With George RR Martin taking his sweet-ass time getting around to actually writing the final two instalments in the A Song of Ice and Fire series of books – y’know, those weird little tomes that formed the base of the extremely obscure and little heard of TV series Game of Thrones – that people have gotten to the end even before he has.
Martin has had a long term plan for how the series is going to pan out, and has been moving towards that slowly by implanting subtle clues within the existing books narratives. But some people have cottoned on and apparently figured it all out.
So sayeth Georgie-Boy: “So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories and while some of those theories were amusing bulls— and creative, some of the theories are right.”
“At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I’d planted in the books and came to the right solution.“
Fortunately for all of you though, this isn’t like the world of professional wrestling where storylines are changed on a whim because fans on the internet have figured out the logical conclusion and screw them for knowing the ins and outs of basic narrative structure. Despite people figuring it out, Martin has no plans on changing the way the series will play out.
“I’ve wrestled with this issue, because I do want to surprise my readers. I hate predictable fiction as a reader, I don’t want to write predictable fiction. I want to surprise and delight my reader and take them in directions they didn’t see coming. But I can’t change the plans.”
“I wrestled with that issue and I came to the conclusion that changing it would be a disaster, because the clues were there. You can’t do that, so I’m just going to go ahead.”
“Some of my readers who don’t read the boards, which thankfully there are hundreds of thousands of them, will still be surprised and other readers will say: ‘see, I said that four years ago, I’m smarter than you guys.”
His solution? Stop reading the damned message boards.
I know. Total shocker, right?
Now that he’s sorted that little conundrum out, all that’s really left to do I suppose is sit the fuck down and write the godforsaken last two books already.
Photo: Joe Scarnici via Getty Images.
