George Martin’s Plan To Keep The Show From Catching Up

George R.R. Martin’s plan to keep the show from catching up, in Vanity Fair

By Ours is the Fury

As part of their in-depth cover story on Game of Thrones in the April issue, Vanity Fair spoke with George R.R. Martin on a variety of topics. Most importantly the author discussed the one thing that’s been on everyone’s mind for the last few years which has been, “Can he keep the show from passing him?”

Vanity Fair tells Martin that executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss stated in their interview that “they are getting close to you, with the show.” Martin confirms that he’s given Benioff and Weiss the “broad strokes” of what he’ll be writing, but is still hopeful that he can prevent them from catching up to him. He elaborates:

The season that’s about to debut covers the second half of the third book. The third book [A Storm of Swords] was so long that it had to be split into two. But there are two more books beyond that, A Feast for Crowsand A Dance with Dragons. A Dance with Dragons is itself a book that’s as big as A Storm of Swords. So there’s potentially three more seasons there, between Feast and Dance, if they split into two the way they did [with Storms]. Now, Feast and Dance take place simultaneously. So you can’t do Feast and then Dance the way I did. You can combine them and do it chronologically. And it’s my hope that they’ll do it that way and then, long before they catch up with me, I’ll have published The Winds of Winter, which’ll give me another couple years. It might be tight on the last book, A Dream of Spring, as they juggernaut forward.

Martin puts forth the idea of a prequel season, mentioning his Dunk and Egg stories, as well as his recent Targaryen-centered novella, “The Princess and the Queen,” as examples of Westeros-based material that could be used. He is aware of the press for time, particularly as there are young cast members such as Maisie Williams growing more adult every day.

Read the full article at Vanity Fair to see what George thinks about keeping readers off-balance, who his favorite Lord of the Rings character is, and how he really feels about the look of Game of Thrones.

Ours is the Fury: I think Martin might be a little too optimistic about how many seasons can be gotten out of AFFC and ADWD.  Although I’d love to see an adaptation of some of the prequel novellas, I’m not looking forward to waiting extra years between seasons of GoT if it comes to that, and I don’t think HBO would go for it, in my opinion.