The long wait has ruined George R. R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter

January 22, 2026 — 5:00am

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And, in the year of our Lord 2026, we are still waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish The Winds of Winter, one of the most eagerly anticipated works of literature of the 21st century.

It has now been more than 14 years since A Dance with Dragons, the most recent novel in the Game of Thrones book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, was released. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin addressed the epic wait for the book. Asked if he’d “ever considered simply giving up on the book” – after all, it is his life – he replied: “I would hate that. It would feel like a total failure to me. I want to finish.”

Millions around the world want him to finish The Winds of Winter as well. After investing so much time and emotion into HBO’s Game of Thrones TV adaptation – the last true water-cooler series, an irreplaceable piece of pop culture, and sometimes voted the greatest show of all time – fans such as myself understandably want to know how it ends in the source material.

Part of us wants Martin chained to a keyboard, fed only bread and water, until he delivers The Winds of Winter to the printers. Perhaps sharing a writerly cell with J. K. Rowling, tasked with producing Harry Potter books until she expires.

I do feel for him. No modern author has been more relentlessly pressured to produce their next work than Martin. Every time he’s spotted with Game of Thrones stars Sophie Turner or Peter Dinklage at an industry event, or seen out on the town (dare forbid) enjoying his hard-won fame and fortune, we get mad.

Every time it’s announced he’s working on something else – a video game like Elden Ring, say – or dares to have a life outside core Thrones interests, or releases adjacent projects such as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, we feel cheated, as though he’s skiving off work.

Yet allow me to make a bold statement – to be the dragon’s advocate, as it were. The Winds of Winter, as a cultural product, as a meme, as a literary promise, as a mirage on the horizon, is overrated.

It is Schrödinger’s masterpiece: in a strange quantum state, both alive and dead, finished and unfinished.

As it stands, in its unfinished form, the penultimate book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series is perfect; a transcendent work that satisfies every fan’s hopes and desires for the series. But the moment it is completed, it will collide with a familiar reality: that no ending can live up to a decade-and-a-half of expectation.

Martin surely knows this. If he finishes the book along the trajectory of the widely loathed TV finale, he risks alienating readers. If he diverges from it, he risks invalidating the show’s arc entirely. Such is his predicament that he has reportedly referred to The Winds of Winter as “the curse of my life”.

Yes, the 77-year-old Martin is now 14 years and counting into writing the book. But quality takes time. It took J.D. Salinger 10 years to write The Catcher in the Rye. Margaret Mitchell took 10 years to write Gone with the Wind. J. R. R. Tolkien spent roughly 17 years on The Lord of the Rings. Crucially, they worked in a pre-internet age. They didn’t have to stick their heads into the dragon’s mouth of social media. They weren’t constantly bombarded with comments such as “Give us the continuing adventures of Holden Caulfield”, “Quit working on secondary literature!” and “You’re going to die before you finish The Lord of the Rings 2!”

Martin has instead fallen into the same hype trap as Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy, a project that also took 14 years, where the longer the wait, the greater the myth – and the sharper the disappointment when reality arrives.

Even if Martin has, as he told THR, finished about 1100 manuscript pages he’s in an unwinnable position. So I’m going to cut him some slack. In appreciation for giving the world Game of Thrones, I’ll treat the eventual arrival of The Winds of Winter not as Schrödinger’s masterpiece but as simply another worthy addition to an already remarkable body of work.

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