/lit/ - Literature

George R. R. Martin Doesn't Need to Finish Writing the Game of Thrones Books

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/george-r-r-martin-game-of-thrones-books/

>Since Game of Thrones began, Martin has published just one new book: A Dance with Dragons, the fifth in the Song of Ice and Fire series. (OK, he technically released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but that was a prequel and—actually, let's just not speak of it.) Martin thinks he could finish the next one, The Winds of Winter, this year. Maybe. Who knows? Last year, during Season 6 of the TV series, the show fully bypassed the published blueprint of Westeros, the world of Martin's fantasy epic. Fans freaked out—how could he let this happen? George, stop going out and having fun, these fans demanded, get in your house and finish the series. The internet’s favorite joke since around 2012 has been to yell at Martin whenever he’s found to be doing something other than furiously typing. The animating theory of the joke is that it’s his duty—his imperative—to finish the story he began.

>Guess what? It’s not. Twitter, you, me, everyone, needs to get over it. The Song of Ice and Fire is not the Westerosi enchiridion any more. Martin's story, the world he built, lives on TV. And now that HBO is cooking up spinoff shows based on the original, it’s official: The TV universe has eclipsed the books and become the Game of Thrones canon.

>And that is fine. It really is. Not in a "the world is burning down around me and I pretend this is fine" kind of way. It’s OK because the world of Westeros is not a concrete thing— it's still being built. Hell, it’s being realized beyond Martin's imagination, faster than he's able to write sentences. You know who that's good for? You, the fan of that world. More for you!

>There's this notion that whatever came first—a book, a film, a TV show—has to be the sacred writ of any major pop culture property. That's simply not true, especially in the case of Game of Thrones, where the global phenomenon has largely been about HBO's series. And there's no reason the show can't be like The Godfather or The Shining or Blade Runner or even Jaws. (Full disclosure: That's a film I have a personal and ambivalent stake in.) The cultural impact of all those films surpassed the books upon which they were based. Or think about the Star Wars novels and comic books that came out after the original movies. Are they verboten? More than anything, they're just more windows into a world people can't get enough of—something Martin's future books are about to become. Either way, none of these offerings ruined the source material. None of them ruined the stories that came before.