At the Emmy Awards ceremony, Games of Thrones picked up its 38th Emmy, which makes it the most successful fiction programme in the history of the awards.
There’s hardly anything left to be said about the series, such a huge enterprise that it employs 250 people just in the cast, with the crew of more than 700 filming simultaneously in three countries. But the show, though it’s made the fictional continent Westeros an international hit and almost threatens to make fantasy respectable, is only part of the story; or rather, only one version of the story. Though its first season was a faithful adaptation of Game of Thrones, that’s merely the first part in George RR Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. From the second season on, the TV show began to diverge from the books; the season currently being filmed is the seventh, and like the last season (and bits of the fifth) it draws on the sixth novel in the sequence, The Winds of Winter.
The only thing, as readers will already know, is that Mr Martin hasn’t actually published The Winds of Winter yet. And it’s not even the final book; it is to be followed by A Dream of Spring.
In one way, none of this matters much since books are not the same things as adaptations. Sometimes films and TV shows are even better than their source material but even if someone makes a terrible film of a good book, it doesn’t ruin the book. The book’s still there, after all, its qualities entirely unaffected by the efforts of – to pick a name at random – Baz Luhrmann.
But then F Scott Fitzgerald did finish The Great Gatsby. It’s more worrying when you haven’t got the book. And George RR Martin is as likely to miss a deadline as the other George Martin was to mention The Beatles; just this week his publishers denied a publication date (suggested by a listing on Amazon) of March next year.
I say good for George, who celebrates his 68th birthday today. He is presumably now as rich as Croesus and, if he takes his time writing, it’s nobody’s business but his own. It may make his publishers a bit jumpy but the fans clamouring to read the next instalment should shut up and give him some peace.
Mr Martin can’t now have his lunch without someone tweeting a picture of him and asking why he isn’t locked in a dungeon writing. Actually, that was me, at the World Science Fiction Convention in London in 2014 but I was quite rightly told off by one of his editors. As the writer Neil Gaiman once pointed out: “George RR Martin is not your bitch.”
This is naturally annoying for those of us keen to read on but it has the virtue of being unavoidably true. The entitlement of fans is becoming so absurd that JK Rowling is routinely berated by her readers when she makes a statement about her own characters. It’s too much. Postmodern criticism may insist a novel is a collaboration between reader and writer but, let’s face it, we know who’s doing most of the work.
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