If you read between the lines of the recent public conversation about how long Game of Thrones will continue on HBO, there seem to be two camps. On the one hand, HBO president Michael Lombardo said, “Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely.” Meanwhile, show creator Dan Weiss said that if they “try to push it” pass their planned run of 13 more episodes after this season, their fear is that Game of Thrones “falls apart and loses its heat.” Weiss, David Benioff, and Lombardo seem to have reached a compromise of two final shortened seasons, but there’s a third option that would keep the world of Westeros alive and well on HBO: a spin-off. And author George R.R. Martin is game.

“There’s enormous storytelling to be mined in a prequel,” Lombardo said last summer, and Martin, who has already written several volumes on the expanded Game of Thrones universe, agrees. “There is certainly no lack of material,” Martin told Entertainment Weekly. “Every episode of The Naked City—one of the television shows I watched as a kid—ended with a voice-over: ‘There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’ There are eight million stories in Westeros as well . . . and even more in Essos and the lands beyond. A whole world full of stories, waiting to be told . . . if indeed HBO is interested.”

Martin even has a specific idea in mind. Is it Robert’s Rebellion—the clash between Robert Baratheon and Aerys Targaryen featuring a young Ned Stark and Jaime Lannister? Or is it the original Dance of Dragons tale featuring young sexy Targaryens going to war on the backs of their fire-breathing pets? It’s . . .not. “The most natural follow-up would be an adaptation of my Dunk & Egg stories,” Martin says referring to the series of novellas he wrote that are set 89 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire. “Each of the novellas could easily be done as a two-hour stand-alone movie for television; that would probably be the ideal way to do them, rather than as an ongoing weekly series. The Hedge Knight and its sequels are lighter [in tone] than A Song of Ice and Fire, more in the realm of action/adventure.”

The stories, though certainly engrossing enough for die-hard A Song of Ice and Fire fans, are sadly a little low on some of the elements that make the show such a hit for HBO. To put it in Ian McShane terms, there are few tits and no dragons. They take place during a time when the magic of White Walkers, Red Women, dragons, etc. has abandoned Westeros and follow the chivalrous adventures of Dunk (Ser Duncan the Tall) and his squire Egg (who would become King Aegon V Targaryen of Westeros). This would be like the travels of Pod and Brienne stretched out over several hours, minus the subversive thrill of Brienne’s gender. Appealing to many, but maybe not the world-wide hit HBO would be hoping for.

Martin has actually wanted to adapt these Dunk & Egg stories into some kind of filmed property for awhile now, but admits there’s a snag. “HBO, when acquiring the rights to the Song of Ice and Fire novels, also acquired film and television rights to the world of Westeros. So if we did Dunk & Egg with anyone else, we would need to remove all the references to House Targaryen, the Iron Throne, etc.,” he wrote back in 2014.

There’s another reason why, beyond content, a Dunk & Egg series (or series of movies) is unlikely to happen at HBO. Weiss and Benioff told Variety just last week that they have no intention in dabbling in Game of Thrones sequels, prequels, or spin-offs. And even Lombardo, when he originally mentioned the possibility of a spin-off, said, “What I’m not going to do is have a show continue past where the creators believe where they feel they’ve finished with the story.” Knowing that Weiss and Benioff are not interested, Lombardo has doubled down on his original statement. “That’s never the way we’ve done our best work,” he told Variety, dismissing the idea of a spin-off. “I can’t imagine, if it were not driven by [Weiss and Benioff], that that would happen.”

Martin can keep dreaming, but for now it looks like those dreams will be confined to the written page.