The good news is, though George R.R. Martin obviously hasn’t finished writing the book series upon which Game of Thrones is based, he at least knows how it’s going to end. He’s just got to get to there now. The bad news is, some fans have already figured out that ending, based upon the clues that Martin has already laid out in the novels.

Of course, lots of fans have their theories, and while some of them are correct, Martin is not going to let on which ones are and which ones aren’t. He has, however, stopped reading message boards because he hates seeing people figure it out, as he tells UK’s Telegraph:

“So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories and while some of those theories were amusing bulls— and creative, some of the theories are right. “At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I’d planted in the books and came to the right solution.

However, Martin is not going to let that dissuade him from continuing along his prescribed narrative path.

“I’ve wrestled with this issue, because I do want to surprise my readers. I hate predictable fiction as a reader, I don’t want to write predictable fiction. I want to surprise and delight my reader and take them in directions they didn’t see coming. But I can’t change the plans … I wrestled with that issue and I came to the conclusion that changing it would be a disaster, because the clues were there. You can’t do that, so I’m just going to go ahead. Some of my readers who don’t read the boards, which thankfully there are hundreds of thousands of them, will still be surprised and other readers will say: ‘see, I said that four years ago, I’m smarter than you guys.'”

Damn. I am not a book reader, but this kind of thing makes me really makes me wish I was because I love trying to figure this stuff out, and if the clues to the ending are already there, speculating would be terrifically fun. It’s not just a fantasy series, it’s a mystery now!

Of course, Martin says, only “one or two people” have put it together, and even if it’s a few more than that, it means the degree of difficulty is presumably high, which makes it an even bigger challenge, which means brb, I’ve got 4,200 pages to read and diagram and a Carrie Mathison wall to assemble.

Source: Telegraph