Now that HBO has announced a pair of new shows set in the Game of Thrones Westerosiverse (for the lack of a better term), it’s high time for A Song of Ice and Fire’s George R.R. Martin to weigh in on the next televisual representations of the world he created. While he doesn’t have much to say about the spinoff focused on the original Aegon’s conquest, he did mention the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms series, for which he hopes to write more stories to enable future seasons of the show.
This is adorable.
I’m not here to castigate GRRM for not finishing the sixth volume of the Game of Thrones series yet; if The Winds of Winter gets published during my or his lifetime, great. I’ll be thrilled to read it. But the idea that the author is somehow going to find time to write more stories about the knight-errant Dunk and his squire and future Targaryen ruler Egg over the next few years when his priorities have long been arranged is cute, to say the least. But at least Martin knows it. From his Not a Blog blog:
“Before we reach the end of the published stories, I will need to find time to write all the other Dunk & Egg novellas that I have planned. There are… gulp… more of them than I had once thought. There’s ‘The Village Hero’ and the Winterfell story, the one with the She-Wolves, and maybe I need to write that Dornish adventure too to slip in between ‘The Hedge Knight’ and ‘The Sworn Sword,’ and after that there are… ah… more. I just need to finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, and then do either A DREAM OF SPRING or volume two of FIRE & BLOOD, and slip in a new Dunk & Egg between each of those in my copious spare time… and that will keep me ahead of Ira [Parker] and his merry crew… for a few more years.”
So, yeah. He’ll get right to those extra Dunk and Egg stories after the two remaining novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, or a sequel to the House of the Dragon faux history book/source material Fire & Blood (which I didn’t even know was in the table!), or maybe that Wild Cards TV series people keep talking about, or god knows what else.
That said, Martin does plan on co-writing all of the episodes of the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms series alongside House of the Dragon’s Ira Parker, which will apparently focus on one of Martin’s three published Dunk and Egg novellas each season. So when the show does eventually make it to air — which will be 2025 at the absolute earliest — he’ll have three years minimum to write another story. Good thing he has so much spare time!