George R. R. Martin has come out and hinted on what to expect in the ending to his massively popular “A Song of Ice and Fire” books.
The series has become exponentially popular in recent years since HBO adapted it for “Game of Thrones,” which recently won the Emmy for Best Drama Series. The show has been renewed for two more seasons, but with an end date likely in sight, fans are more anxious than ever about how it will all end.
Martin knows all the answers, but he’s not giving anything specific away.
“We all yearn for happy endings in a sense. Myself, I’m attracted to the bittersweet ending,” the author said in front of a crowd at the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism, where he was accepting a Hall of Achievement alumni award Wednesday. “People ask me how ‘Game of Thrones’ is gonna end, and I’m not gonna tell them, but I always say to expect something bittersweet in the end. I think Tolkien did this brilliantly. I didn’t understand that when I was a kid, when I read ‘Return of the King.’ You can’t just fulfill a quest and then pretend life is perfect. Life doesn’t work that way.”
Martin also admitted he did not expect the HBO show to catch up to the events in the books quite as quickly as it did.
“I’ve been hearing them come up behind me for years, and the question is, ‘How can I make myself write faster?’ I think by now the answer is, ‘I can’t,’” he said. “I write at the pace I write and what the show is doing is not going to change what the books are.”
There are rumors that the sixth book in the series, “The Winds of Winter,” will be released in 2016, but thus far it has no release date. Season 6 of “Game of Thrones” will premiere in April.