Is it premature to start wondering about the Dream of Spring release date? Of course it is, but that’s the fun of speculating: You do it before you should. Winds of Winter isn’t even done yet. But hey, we were speculating about Winds back before Dance came out, and Dance before Feast. It’s high time we started wondering when Dream of Spring will show up on our doorstep, and whether or not that seventh book will actually become two.

Dream Of Spring Release Date: Seven Books Or Eight?

The end of Game of Thrones, and the timing of that ending, depends greatly on whether or not George R. R. Martin decides to turn the series into eight volumes, instead of seven. His editor has teased that he may do just that, and is at least considering it (let’s hope one of the books reverts to the original title of the final volume, A Time For Wolves, even if it is super on-the-nose).

It would make sense for George to switch to eight books, or at least it wouldn’t be surprising. A Song of Ice and Fire started as a mere trilogy, of which the actual fifth book would have been the second. Obviously, the tale grew in the telling. And it has continued to do so. It’s hard to imagine the series resolving in just two more books, and yet that’s what it’s supposed to do. It seems like a big ask, unless one of those books is genuinely titanic in size. A split into eight makes sense under those grounds.

But it disrupts a pretty great symmetry in the Song of Ice and Fire books. Seven Kingdoms, seven gods, seven books. It’s a nice touch, and would be weird to break it into eight. Doesn’t mean it won’t happen—look at Wheel of Time. But it’s a change George would only enter into with some gravity. Or maybe he could just call the seventh and eighth books the two halves of book seven, like with the Harry Potter movies. That would be the best of both worlds.

As for the actual Dream of Spring release date, of course there’s no way of knowing. I hope—we all hope—that George can pick up the pace a little bit. The first three books were all two years apart; since then, we’ve shifted to five years apart. But that was because of the Meereenese knot and its aftermath, and the abandoned five-year gap in the story, which George had to rewrite around entirely. It caused huge problems and delays. Those issues are presumably solved now. And that hasn’t helped George R. R. Martin write Winds of Winter any faster, but hopefully with that book he’ll lay enough groundwork that the end of the series can come chugging along quickly enough. After all, we need to know whether Daenerys can actually defeat those pesky Others. I for one am not so sure.