One question about the Game of Thrones TV series has reared its head with increased frequency over the last few months. That question is fairly straightforward: will we see this story end on TV before author George R.R. Martin can deliver the final novel in the series?This is a valid question. The Game of Thrones TV series began in April 2011, at roughly the same point in time that Martin was delivering the manuscript for the fifth novel in the Song of Ice and Fire book series, A Dance with Dragons. Dragons was published in July 2011 and Martin reported that he had started work on the sixth and planned-to-be penultimate novel in the series, The Winds of Winter, using roughly 200 manuscript pages' worth of material as a springboard to write the next book. Like A Dance with Dragons and A Storm of Swords before it, Martin plans for The Winds of Winter to come in at around 1,500 manuscript pages in length. Martin wrote A Storm of Swords (the third novel in the series, published in 2000) in about two years, so it was not impossible to write this amount in a short amount of time. However, A Dance with Dragons took five and a half years to appear, after a five-year wait for the fourth book in the series. With the well-publicised reasons for those delays dealt with (scrapping the original fourth book in the series a year into the writing and starting again from scratch; and a thorny timeline problem called the Meereenese Knot), it was hoped that the new book would take closer to the Storms timespan to complete than the Dragons one.As of March 2013, The Winds of Winter remains incomplete. New chapters have appeared, read out at conventions and appearing on Martin's website, and he reports progress being made, but no hard info on page count (a hopeful page count of 400 from a Spanish signing appearance a few months ago later turned out to be an erroneous mistranslation) has been given recently. In addition, Martin has reported taking on more projects than he should have done, with both The Lands of Ice and Fire and more recently The World of Ice and Fire (and its related short story, The Princess and the Queen) taking up more time than first intended. The result of this is that we should not be expecting The Winds of Winter to appear in the near future. I've been mooting a late 2015 release date (with the novel being finished in the first half of 2015) as a realistic date, and with Martin's work decks clearing to allow him to work on the novel full-time only this year, this seems to track (and only if no major obstacles on the scale of the Meereenese Knot arise).
In the meantime, HBO have reached their third season, which will carry them roughly two-thirds of the way through the third novel in the series, A Storm of Swords. Season 4 next year (if commissioned, which seems about 99% likely) will almost certainly see them starting to reach material from the fourth and fifth books in the series (which take place concurrently), which means that within not too much time at all they will be breathing down Martin's neck.
The question arises about what will happen next. The first thing they have to do is get through A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. They will likely take all of Season 5 to do this, along with a chunk from the end of Season 4 and probably a chunk from the start of Season 6. Whilst they're going to be just a book behind Martin fairly imminently, they are also going to take the better part of two seasons' worth of episodes (though extending across three actual seasons) to get through that material. Assuming that they will start reaching Winds of Winter material in late Season 6 and assuming Martin is able to publish The Winds of Winter in late 2015, that will get HBO the book at just about the time they'd need to be filming the next season (they'd actually need it for around June or July of that year, but the MS will be close enough to completion by then that Martin can simply give them information from that).
Of course, if The Winds of Winter is as huge as advertised, it may mean that HBO would take an additional two seasons to get through that material, extending from Season 6 into a potential eighth season. However, at the point another problem rears its head: how long is the HBO series itself going to last?
In the past, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have mooted anything from 70 to 90 episodes - seven to nine seasons - to tell their story. This gives them flexibility to end the story after seven seasons if the show's popularity is waning, or continue for nine if the show's popularity remains buoyant. Other issues will play a role in this, such as actors decided to leave or becoming so famous thanks to the show that contractual negotiations become prohibitively expensive (most of the original cast signed six-year deals, which will have to be extended come Season 7). But nine seasons is the longest the show is likely to go on for, and even that seems optimistic when you realise that no HBO drama series, not even the mega-popular The Sopranos, has lasted longer than six.
Even if we assume nine seasons is the lifespan of the show, that clearly leaves problems. Martin has indicated he imagines A Dream of Spring - the mooted seventh and final novel in the series - will also needed to be about 1,500 manuscript pages just to wrap everything up satisfactorily. That means a likely further 3-4 years (at absolute best) to bring the books to completion after The Winds of Winter is finished. This clearly puts the publication of A Dream of Spring and the arrival of the final season of the show at about parity, and again this assumes no major problems occurring. It will also cause problems if A Dream of Spring takes two full seasons or more to tell on screen, since at that point the HBO show is unlikely to still be going. It also means we will see material from the start of A Dream of Spring in Season 8 of the show before the book is published (which will probably be okay with most people, as long as the novel itself comes out before the ninth and final season airs).
This leaves us with a situation that would look like this:
2013: Season 3 - A Storm of Swords Part 1
2014: Season 4 - A Storm of Swords Part 2/A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons Part 1
2015: Season 5 - A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons Part 2
Late 2015: Possible Winds of Winter release date.
2016: Season 6 - A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons Part 3/The Winds of Winter Part 1
2017: Season 7 - The Winds of Winter Part 2
2018: Season 8 - The Winds of Winter Part 3/A Dream of Spring Part 1
2019: Season 9 - A Dream of Spring Part 2/longest realistic lifespan of the TV series
As you can see, this means that Martin would be required to publish A Dream of Spring by spring 2019 at the latest, and to give the showrunners material from it in the summer of 2018.
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