It’s been six years since Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin last graced the world with a new book or novella. The fantasy writer likes to periodically remind the public that the beleaguered Winds of Winter is making some kind of progress, sure. The whole thing has been such a saga, though, that some fans are losing hope Martin will ever publish something again. The good news is that Martin is writing something that isn’t a TV show. Whether the specifics will actually make fans happy is a different story.
The latest morsel of George R.R. Martin news comes by way of a Hollywood Reporter interview with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker. Most of the interview is about the future of the HBO show, which has nearly finished filming season two. Inevitably, the conversation circles around the show’s universe creator, George R.R. Martin, and how the show plans to adapt his material given its unfinished state.
Previously, Parker stated that he wouldn’t mind taking a multi-year break after season three. For season four, Parker said he wants to bring back the same actors to tell new canonical stories. Not only is TV not produced that way, the actor who plays Egg, Dexter Sol Ansell, is going to age. There’s the risk that Ansell won’t quite look the part anymore, especially if Martin drags his feet for too long on the new material.
Parker said that Martin is currently working on the fourth novella in the series. Fans already knew that. Martin himself expressed some anxiety about the novella’s progress in relation to the show back in 2022. In 2024, Martin claimed that he would continue expanding the Dunk and Egg stories after publishing Winds of Winter… whenever that would be.
We got two new tidbits from Parker’s interview with THR. The first is that the fourth novella “takes place in a very cool location,” and that the fifth novella would be the end of the story of Egg as a boy. Older actors wouldn’t be an issue at that point, because the stories would be about Egg as a prince.
“[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 said.
Later, Parker reveals that George R.R. Martin has shown him unpublished pages to read. He describes them as “actual written prose he found in his files somewhere that he sent over, and we used them.” The showrunner said he received “extra stuff that as far as George’s filing cabinets are concerned — is canon.”
There was no indication if the pages belonged to a specific book, though presumably it’s the fourth novella. Earlier this year, the showrunners said that Martin had given them outlines of “a dozen or more” stories starring Egg and Dunk across their lifetime. From the sounds of this more recent interview, Martin has actually shown them more than just outlines.
Tough luck, folks who were hoping for a new Winds of Winter update. Worse: I am now starting to believe we might get a new Egg and Dunk novella before Winds of Winter, despite Martin’s promise that it would be the other way around. At least he’s writing something, though.