The Winds of Winter is the as-yet-unfinished sixth book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, famously adapted by HBO as Game of Thrones. The behind-the-scene story is well-known by now. The show adapted the first five of Martin's books, roughly as seasons 1-5. After that, they ran out of source material, so Martin told them what was coming next, which is what we saw in seasons 6-8. But Martin himself has yet to reveal it in his own words.
And while there are some hopeful signs, we still don't have any firm information about when The Winds of Winter might show up. Fans have been waiting to read it since at least 2011, when Martin published A Dance With Dragons. That's 14 years of waiting. But the first mention of Winds goes back further than that.
The Redditor Expensive-Country801 recently posted a message written in January of 1994 about Locus, a magazine all about sci-fi and fantasy. "Gosh. According to the December issue of Locus, George R.R. Martin sold an epic fantasy trilogy, A Song of Ice and Fire, to Bantam for a large amount of money," it reads. "The three titles are: A Game of Thrones, A Dance With Dragons, The Winds of Winter. Bad news is that the first novel isn't due until early 1996."
A Game of Thrones did indeed make that 1996 date, and Martin released novels at a decent clip for some years after that. The first long wait came with the fourth book in the series, A Feast for Crows, which took five years to come out. A Dance of Dragons followed six years later. And then...we all know what's happened since then.
Interestingly, in Martin's original outline for his series, A Game of Thrones was roughly supposed to cover what became the first three books: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. Then, A Dance With Dragons would cover Daenerys Targaryen's invasion of Westeros, while The Winds of Winter would wrap things up. The fourth and fifth books in the series, A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons, were actually written as ways to bridge the gap in the story, to get us to the point when Daenerys was going to invade. So technically, we haven't even gotten a third of the way through Martin's original outline.
Then again, that outline bore little resemblance to the story that ended up getting written — for instance, the original outline features a Jon Snow-Arya Stark-Tyrion Lannister love triangle — so it's hard to conclude anything using it as a basis. All we know is that The Winds of Winter was first mentioned in the mid-'90s, when Bill Clinton was president, grunge was popular and a sitcom called Friends had made its debut. Over 30 years later, we're still waiting.
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