George RR Martin is, as Neil Gaiman famously once opined, not your bitch.

It is eight years to the day since Gaiman wrote this to a fan on his website who had asked whether it was fair to feel that Martin was “letting him down” by taking so long to publish the later volumes in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. That was in 2009, meaning that that fan had another two long years ahead before he’d get his hands on the fifth book, A Dance With Dragons. If that chap was feeling let down then his disappointment must be through the roof now, six years later, still waiting for the next book, The Winds of Winter.

Still, writing books isn’t digging ditches. The creative spark cannot be harnessed and utilised like electricity, always available at the flick of a switch. George RR Martin is not your bitch.

But.

While Gaiman’s comment still holds, won’t somebody think of the fans? The culture of entitlement, where fans expect writers to be chained to their desks is one thing. On the other hand, six years is a hell of a long wait between series books.

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And fans of the books have four new reasons to gnash their teeth: HBO has announced four Game of Thrones spin-off TV shows, all with Martin’s involvement. With the announcement came some quiet rumblings at that last detail. After all, if Martin is focused on developing four new shows, The Winds of Winter could slip back even further.

Since A Dance With Dragons came out in 2011, there has been a trickle of details about The Winds of Winter. In 2014, Martin told a Swiss newspaper that he was offended by fans speculating that he might die before finishing, saying: “Fuck you to those people.” In May 2015, Martin thought it was “very doable” that it’d be finished by October – that year. Then, after writing “hundreds of pages”, with the occasional short story or anthology coming out in between, Martin conceded in 2016 that the latest season of the HBO TV adaptation of Game of Thrones would indeed contain parts of what is to come in his unpublished sixth book. Finally, in January this year, he responded to a comment on his blog that (tentatively and politely) asked when it was due by saying he thought The Winds of Winter might published in 2017 – while acknowledging that, yes, he had said pretty much the same thing in 2016.

While few of us would disagree with the notion that George RR Martin can write what he wants, can’t fans freely voice their frustrations if they have them? There is a tendency for social media dogpiles to hit unwary readers who dare say that they wish Martin would crack on. Yes, a thousand times, yes. Writers are human beings, not machines, and the crafting of of one of Martin’s weighty creations isn’t something that can be rattled off before tiffin.



But writers are contractually obliged to deliver on what they have promised, and not just to their publishers, who set delivery dates and pay out advances with the expectation of the agreement being fulfilled. There’s also an implicit contract between writer and reader. If the author says, “Look, I have his story but it’s going to take three or six or nine books to tell,” then by buying the first and second and third books in that series, the reader is entering into an accord with the writer: “Yes, I will devote time and money to you on the understanding that, if I embark on this journey, it will come to an end before too long.”

Martin isn’t yours to command. Neither is Patrick Rothfuss, whose highly acclaimed trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicle is currently one panel short of a triptych, and has been for some time. The first book, The Name of the Wind, was released in 2007, and the second, The Wise Man’s Fear, arrived in 2011. Six years on, there’s no release date for The Doors of Stone. This particular affliction seems to haunt epic fantasy series. Take Robert Jordan’s series The Wheel of Time: book one was published in 1990 and 17 years later, while working on the 12th and projected final volume, Jordan died. Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson was brought in to finish the final book (which then became three).

Perhaps what’s needed is some perspective from both sides. Writers and their more vociferous supporters perhaps need to remember that fans only bay for the next book because they love them and trust that the writer will deliver. Similarly, those fans should perhaps appreciate the work that goes into their favourite entertainment a little better. After all, there are other fantasy writers besides George RR Martin – Jordan’s books are all done now, and maybe the wait between Game of Thrones books is the time to discover them.