Brace yourselves for the biggest official Game of Thrones or A Song of Ice and Fire news since the delay of the final season of Game of Thrones: George R. R. Martin has confirmed that he’s almost done writing his next book! Oh, wait, did you think that meant he's done with Winds of Winter? Big mistake. No, the inimitable GRRM has nearly completed the first volume of Fire and Blood, his epic history of the Targaryen dynasty. And it’s coming out before Winds of Winter—probably even this year.
Fire And Blood Release Date: Before Winds Of Winter, That’s For Sure
The news about Fire and Blood comes from the one truly reliable source for A Song of Ice and Fire news: LiveJournal. Specifically, George R. R. Martin’s. Take a look if you don’t believe me (obligatory hat-tip to BryndenBFish, ASOIAF Twitterer extraordinaire):
So there you have it. Fire and Blood will be in two volumes, one coming out before Winds of Winter and nearly complete, the other barely started and coming out well after (but I’m going to take a shot in the dark and guess it will still come out before A Dream of Spring). In case you don’t know about it, George R. R. Martin jokingly refers to Fire and Blood as “the GRRMarillion,” a reference to the posthumously published Silmarillion of J.R.R. Tolkien, an in-depth and nearly biblical account of the origins of Middle Earth and the war between the Elves and the Dark Lord Morgoth (cursed be his name), to whom Sauron was but a servant.
In the same vein, Fire and Blood is a history book, one recounting the intricacies of three centuries of Targaryen rule. We’ve already seen some excerpts of the book covering the great Targaryen civil war, the Dance of the Dragons, which ultimately led to the decline and extinction of the Targaryen dragons.
As for the question we’re all wondering, yes, this means that GRRM has been working on Fire and Blood instead of writing Winds of Winter. And he can do whatever he wants, that’s his right, but it means it’s pretty darn unlikely we’ll see Winds of Winter this year. His comment that we won’t see Fire and Blood volume 2 until after Winds suggests that there may actually be an end in sight to our long wait; we can certainly hope.
But in the meantime, it means we’re pretty likely to get a book set in Westeros this year—and all told a pretty exciting one. The book is set to cover everything from Aegon’s Conquest to the extinction of the dragons, probably the most exciting part of Targaryen history. It may not answer the many hundreds of questions we’re dying to see revealed in Winds of Winter, but it will still be pretty darn cool. Keep an eye out for Fire and Blood later this year or in early 2019.
