“I have two books left, Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, but I also have to write like, eight or nine more Dunk and Egg adventures. And, I’ve got a contract to finish the history of the Targaryen dynasty,” George R.R. Martin said, speaking to the future of Westeros beyond A Song of Ice and Fire at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (video below). “Some of you may have read my book of fake history, The World of Ice and Fire… I have hundreds more pages of that material.”
While he didn’t mention anything resembling a release date for The Winds of Winter, GRRM did speak to the next novel’s dark tone. “There are a lot of dark chapters right now in the book that I’m writing,” Martin said (and Entertainment Weekly heard). “It is called The Winds of Winter, and I’ve been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming. Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places.”
It seems all the horrors we’ve witnessed up to this moment were nothing but the appetizer. “In any story, the classic structure is, ‘Things get worse before they get better,’ so things are getting worse for a lot of people,” Martin said.
And it won’t all be redeemed in the final book, A Dream of Spring. As GRRM’s stated many times before, A Song of Ice and Fire is unlikely to go out on a soaring high note. “I’m not going to tell you how I’m going to end my book, but I suspect the overall flavor is going to be as much bittersweet as it is happy.”
Still, there’s a long way to go before the end. And with only two seasons left in Game of Thrones, it’s probable that A Song of Ice and Fire will wrap up years after the series, in a very different fashion.
