The Windbag of Winter
By publishing an excerpt from the next volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin proves that he genuinely is working on it, and may finish the series during the lifetime of one of Doc’s kids.
by Mike Schilling · March 30, 2014
By publishing an excerpt from the next volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin proves that he genuinely is working on it, and may finish the series during the lifetime of one of Doc’s kids.
Tags: a game of thrones
Mike Schilling
Mike has been a software engineer far longer than he would like to admit. He has strong opinions on baseball, software, science fiction, comedy, contract bridge, and European history, any of which he's willing to share with almost no prompting whatsoever.
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Sorry, but that proves nothing. The ‘latest’ excerpt is over a year old. I think GRRM is only good at editing anthologies now. Too bad, sure was a helluva start.Report
It’s a fabulous chapter though. Well worth the read.Report
Tough going at parts, but then again the life this character has found would be a tough one.Report
What’s the deal with all the underlining?Report
The Others have killed almost all of the scribes, and the survivors are making do with whatever punctuation they can scavenge.Report
It appears to indicate unspoken thoughts.Report
Remember back in school, when you wrote—like, wrote wrote, with pencils and pens—and your teacher told you to use underlining as a substitute for italics? For some weird reason he’s doing that here.Report
I hope he introduces a bunch of new characters in the last two books, kills off one or two more of the most central characters, explains nothing about the things fans are interested in -like Snow’s mom- and leaves all of the central plot points unresolved- e.g. Daenarys is not yet taking over the west, the Others are still futzing around, etc.Report
space awesomeReport
On top of the heap, at the end of the day, the sole remaining claimant to the Iron Throne with enough strength to hold it will be … Samwell Tarly.
On a related note, whatever happened to Rickon Stark? Crow food?Report
He’s on an island with cannibals. The Onion Knight has been sent to pick him up…Report
I’m rooting for Hodor.Report
I think you Hodor that you are Hodoring for Hodor.Report
@shazbot3
No, he’ll kill off everyone at the end of book 6, and book 7 will just be a description of the snow falling on their graves.Report
That’s what the Others are there for. He needed viewpoint characters who could spend 700 pages describing snow.Report
Did you know that The Others have over 900 words for ‘snow’?
While I’m at it, this egregious, literal “Othering” of the natives of the far North is one of the worst things about GRRM’s writing. Whatever their flaws, at least they are not Machiavellian, incestuous backstabbers, like some of our ostensible “protagonists”.Report
I don’t get it. This didn’t link to any TV episodes.Report
Lovely, how many years and he gives me one chapter from my least favorite Stark.Report
Really? I think she’s most people’s favorite.Report
Lotta folks like Jon.
(For me, it’s anything but Dany. I loathe her plotline).Report
It’s probably contrarian of me but I have always found John Snow and Arya grating and annoying, not interesting or exciting.Report
You like Robb and Catelyn more?Report
I liked Robb and Catelyn a lot. Especially when they were figuring out what to do with Jaime Lannister.Report
Robb is one of my favorites, along with Sansa (even though I know she’s a twit). Catelyn is a Stark in Law and doesn’t count.Report
Is it too soon to turn “Jordan” into a verb?Report
Brandon wins the internets!Report
At some point they’re going to have to include 10-15 minute montages of people staring at eachother and glaring at eachother scarily between battle scenes.
We’ll probably end up with something like this in Westeros: http://funnymama.com/store/130825/208496_v0_600x.pngReport
Nah, the show’s going to either stop, or (more probably) go ahead with writing its own conclusion if Martin hasn’t finished TWOW within the next year. They’ve already added a fair amount of original material, and some of the characters’ plotlines in Season 4 are already including events from A Feast for Crows (e.g., Brienne) and A Dance with Dragons (e.g., Bran). Season 5 is going to take them up to the end of the published series, and possibly beyond.
I wouldn’t mind Weiss, Benioff et al. writing their own conclusion for the show. Martin’s pretty clearly getting bogged down and has lost track of his central narrative.Report