There is still a lot of mystery and speculation around the release of “Winds of Winter”, the next installment in George R. R. Martin’s iconic series “A Song of Ice and Fire”. The author has been pretty quiet about his progress on the book, and his fans are still wondering what he’s up to, as the negative rumors about the book keep piling up.
Some suspect that Martin might have given up working on the book completely, while others are worried that it might not meet the quality standards of the past installments in the franchise. On the other hand, it’s been quite a while since the last book came out too, and fans will definitely have some higher expectations at this point.
According to some of the more skeptical ones in the writer’s fan community, this is actually the biggest issue he has to face right now. The longer fans go without the next installment, the more they will expect from it, and subsequently the more disappointed they are going to be once the book comes out, no matter how good it actually is.
Recent rumors have taken an even more negative turn, with claims that the book series might actually face a premature conclusion after the release of this installment. According to these rumors, George R. R. Martin has been getting tired of working on the series, and the author apparently wants to put the pen down for good – or at least move on to something else.
This particular rumor immediately made many people disappointed, even though there is no official confirmation about this claim and nobody knows for sure whether it’s true or not. It just goes to show how powerful speculation can be when it comes to a series as major as this, and George R. R. Martin is probably right to avoid making any public comments, considering that they will be taken apart piece by piece by his fans.
Meanwhile, fans of the book series have been threatening to boycott the next season of “Game of Thrones” if the situation doesn’t clear up anytime soon. This might sound like a scary claim, but one should keep in mind that Internet boycotts rarely work out to anything significant.
As an example that gets repeated quite often, many gamers threatened to boycott “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” in the past, due to the announcement of certain changes in the game’s formula that immediately displeased many fans.
However, in the end, what we actually saw was that many of those people ended up playing the game and even enjoying it, as indicated by the activity in a Steam group specifically created to organize the boycott.
With that in mind, and considering how large the fan base of “Game of Thrones” is, fans might want to try a different approach if they want to make their voice heard. In the least, one has to remember that a large portion of the people who follow “Game of Thrones” don’t even know that the show is based on a book series, and won’t participate in the boycott in any form.
Other rumors about “Winds of Winter” claim that Martin has actually lost the manuscript for the book, but this was immediately dismissed as a ridiculous claim by many. It’s known that the author uses some ancient technologies for producing and storing his work, but at the same time, it’s safe to assume that he has a comprehensive backup system in place.