George R.R. Martin Is Not Happy With ‘Winds Of Winter' Fans, Not Happy At All

Forbes

2 days ago

In a recent blog post about a film adaptation of Howard Waldrop's novella A Dozen Tough Jobs, Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin takes a diversion to let his feelings about upset fans be known in no uncertain terms.
Fans, of course, remain baffled and angry and depressed over the lack of any visible progress on Martin's sixth A Song Of Ice And Fire novel, The Winds Of Winter. It's been fourteen years since the publication of A Dance With Dragons, so being a little upset about the lack of book in hand makes sense.
I wrote a post back in 2022 trying to mathematically predict when – if ever – Winds might finally be published. At the time, and assuming Martin would continue writing at about the same pace he'd been writing (just averaging out pages written per year) I came up with somewhere between 3.8 years and 5.18 years. Of course, that was back in December of 2022 and I don't think we've had a single update of substance from Martin since then.
If Martin continues to average around 3.625 days per page when he gets around to A Dream Of Spring, I predicted that it would take another 15 years after the 2027 publication date of Winds Of Winter. I'd be 61-years-old by then. Martin would be 95. And frankly, all of these mathematical predictions feel wildly optimistic at this point. Hell, in 2018 – seven years ago! – I wrote a post arguing that it's time we all just accept that Martin will never finish the book, let alone the series. 'Recall the five stages of grief," I wrote at the time, "denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's time to finally read the writing (or lack thereof) on the wall and accept that this series may never be finished. Abandon hope and anger and leave your expectations in the dirt. One of the fantasy genre's very best series may also become its most crushing disappointment.'
That was seven years ago. It's been fourteen years since the last book came out.
All of which is just my way of explaining why fans, who love these stories, might be distraught and might see all the success Martin has had thanks to his unfinished work and the support of his fans, as frustrating. Which brings us back to Martin's blog post.
In a lengthy aside, the author writes:
This is an awfully bitter and resentful thing to write about the fans who made Martin rich and famous, whose adoration of his work led to several major TV deals with HBO and paved the way for all these other projects. It's a bit of a humble-brag with a dash of self-pity thrown in, listing off all these other achievements and pointing out how Thrones fans don't like them.
Of course, Martin follows this by pointing out that fans are also wrong. 'Thing is, I do care about them,' he writes. 'And I care about Westeros and WINDS as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine.'
I would argue that most fans absolutely know this and most fans don't hate everything else that Martin has done. The reason so many of us are frustrated by all of Martin's various announcements and projects is because we know they distract him from work on the one thing most of his fans are truly passionate and excited about.
If you go to your favorite restaurant expecting a great meal, and the chef comes out and starts showing you pictures of his gardening project and the old truck in his garage he's been working on, and the haikus he's busy penning back in the kitchen, and a bunch of other stuff that's cool, sure, glad you have hobbies, chef – well, after enough of this you might get a little annoyed at having to wait for your meal. It's not that you don't want the chef to have a life outside of cooking, but you've been coming to this restaurant for years and it's a successful business because of the patronage of people like you, and now you're sitting around going through photo albums of the guy's grandkids while your stomach is growling.
And now the chef is ranting about how ungrateful you are, how you don't like his grandkids, how you think his food is going to suck once he's done making it, blah blah blah. We're here for the steak, not pressed flowers and your thoughts on the NFL. The restaurant is here because we like the food, not stories about your trip to Istanbul.
Forgive the extended metaphor, but this is a toxic dynamic. Fans can absolutely be the biggest pricks in the universe and I certainly have empathy for Martin, who has gone from towering literary figure and beloved author of one of fantasy's most successful series, to The Guy Who Will Never Finish His Book, but frankly that's on Martin, not fans. He's loaded up his itinerary with projects, from editing his Wild Cards books to writing the lore for the video game Elden Ring (great game, obviously, but still) to Dark Winds and dozens of other distractions. One can't help but wonder if he's just completely, impossibly stuck. I'm sure he cares. Maybe some people think he doesn't, but I think he does. He's just not in a position where caring equates to devoting himself fully to the cause.
This is one problem with success. A struggling author who relies on his popular series to put bread on the table would have no problem finishing. A successful author who already sold the rights to his series, and has seen it made into a brilliant TV show that ended in disaster, has a lot less fire under his feet. There are no bees in his bonnet.
The really sad thing is that if Martin just finished Winds and Dream by now, fans would probably care a lot more about his other projects. We'd be excited to learn all about them, eager for more, hopeful that he'd go on to finish Fire & Blood and write more Dunk & Egg novellas and whatever else he did even outside of Westeros. But how are we actually supposed to care about any of the rest of this stuff when we still recall A Dance With Dragons ending with about a dozen cliffhangers? And it's not just Martin's mortality that we start to take into account in our calculus: We could die before these books are finished, too!
And that, dear readers, is my annual Winds Of Winter rant. I think I publish one of these just about every year, usually after an update from Martin. How many pages are finished now, do you suppose? Have we moved beyond 1100 to 1200? Maybe we're closing in on 1300 by now. All I know is that my stomach is still rumbling, though I wish I could make it stop.
Hopefully Martin realizes that all of this anger and discontent isn't motivated by hate. 'The haters' are really just lovers. If fans have started to resent him, it's not because we hate GRRM, it's just that we love his books more. I'm not sure if an author owes his fans a complete saga (he sure owed HBO one, when he signed that deal) but shouldn't he want to fulfill this unspoken contract with readers? Shouldn't he want to do right by the people who bought his books, shared them with friends, spread the good word, fell in love with his world and its characters? These stories are as much ours as Martin's now. We're not entitled to anything, fine, but it sure would be great if he proved us all wrong. That sure would show us, wouldn't it? I can't think of a better way to stick it to fans than to finish the series and get the last laugh.
P.S. I think it's worth pointing out that it's quite something, quite remarkable and good, that people still care this passionately about books. The publishing industry is always in crisis. Nobody reads as much as they ought to anymore. Kids these days have attention spans crushed under the terrible weight of TikTok and Instgram. We're all distracted endlessly by phones and an onslaught of other media. That people remain passionate about books, even books we may never get to read, is something we should celebrate.