Few books have had such a legendarily long wait between books as A Song of Ice and Fire, but no matter how stalwartly you've been biding your time for George R.R. Martin's next epic fantasy novel, the newest milestone in this saga is a rough one. I've long been of the opinion that Martin should take as much time as he needs to finish The Winds of Winter — authors do not owe readers their work, and art is not an exact science — and I haven't lost faith that Martin is still working on Winds...but it's impossible to deny that the latest update to this publishing saga made me sigh in despair.
June 16, 2026 was a sobering anniversary that hit A Song of Ice and Fire fans who noticed it like a knife to the chest during the Red Wedding. That date marked 5,543 days since the last novel in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published on June 12, 2011. The kicker? That's the exact same amount of days that passed from the time Martin published the first novel in the series, A Game of Thrones, to when Dance came out.
In other words, we've officially been waiting for The Winds of Winter for the same amount of time as it took for all five of the published books to release before that.
What would The Winds of Winter even be like at this point?
Beyond the dispiriting question of whether we'll ever actually get to read The Winds of Winter, the thing that strikes me most about this latest milestone in the book's ongoing delay is just how much it crystallizes the passage of time.
For perspective, in the books, Jon Snow is still dead at the Wall. Daenerys is hanging out with the Dothraki in the Dothraki Sea (presumably, since the book ended on a cliffhanger). Young Griff is staging his invasion of the Stormlands. Tyrion Lannister hasn't even met Daenerys yet, and the Battle of Meereen rages on. Cersei Lannister awaits her trial from the Faith Militant. Brienne of Tarth is still in the middle of enacting some shadowy deal she made with Lady Stoneheart to trap Jaime Lannister, which is a cliffhanger established all the way back in 2005 with the publication of A Feast for Crows. Samwell Tarly has not read a single book or scroll in the Citadel of Oldtown.
I could keep listing things, but you get the point: a lot of time has passed, so much that seasons 2-8 of Game of Thrones aired in the interim, as well as two seasons of House of the Dragon (with a third about to drop that will obviously beat Winds out the door), and one season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with a second deep in production that will air next year.
Putting this through a personal lens, I was one of those obsessed readers who picked up A Dance with Dragons on its publication day and blasted through it over the course of the next couple of days. Suffice to say, the amount of life milestones that have passed since that publication day, when I was in my early 20s, is shocking to ponder. It was truly another lifetime ago.
Because of all that, I can't help but wonder: would The Winds of Winter even feel like a cohesive part of A Song of Ice and Fire if it released today? Martin is a vastly different person and likely writer than he was a decade and a half ago, when Dance released. He's had some of those sample chapters from The Winds of Winter done that whole time, but if he's been tinkering with any of them or other similar chapters all these years, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that his opinion of them has changed as he himself has grown. And because of that, I'd be extremely interested to see how Winds would even feel beside the other books, which were written in significantly closer succession, before Martin became a megastar writer who can't go anywhere without getting recognized, or make any sort of public appearance without getting relentlessly heckled about Winds.
That's me projecting a bit, of course, but still. Should we ever see The Winds of Winter actually release, it's one more aspect of its long journey to book shelves that will be fascinating to consider.
For now, the first five books of A Song of Ice and Fire are available wherever books are sold. The third season of House of the Dragon, based on Martin's book Fire & Blood, begins airing this Sunday, June 21 on HBO and HBO Max.
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