before Game of Thrones Season 6. And for a few months, Martin got a respite. After all, the book wasn’t coming until after Season 6 was over. For another six months, we all stopped asking.

But now Season 6 is over, and fans have literally nothing to distract them. And that’s how wild book rumors get started.

Two of those rumors caught fire over the weekend. The first, which comes courtesy of The Independent, is that Martin will not follow the normal protocols of releasing a wildly popular book. Instead one of the few appearances on his 2016 calendar, WorldCon (which he loves to attend every year) will somehow coincide with the surprise release of the novel. The chances of that are next to nil, of course, as that would not only cause minor riots, but prevent pre-orders from such outlets like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which depend on such things for their quarterly profits. This year’s WorldCon will be held on August 17-21, meaning that, in order for this rumor to come to fruition, Martin would have to already be done, or very nearly so.

The other, even more highly unlikely rumor is that Martin will release both The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring simultaneously, and that’s what the hold up is. Let’s start with the fact that it 100% ignores Martin’s own words to us—that he really just isn’t getting The Winds of Winter done that fast, and there is no other hold up except that. Then let’s move on to the secondary level of wish fulfillment going on here: that we won’t have to wait just as long for A Dream of Spring.

The fact is, Wonkblog already ran the numbers on this back in January, and if one plots Martin’s writing speed, extrapolated from the speed with which he has written the first five novels, The Winds of Winter isn’t going to be finished this year at all. At best, it will be finished in 2017.

And A Dream Of Spring won’t be finished along with it. At best, it will probably not be done until 2023. The idea that Martin is somehow going to surprise us and we won’t have to have a seven-year wait between novels is so far-fetched as to be utterly impossible. As for a surprise drop of The Winds of Winter with no warning—not if his publishers have any say over anything. After all, right now J.K. Rowling’s eighth Harry Potter novel has won the pre-sales derby for 2016. If there is any way that Martin finishes in time to knock her off that perch, you know his publishers will take it.