A Dance with Dragons, the last mainline book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, came out on July 12, 2011. As of this week, that is more than 5,490 days ago, and the sixth book in the main series still has no release date. In that stretch of time, Martin has found room for a peer-reviewed physics paper, a Santa Fe cocktail bar, a restored train line, an arts collective, and consulting work on two separate HBO shows. This week he added one more item to that list: a brand-new novella in the Dunk and Egg series, a corner of the Game of Thrones universe he had previously said he would not touch again until The Winds of Winter was finished.
The new book comes from Ira Parker, the showrunner who adapts the Dunk and Egg stories for HBO’s “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” Parker has been developing the show’s future for months, working from material Martin has never published, and this week he laid out exactly what that material contains. “Book four, which George is working on, takes place in a very cool location,” Parker told The Hollywood Reporter. “And five is the last story point of Egg as a boy. So it’s a very natural ending place for us to take a break and come back when Dexter is older. So then we can do Egg the Prince, do some politics, do some fun stuff in Summer Hall and King’s Landing, and get a different vibe where they’re not on the road all the time.” Parker says he has an outline for as many as twelve Dunk and Egg novellas from Martin sitting in a secret document, enough material to keep the show running for years after the source novellas run out. Martin found time to plan all twelve. The one book fans have been waiting on since 2011 is not part of that plan.
The side-project list runs longer than most fans realize. In February 2025, Martin co-authored a peer-reviewed paper in the American Journal of Physics with Wild Cards contributor Ian Tregillis, working out the Lagrangian dynamics of a fictional alien virus. The following month, he opened Milk of the Poppy, a medieval-apothecary cocktail bar in Santa Fe’s Railyard District, the third business he has folded into the same 1910 adobe building that already houses his Jean Cocteau Cinema and Beastly Books. He also helped fund Meow Wolf, restored a historic short-line railway into the tourist attraction Sky Railway, serves as an executive producer on AMC’s “Dark Winds,” writes for the video game “Elden Ring,” and consults on both “House of the Dragon” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” None of it is The Winds of Winter.
Martin has been asked about that list directly, more than once, and he does not deny it. In an April interview with Time, he described the book’s delay as a running wound rather than a mystery. “That’s the curse of my life,” he said. “There’s no doubt Winds of Winter is 13 years late. I’m still working on it. I have periods where I make progress and then other things divert my attention and suddenly I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows, I have something else to do.” Months later, at New York Comic Con, a moderator raised the same subject, and Martin gave an answer that was less an explanation than an admission of priorities. “Yes, I do love Winds of Winter. I’m still interested in it, I’m still working on it, but honestly, I love these other things, too.” He went further, previewing the exact complaint he expects every time he signs a new deal instead of finishing the old one. “Why the f*** is George R.R. Martin writing this other thing when he should be writing Winds of Winter? What is he doing?” Martin said, repeating the question back to the crowd before waving it off: “And I want to say, ‘I did it in 1993, guys. Come on! It was lying in my drawer, and they wanted it, so I sold it to them!’”
That gap between what Martin says about the book and what he produces has been open for years, not months. In a July 2023 post on his own blog, Not a Blog, Martin wrote that he had been working on Winds “almost every day. Writing, rewriting, editing, writing some more.” Two years later, that same period has produced a physics paper, a cocktail bar, and a new novella announcement, but no finished manuscript.
It was that gap, stretched out over a decade and a half, that finally boiled over in public last August at Seattle Worldcon, though not from Martin himself. An audience member took the microphone during a panel with Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Robin Hobb, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Ryan Cahill and told Martin, “Here’s the thing, George, you’re not going to be around for much longer,” before asking whether Sanderson should take over and finish the series once Martin dies. Sanderson answered first: “Not me.” The rest of the panel began standing up. Martin did not respond to the question at all. He left the stage for his next scheduled engagement, and the panel ended in boos from a room that had shown up to celebrate the genre, not to watch an author get told to his face that he was running out of time.
Martin later told the Hollywood Reporter the moment felt like being slapped, and that he was further wounded to find fans online agreeing with the question. Whatever the questioner’s tone, the underlying math behind it is not in dispute. A Dance with Dragons came out in 2011. Winds of Winter has no announced date in 2026. A fourth Dunk and Egg novella now does.
If Martin can find time for a physics paper, a cocktail bar, a train line, and a brand-new prequel novella, what is stopping The Winds of Winter, other than the fact that he keeps choosing not to finish it first?
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George R.R. Martin is a cautionary tale to all creators that “fame” can easily turn to “infamy” when you demonstrate such prolonged disdain toward your creations, your legal obligations, and to your loyal fans. It’s obviously his choice to dawdle away his remaining time on such selfish frippery, but that comes at the heavy price of decimating his creative legacy.
Hope it was worth it, Skipper.