The TV show has ruined any chance of that series ever being completed. The man is old and now has fuck you HBO money. He should just tell people he's not going to finish it and hand it off to someone else.
It's wandered into Half-Life 3 territory. Being both iconic for how long the fans have waited for it, and a product that's meant to be the climax of a high-profile series, there's no way it can live up to the hype.
We all know it's going to be finished by Brandon Sanderson, the Computer Associates of moribund, out-of-control fantasy series.
Nah. What ruined it was the fan response to the ending.
That for aure was the ending he had intended for the books and provided to D&D with his outline of major plots points... There's no way they made that up on their own. The dramatically negative response to the ending means he would have to redevelop the entire ending again.
Most people didn't really hate the HBO ending that much after reflecting on it. What we hated was how God damn rushed and sloppily it was done. We were also furious how poorly the Battle for Winterfell was done. If they'd done the proper arc for Daenerys descending into madness, more of Bran being positioned for taking the throne, etc etc, it wouldn't have fallen nearly as flat. Instead, the show skipped all of that development and so all the character choices felt completely random and stupid.
Anyway, I agree with you that that's why he's lost motivation for it. Iirc, he initially supported D&D and said that was the intended ending. It wasn't until later that he backtracked and said that it wasn't. But, yeah, we're never going to get the last books.
Is there anywhere we can find a translation yet or is it too early?
Looks like it's the 2015 discovery:
It was a handful of extra lines that described the Cedar Forest being much more lively and noisy, acting like a whole royal court, than previous versions. It also showed that the whole tablet was much more recent than previously thought.
Gilgamesh, a king. Gilgamesh, a king, at Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. They cried out aloud, send us a companion for our king. Spare us from his madness. Enkidu, a wild man from the forest, entered the city. They fought in the temple. They fought in the street. Gilgamesh defeated Enkidu. They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.
The new friends went out into the desert together, where the great bull of heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the bull by the tail. Gilgamesh struck it with his sword.
They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, 'he who was my companion through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.
Given that the Epic of Gilgamesh was something copy pasted to train scholars and stonemasons for centuries if not millennium, how can we be sure this is canon?
I almost forgot about ASOIAF completely. I still remember when A Feast for Crows came out after a couple of years of waiting, and how eager I was to read it. And A Dance with Dragons was generally an unenjoyable mess for me, feels like a forced afterthought.
It's been almost 20 years, time to give up GRRM. I'm sure you have a couple more unrealized ideas that took a backseat while you finished it.
that shit looks like it's written in size 4 font. were Babylonians ant-sized?
Clay tends to be heavy as shit, so writing tiny means that you don't nead a mule team to bring the reciept for the bad copper.
Finally! I'm still waiting for Chess 2.0 though
A Dance With Dragons took him 6 years to write. It's been 13 years since then. Even if Winds of Winter came out tomorrow, it would take him 26 years to write A Dream of Spring given that each book takes twice the time the previous one did. Sadly it's vaporware at this point.
Oh good, another chance for people to casually talk about how they expect a person to die soon.
I don't think it's so much that people expect GRRM to die soon -- nevermind the fact that he's well into his 70s and rumors about his health are irrepressible -- as it is that the most recent book in the series was released thirteen years ago.
Between the first two books, there were two years, then another two years for book 3, then five years, then six. It's simply a matter of an unfavorable mathematical progression. Even if by some miracle he drops Winds of Winter tomorrow, the planned final book would seemingly take at least as long again to finish, and given the difficulty of endings, probably much longer than that. GRRM could live to 100 and we would be lucky to see him complete this series.
"Soon" doesn't even come into it.
You've just jumped at the opportunity to prove my point.
I love to read and I have loved reading the ASOIAF series and of course I'd love to get to the end (I never bothered to watch the TV show). But I can't get my head around the entitlement to that finale meaning I can complain about another human's mortality! If I get them then great, but the constant need to piss and moan about it just baffles me.
