It has been over 15 years since the last A Song of Ice and Fire novel, and seven years since Game of Thrones came to a close with its infamous final season, and still, there's no sign of Winds of Winter, the penultimate book in the saga. It's become a running joke among fans that it will never be finished as George R. R. Martin gets distracted by an endless journal of side quests, but fellow author Brandon Sanderson, best known for Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive, is sympathetic.
Rather than constantly hounding Martin or bluntly telling him that he will be dead before the series is finished—which one fan even said to his face at WorldCon in 2025—Sanderson urged readers to show kindness.
"Writing can be a lonely profession," he said in an interview with IGN. "We all know the difficulty of a book that just WILL NOT work. I've been fortunate that books like that have always been side projects for me, ones I can abandon without it causing too many ripples in my career. The only thing that will lead to A Song of Ice and Fire being finished is our support, patience, and effort to remember what makes a book special: the fact that they are one of the few mass media art forms that are still largely created by individual human beings."
There's this notion that Martin owes fans an ending, a neat final chapter to close the A Song of Ice and Fire saga once and for all. With how long Martin has been writing Winds of Winter, most fans have resigned to believing that we will never see the ending, speaking of Martin as though they're already writing his eulogies, when he's still doing great work elsewhere. Sanderson instead argues that "George doesn't owe people books," because authors cannot make that promise.
"Who knows if I'll come down with a sickness tomorrow," Sanderson said. "I am literally incapable of making promises about the future in that way, the same as any person is. That said, I do think we, as authors, are making a contract with readers when we start a book series—and that contract implies a certain responsibility on our part. The promise to work on the project, to give it due attention, to try our best to get the books done in a timely way. However, this is art [...] I don't know that George owes anyone books as much as he owes them real, dedicated effort in producing those books, which might seem like semantics, but I'm an author. That's the job. It's not, however, my job to determine if George has made that effort or not.
"My gut says that he has," he continued. "And the fact that we're where we are indicates that this is one of those times when the rest of the world has to wrestle with a terrible fact we as authors face every day. That from the outside, this seems like a trade (like making cabinets) when in reality it's an art, much like making music… and sometimes, you lose that music.
Sanderson was also prompted yet again by IGN on whether he would finish A Song of Ice and Fire on behalf of Martin, should it come to that, and again, Sanderson stressed that he is "the wrong person," and that if George decided to pass the mantle, "he'd deserve someone who is as good a fit for his world as I was for Wheel of Time."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/brandon-sanderson-winds-of-winter-needs-patience/
