Game of Thrones fans, if you had any high and ambitious hopes for the Dream of Spring release date, you can now put them aside. George R. R. Martin has basically confirmed that Dream of Spring won’t come out before Game of Thrones is over… except in the extremely unlikely event that the show runs ten seasons. It’s one of GRRM’s first public admissions of what we all suspect… that the show is going to finish well before the books do.
Game Of Thrones, Winds Of Winter And Dream Of Spring: The Endgame
The new comments about Game of Thrones and Dream of Spring come via GRRM’s LiveJournal (hat tip to Screenrant for spotting it). On a post about the new trailer (above) for Game of Thrones season 6, which debuts on April 24, a commenter asked George whether there was a chance A Dream of Spring would come out before the last season of the show, even though Winds of Winter is missing the season 6 premiere. Gasp-inducingly, George replied, and said, “If the show runs ten seasons, maybe.” Sadly, you have to take that sarcastically. Don’t get your hopes up. Another commenter replied asking if that meant there was at least a chance of such a thing happening, and George replied, “Of course not.”
And there it is, starkly written. A Song of Ice and Fire won’t finish until after Game of Thrones is over—unless it ran ten seasons, which it definitely won’t. We all knew this, we knew there was no way A Dream of Spring could come out before 2020 or so, but it’s still hard to see and read it.
Winds of Winter is still hopefully coming out this year, if we’re lucky, but beyond that it’s going to be a long wait for the end of A Song of Ice and Fire. And to the commenter on GRRM’s LiveJournal who said he knew that George’s comment would spark an iDigitalTimes article: you nailed it. Here we are. But it really is news when the author of A Song and Fire admits that it’s not realistic to think that the book series could possibly end before the show. It’s not actually impossible, mind you, and that’s what GRRM meant by his “ten seasons” joke. But the truth is, A Dream of Spring will almost certainly come out several years after Game of Thrones is over. Such is the way of the world.