“Game of Thrones” fans hoping for further adventures of their favorite characters in HBO’s newly announced spinoff series will be sorely disappointed, author George R.R. Martin revealed.
“None of these new shows will be ‘spinning off’ from ‘Game of Thrones’ in the traditional sense,” the beloved but notoriously slow writer revealed in a post on his official blog Sunday night. “We are not talking ‘Joey’ or ‘AfterMASH’ or even [‘Frasier’] or ‘Lou Grant,’ where characters from one show continue on to another.”
In fact, Martin shut down fans hoping for spinoffs involving not only beloved characters (“all of you who were hoping for the further adventures of Hot Pie are doomed to disappointment”) but also deeper dives into episodes from the “A Song of Ice & Fire” saga captured in the HBO series like Robert’s Rebellion (“That’s not a story I want to tell just now; it would feel too much like a twice-told tale”).
Martin also revealed that there is a fifth HBO spinoff series in the works in addition to the previously announce four — and that not only are all of them prequels but “some may not even be set on Westeros.”
The author also addressed fans of his three Dunk & Egg novellas, which will also not be the source material of any of the new HBO projects. “Eventually, sure, I’d love that, and so would many of you,” he wrote.
“But I’ve only written and published three novellas to date, and there are at least seven or eight or ten more I want to write.
“We all know how slow I am, and how fast a television show can move,” he continued. “I don’t want to repeat what happened with Game of Thrones itself, where the show gets ahead of the books. When the day comes that I’ve finished telling all my tales of Dunk & Egg, then we’ll do a tv show about them… but that day is still a long ways off.”
Martin noted that he is actively involved in all of the prequel shows, in some cases as a co-writer, and that four of the writers have visited him at his Santa Fe home. “We’ve spent days together discussing their ideas, the history of Westeros and the world beyond, and sundry details found only in The World of Ice & Fire and The Lands of Ice & Fire,” he wrote.
The writers already announced include Max Borenstein (“Kong: Skull Island”); Jane Goldman (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”) paired with Martin; Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential”); and Carly Wray (“Mad Men”) with Martin.
And yes, he insisted that he is still pecking away at the long-delayed, eagerly awaited “The Winds of Winter” novel in the “A Song of Ice & Fire” saga. “I will confess, I do wish I could clone myself, or find a way to squeeze more hours into the day, or a way to go without sleep,” he wrote.