This is essentially my theory on why GRRM still hasn't released the sixth book. He's essentially created plot tech debt that can't reasonably be brought together. I'm a huge fan of ASOIAF but the 4th and 5th books begin to introduce some serious story sprawl that makes no sense to start that late in the game. Most of the community on Reddit seems convinced that he can't possibly finish in two books (the series was originally planned as a trilogy, but changed to target 7 books). And it's pretty optimistic to think that we'll ever get to a seventh book given GRRMs age and pace of writing.

The final two seasons of GoT are an absolute mess but at least some of the blame has to go to George. D&D did a fairly excellent job adapting the story when they had the books to work from and only truly went off the rails once they had to start trying to tie things together from vague notes from GRRM. They certainly bear some responsibility as well, but it's hard to fault them for failing to finish a story that the author himself just can't seem to get a handle on.

I say all this with great sadness, but that's how it seems to me.

Totally agree with that interpretation. GRRM would seemingly get bored with a story-line or not have a planned resolution so he introduced a new one. Which is fun, I guess, but trying to tie everything back together again becomes impossible.

He wrote quite a lot about the difficulty of solving a series of events in Meereen in the lead up to A Dance With Dragons, which he referred to as "The Meereenese Knot".

Looking at this analysis on Reddit, GRRM mentioned this particular piece of trouble multiple times over a 5-6 year period ( https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2pp2m8/spoilers_all... ).

The crazy thing is that, based on what we saw in the series, much of the Meereen plot _doesn't even figure into the endgame_. I'm sure George has bigger plans, but Daenerys in Meereen seems to be at best the run-up to where her plot ultimately leads in the books, and yet George is spending years and years adding dozens of characters and solving a knot of plotting that seems like a sideshow! How he'll ever get to the point in his remaining lifespan is beyond me. The man is 74. Even giving him an extremely generous 20 more years of life, he's just not on pace to finish the series unless something changes very, very soon.

Meanwhile he's writing back story for Elden Ring, working on a series of TV shows, writing lore books and prequels to ASOIAF. Sadly the dude just seems to have lost the steam required to take it to the finish line.

It's extremely sad as ASOIAF is legitimately great.

I think he legitimately gave up on finishing the series a long time ago. Painted himself into a literary corner and rather then rely on some deus ex machina to sweep away the problems is choosing to never finish.

I guess the real lesson: unless their name is Brandon Sanderson, do not start a partially completed series.

> Even giving him an extremely generous 20 more years of life, he's just not on pace to finish the series unless something changes very, very soon.

Is he even working on it anymore? It looks like he is spending his time on numerous unrelated projects these days.

He makes token mentions of progress every couple of months, but I would not be surprised to hear it's essentially been shelved. My entirely unsubstantiated guess is that he hasn't exactly given up on it yet but is finding more enjoyment in other projects. Just like any of our long-languishing side projects, he may sit down and churn it on for a while here and there, but he's not spending full days at a time on it, or at least not consistently.

ADWD released in 2011. Even at his glacial pace it's hard to understand how he could still be working on it if he was consistently dedicating hours a day to writing. It's not like he hasn't produced anything in that time either, so yeah, probably just not working on it much at all.

> D&D did a fairly excellent job adapting the story

For the first few seasons yes. Not so much in later seasons (even way before the books stopped). They also changed many things that were not supposed to, for unclear reasons.

Yeah, agreed, I'd say the derailing really started around season 5. They did a great job up through A Storm of Swords. The 4th and 5th books are sorta tougher nuts to crack - absolutely rich with good stuff, but the pacing changes and the scope of the story widens. Those books are a bit difficult to get through on a first read, but _wildly_ amenable to a second reading (in Feastdance order if you really wanna experience it the best way possible).

I'm a big fan of those last two books but can see how they'd be tough to adapt well, especially for a show that exploded in popularity like GoT did.

The problem is that the war was over when Dani lands with three full dragons, the Dothraki, and the Unsullied but the series wasn't. The logical end there is a Lannister-que and it took a lot of ridiculousness to make it something else.

But it is Game of Thrones... simply kill off the characters as needed.

I think the issues with the next books come down to deciding:

- how the Army gets south of the wall

- how far south they get before encountering defeat (IMO they are the big bad, and if they don't make it down to the heart of the Kingsland slaughtering everything into a near-unstoppable horde, then the entire literary point of them is meaningless)

- how to plausibly defeat them

The failure of the TV series to address those three macro tension points to the whole series was the essential great failure of the series. They are the existential dread, they are old testament retribution for all the human sins on display in the series, they are nature's revenge for our failings as a species. An extinction level event where it's not just you dying, it's everyone dying. Really they are cold-to-the-bone fear that you're supposed to feel.

At this point why GRRM doesn't simply hire people to ghostwrite for him and he executive edits the final books is beyond me. There are fanboys likely of great writing ability and talent that would happily contribute for contracting money and not care if GRRM shovels the novels out the door with only his name on the finished product.

I agree on basically every count, and George has even said that this next book is going to be pretty dark.

Idk though. He's described himself as a "gardener" when it comes to writing. I'm not sure he'll be able to prune things down to where he needs to to finish.

Another tinfoil hat theory of mine is that the reception to the end of the series has put extra pressure on him to bring home all his plots in a satisfying way. It would definitely be a strange feeling to see some of your major plot beats happen in an unsatisfactory way before getting to release them in book form.

At least Preston Jacobs seems to have a plan for how to tie it all together for the fan version of winds of winter

I disagree. There were many plot threads but most of them were just uninteresting. Too many characters were off in their own worlds in full plate plot armor. They could die and make their whole story irrelevant because they were on their own; or they could come back, which they did.

The first two seasons were interesting because people were in the thick of it and their deaths were prior to their plot arcs reaching even their midpoints. I understand the books were more sprawling. But the show was very simple by the end.