George R.R. Martin Has A Plan To Keep GAME OF THRONES From Catching Up With His Novels

 

After news came earlier last week about the hit HBO series Game of Thrones and what "might" happen should the series catch up with writer George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels, author Martin has told Vanity Fair in their feature Game of Thrones themed issue his plan for making sure the series doesn't catch up before he can release The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, the final two novels of his story of Westeros.

 The season that’s about to debut covers the second half of the third book. The third book [A Storm of Swords] was so long that it had to be split into two. But there are two more books beyond that, A Feast for Crowsand A Dance with Dragons. A Dance with Dragons is itself a book that’s as big as A Storm of Swords. So there’s potentially three more seasons there, between Feast and Dance, if they split into two the way they did [with Storms]. Now, Feastand Dance take place simultaneously. So you can’t do Feast and then Dance the way I did. You can combine them and do it chronologically. And it’s my hope that they’ll do it that way and then, long before they catch up with me, I’ll have published The Winds of Winter, which’ll give me another couple years. It might be tight on the last book, A Dream of Spring, as they juggernaut forward.

This is what show-runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss told Vanity Fair regarding Game of Thrones and the novels current time-frame:

"Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be," explained Benioff. "If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.”

It was made clear long ago Martin and the show-runners had gone over the future of the series, as the television show has already featured and hinted at many things not yet touched upon in the books.

Martin also said he isn't opposed to a mid-season break much like Breaking Bad  or Mad Men had, or maybe even a prequel season.

“I don’t want to sound too glib about this. This is a serious concern.” He continues, “We’re going forward, and the kids are getting older. Maisie was the same age as Arya when it started, but now Maisie is a young woman and Arya is still 11. Time is passing very slowly in the books and very fast in real life.”

A Prequel season, in my opinion, would be the smartest thing to do, given the series has a "no flashbacks and no fools" policy, fans of the show who have yet to read the books have not been exposed to Lyanna Stark, Rhaegar Targaryen, and many of the events that have a huge impact on the world. 

Game of Thrones returns to HBO this April.