Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

A Feast for Crows was eventually published in 2005, including the author’s note at the end of the book promising the fifth volume coming out the next year. That, however, did not happen and the growing fandom had to wait until 2011 for the next instalment. The Feast went straight to the top position on the New York Times best-sellers list²⁸ and it was also after its publication when Lev Grossman from the Time magazine made the famous proclamation about George Martin being “the American Tolkien”.²⁹ According to the New York Times Martin was thrilled by this comparison, but he did not forget to mention he has already outdone Tolkien in at least one respect – “all three of The Lord of the Rings books are the size of just one of my books,” he commented.³⁰
In the meantime between publishing the Feast and the Dance, HBO acquired the rights to turn the books into a dramatic series, produced and written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss.³¹ As Martin has said, meeting the producers personally played a big role in changing his mind about the possibility of adaptation. He recalls:
“We had a lunch together and they had read the books, and I did not know them beforehand but they said all the right things. They seemed real. You meet a lot of people in Hollywood who say, “Yeah, I love it, love it, love it.” But it doesn’t seem quite real. But I could tell, or at least it seemed to me, that David and Dan were real and they wanted to make the kind of show I wanted made.”³²
The first season of the Game of Thrones series aired in 2011 – the same year A Dance with Dragons was finally released.





²⁷ “George R.R. Martin on Sex, Fantasy, and ‘A Dance With Dragons’,” The Atlantic, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/07/george-rr-martin-on- sex-fantasy-and-a-dance-with-dragons/241738/.
²⁸ “Best Sellers: November 27, 2005,” The New York Times, accessed August 15, 2016, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEEDB113EF934A15752C1A9639C8B63. ²⁹ “The American Tolkien,“ Time, accessed August 15, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20081229125934/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 1129596,00.html.
³⁰ “A Fantasy Realm Too Vile for Hobbits.”
³¹ “HBO turns ‘Fire’ into fantasy series,” Variety, accessed August 15, 2016, http://variety.com/2007/scene/markets-festivals/hbo-turns-fire-into-fantasy-series-1117957532/. ³² “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: George R. R. Martin Talks ‘Game of Thrones’.”
While waiting for the fifth volume there were fans who got angry at George Martin for writing at slow pace – they even formed online groups to harass him, such as “Finish the Book, George” blog. “The nadir, according to Martin, occurred when so-called fans suggested he might deny their pleasure by "pulling a Jordan" on them - referring to author Robert Jordan, who died before he was able to finish his Wheel of Time fantasy series.”³³ Angry Martin responded to this kind of treatment with a Tolkien analogy, saying: “I loved Lord of the Rings back in the 60s and like many millions of other people I was eagerly looking forward to The Silmarillion. But it never would have dawned on me to write to Professor Tolkien and say, 'You better hurry up with The Silmarillion before you die, old man.' What kind of cretin does that?”³⁴ This eventually stopped for a while with the publication of the Dance and the HBO series premiere, only to become even worse a few years later when in 2016 the fans are still waiting for the release of the sixth instalment – The Winds of Winter. The current situation is now even more complicated by the fact that the Game of Thrones’ sixth season’s story is already covering the story of the yet to be published Winds and many of the original book fans are afraid of being spoiled by the series fans on the internet. Worth mentioning that the five years of waiting is not that much, because during that time, simultaneously with The Winds, Martin was also working on his “Westeros history book” titled The World of Ice and Fire with Elio M. García and Linda Antonsson, which was released in 2014.
Right now the fans are eagerly waiting for George to write on his “Not a Blog” anything concerning a possible release date for The Winds, but even in the most recent Ice and Fire related article (concerning the twentieth anniversary of publishing the first book – A Game of Thrones) he explicitly mentions even he himself does not know when he will be done, saying: “Here I am, twenty years later… still working on book six… (and no, sorry, I have no announcement to make on that front)”.<sup>35





33</sup> “George R.R. Martin: At the top of his Game (of Thrones),” The Globe and Mail, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/george-rr-martin-at-the- top-of-his-game-of-thrones/article4259412/.
³⁴ “George R.R. Martin: At the top of his Game (of Thrones).”
³⁵ “The Long Game… of Thrones,” George Raymond Richard Martin, accessed August 15, http://grrm.livejournal.com/496185.html.

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