House of the Dragon author George R. R. Martin claims The Winds of Winter is three-quarters written

Last Updated on November 1, 2022

Game of Thrones has the interesting distinction of being a full television adaptation of a book series that has yet to be finished. When the franchise became one of the biggest TV series on HBO, the author of the property, George R.R. Martin, had not written the final two books in the story, withThe Winds of Winter to be followed by A Dream of Spring. HBO had a deal written into the rights that, as the show came to a close, they had the power to conclude the story however the writers chose to, despite having no source material to draw from. The final season has been the subject of scrutiny by fans as they saw it as inferior to the rest of the show.

It has since become a running joke with fans that House of the Dragon author George R.R. Martin may never finish the last two books, as he’s been writing it for the last decade. On Tuesday, Martin appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and was if the book is anywhere near close to being done. The Hollywood Reporter reveals his response to Colbert’s inquiry,

I think it’s going to be a very big book [more than 1500 pages] and I think I’m about three-quarters of the way done. The characters all interweave and I’m actually finished with a couple of the characters, but not others. I have to finish all that weaving.”

Colbert, sensing his hesitancy, asked if Martin was an optimist or a pessimist, and Martin responded, “Lately I’m becoming more and more pessimistic … we were worried about nuclear war in the ’50s, then we stopped worrying about it and started worrying about the zombie apocalypse instead. Now nuclear is more feasible again. We may have a nuclear war … but even in some of those old [sci-fi] books, there were always good people who would get together and reinvent civilization. Optimism was still there, even if the setting was terrible. Is it still there? Can we be optimistic about climate change? What are we going to do if Putin does use nuclear bombs? What do we want to do? I wish I had a dragon I could fly to the Kremlin.”