Please, people, contain your shock and emotional howling; we didn’t see this coming from a thousand miles off either. But in what’s surely the most unexpected news item to cross our desks today, George RR Martin has confirmed that The Winds of Winter will not be arriving in stores in 2018.
Yes, folks, the long-awaited and much talked-about sixth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series has been pushed back once again until at least 2019 according to Martin himself, placing the tome squarely in the Chinese Democracy class of comically delayed properties.
Martin, who somewhat sensationally migrated his ever-present blogging across from a meticulously curated LiveJournal to his own website not too long ago, confirmed the shocking and definitely not completely expected news in a post made a few hours ago.
No, winter is not coming… not in 2018, at least. You’re going to have to keep waiting for THE WINDS OF WINTER.
Oh, woe! The humanity! Etc.
The good news, for those of you absolutely clamouring for any new Game of Thrones-related material that you can get your hands on, is that Martin did give us further details on part one of Fire and Blood – his wildly extensive history of House Targaryen – which is due to hit shelves in November.
Archmaester Gyldayn has at last completed and delivered the first half of his monumental history of the Targaryen kings of Westeros, FIRE & BLOOD, and Bantam Spectra and HarperCollins Voyager will be releasing the hardcover on November 20, I am thrilled to say.
I’ve seen the archmaester’s manuscript. Since it was handwritten on vellum with a quill pen, he required my help in transcribing the text to a more modern format: WordStar 4.0, on a DOS computer. Took a while, but a few weeks ago I was able to ship it off to my editors on both sides of the Atlantic, and to my foreign representatives for all my publishers around the world. Some of my foreign publishers will be releasing their editions simultaneously with the US and UK hardbacks; others may need to wait for translation from the Common Tongue.
It’s a hefty book, almost a thousand manuscript pages (okay, 989, if you want to be precise). That’s not quite as long as A GAME OF THRONES or any of the later volumes in A SONG FOR ICE AND FIRE, but there’s a lot of reading there, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. This first volume covers all the Targaryen kings from Aegon I (the Conquerer) to the regency of Aegon III (the Dragonbane), along with their wives, wars, siblings, children, friends, rivals, laws, travels, and sundry other matters. For those not up on your Westerosi history, that’s Aegon I, Aenys, Maegor the Cruel, Jaehaerys I (the Conciliator), Viserys I, Aegon II (and Rhaenyra), and Aegon III (the regency). Oh, and there are dragons too.
Lots of dragons.
At nearly 1,000 pages, that’s a hefty little bit of delaying that’ll probably be more than enough to quell the braying, book-thirsty masses for a hot minute. The history compilation expands on prior meticulous notes Martin made for A World of Ice and Fire a few years back, and will be followed up with a second part that is, would you believe, still “a few years” away from coming to fruition.
But hey, George RR Martin is as George RR Martin does.
