What happens if George R.R. Martin can’t finish A Song of Ice and Fire?

George R.R. Martin is currently sheltering in place and working hard on finishing The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. The signs are good: he’s talking more openly about the writing process, and has said that Game of Thrones ending on HBO has taken some of the pressure off and made writing less stressful. “Truth be told, I am spending more time in Westeros than in the real world, writing every day,” he recently wrote on his Not a Blog. “Things are pretty grim in the Seven Kingdoms… but maybe not as grim as they may become here.”

This is all good to hear. But even after Winds comes out, there’s still at least one more book in the series to go: A Dream of Spring. The gaps between new books have lengthened considerably since A Game of Thrones hit shelves way back in 1996. Some fans have wondered if Martin may be unable to complete the entire series. Should the worst somehow happen, is there a plan in place to finish A Song of Ice and Fire if Martin, for whatever reason, cannot?

At first glance, the answer seems like it’s no. At a convention in Toronto in 2003, a fan asked Martin whether he knew the ending of the series. His answer: “Yes.” The fan asked a follow-up question, putting it as delicately as they could, which still isn’t very delicately. “So do you have it written down somewhere… just in case?”

Martin’s response was pretty blunt: “Nope. It’s all in my head. So if I die, you all are s*** out of luck.”

So is that it? Would A Song of Ice and Fire languish unfinished if Martin died before he could complete it? It may be a little more nuanced than that.

In investigating this question, fansite Los Siete Reinos dug up a 2016 Reddit comment from writer Adam Whitehead, the proprietor of the excellent Wertzone blog and a friend of Martin’s, at least according to LSR. In Whitehead’s opinion, when Martin made that comment, he was saying fans would be “s*** out of luck” if he were to die out of nowhere, e.g. flattened by an asteroid or run over by a bus.

If that were to happen, there would be indeed be no clear way forward. For one thing, it’s very unlikely that Martin keeps a blow-by-blow outline of what happens in the rest of his story for any new writer to follow. As he’s said many times, he’s more of a “gardener” than an “architect,” preferring to discover parts of the story as he writes them.

But it’s not like he’s never made notes; he even put together a rough outline for A Song of Ice and Fire before he began writing in earnest, although he changed so much along the way it’s basically just a curiosity now.

Still, there are probably some notes about the ending laying around, and he’s admitted to telling the broad strokes of it to the guys behind Game of Thrones. “I told [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] a number of things years ago,” Martin explained following the Game of Thrones series finale. “And some of them they did do. But at the same time, it’s different. I have very fixed ideas in my head as I’m writing The Winds of Winter and beyond that in terms of where things are going. It’s like two alternate realities existing side by side. I have to double down and do my version of it which is what I’ve been doing.”

The devil is in the details and the details are in Martin’s head.

If someone were to try and fashion an ending out of what little information on the ending is available, it would very likely be a letdown. “This is what happened with Frank Herbert’s Dune books,” Whitehead wrote, “when his son and Kevin J. Anderson found some very scattered and disorganized notes and tried to write a concluding duology (and about 20 other prequels and sequels) and it was terrible, because they made most of it up.”

Image: Dune/Warner Bros.

Martin is also dead-set against allowing other authors to write sequels to his works. “I don’t think my wife, if she survives me, will allow that either,” he said in 2013, in Australia. “But one thing that history has shown us is eventually these literary rights pass to grandchildren or collateral descendants, or people who didn’t actually know the writer and don’t care about his wishes. It’s just a cash cow to them. And then we get abominations to my mind like Scarlett, the Gone with the Wind sequel.”

So Martin doesn’t want people writing sequels set in his world and he doesn’t expect there to be an ending to A Song of Ice and Fire should he die suddenly and unexpectedly. HOWEVER, that does leave one scenario: if Martin, knowing he was going to die, made detailed notes about the rest of his story and picked another writer to finish it.

This is basically what happened with Robert Jordan, the author of the massive Wheel of Time series. Jordan, who suffered from cardiac amyloidosis, passed away in 2007 while working on the 12th book in the series. However, in the years since receiving his terminal prognosis, he prepared detailed notes on the rest of the story, and author Brandon Sanderson was able to complete the series according to Jordan’s wishes.

Incidentally, Jordan was known to say that he wanted his notes on The Wheel of Time destroyed or left alone in the event of his death, and even gave assistants orders to take a sledgehammer to his PC and to melt the hard drive and floppy disks. Obviously, he didn’t follow through with that. And according to Whitehead, Martin — who knew Jordan — has at least considered the same course of action, should he be put in a similar position:

"What he also said, once at a convention (possibly WorldCon 2012 or 2013), with a long-suffering look, is that if he was in the same situation as Robert Jordan, being diagnosed with a terminal illness but with a couple of years warning, then he would strongly consider writing a detailed outline or even talking to another writer about doing it (he knows a few). But it’d have to be that very specific set of circumstances."

Happily, Martin is in good health, and will hopefully remain so for many years. There’s no need to plan for the worst when the best is yet to come.

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h/t Westeros.org