He will, however, excitedly give his opinion on another Game of Thrones spin-off.
Though George R.R. Martin readers will always click on any bit of news involving the author to see if he’s finally giving the Holy Grail of updates—Winds of Winter when?—it’s been an exhausting few weeks for both fans and Martin himself. He ripped off his gloves in a recent blog post (which he’d teased in an earlier blog post) to unload on season two of House of the Dragon. Soon after it appeared, the post complaining about choices made in the page-to-screen adaptation was swiftly deleted, but it still elicited responses from HBO and Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal.
Now, it seems, Martin’s decided he’ll stop weighing in on House of the Dragon entirely. In a Hollywood Reporter story charting various concerns swirling around pop culture’s current biggest fantasy series—Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and HBO’s Dragon—Martin was asked to comment on the Dragon kerfluffle. According to the trade, he chose to speak about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s next Game of Thrones spin-off, instead.
“I visited the set in Northern Ireland in July and loved what I saw,” THR quoted him as saying. “Great cast. [The lead characters] Dunk and Egg look as if they walked out of the pages of my book. My readers are going to love them. I certainly do. [Showrunner Ira Parker] is doing a great job.”
Reading between the lines, you can surmise that Martin is ready to move on from talking about House of the Dragon—at least for now; season three is on the way, and who knows how he’ll react to that. As the THR story notes, Martin’s outspoken criticism could very well be a holdover from his frustrations about how HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation, which earned great praise at first but stumbled in later seasons, was handled. “The previous series looms silently over this,” THR points out. “Martin is understandably passionate and protective about the world he created. He has imagined precisely how pivotal scenes would ideally play out onscreen and gamely stayed mum for years when Thrones took liberties with his material that he didn’t agree with.”
And speaking of Winds of Winter, Martin did offer a teeny update on his progress in a blog post shared earlier this week, in which he said he wrote “some new pages” over the summer. “Some” is more encouraging than “none,” at least! And just like Martin, we’re also looking forward to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, due to hit HBO next year.
