I am 💯 convinced he’s been done with all the material for years and it will all get released on his death. He had a huge amount of leverage for those last deals and he’s paid for all time based on what he made from HBO.
My guess? He just didn’t like what he saw in those last seasons, and doesn’t feel like he owes anyone anything. Maybe we’ll get the rest when he passes, but he’s probably just not worried about it and living his life.
If you want to call it that, then yes. I fear that to him, this is a big project he is no longer excited to finish. Like learning a language and then losing interest or building something in your backyard.
First progress slows down, than nothing happens anymore and finally, after years, you cancel Babel, clean up that stuff in the backyard and let go of your unfinished book series that has build way too high expectations anyway.
I’ve been telling people this since somewhere around 2014/2015 when I read the third book. The first two books were well thought out, the plot moved, the exposition had purpose and was driving toward something. While I was about 2/3 of the way through the book I realized that it felt like GRRM had changed his mind about what he wanted to do with the story. The book no longer seemed focused on a destination, it seemed focused on moving characters around so that he could make something different work instead. But doing that new thing meant killing off 75% of the characters he’d spent two books developing, so he had to replace them with new ones, who were less developed, kind of cardboard cutouts of the previous ones. But now these new characters stories needed to be fleshed out so he could make their involvement make sense. In doing that he realized he couldn’t slot them in to accomplish the goals he needed to complete the story. So he kept expanding the web, expanding the universe, but never really having a plan or path in place to make it all come back together. And that’s where he’s been for over a decade.
He hasn’t finished the books because he doesn’t know how to at this point. He can’t get everything tied together, he can’t go back to the story he wanted to tell because he killed off pieces necessary to make it happen, and the replacements didn’t fit where he needed them to.
I stopped reading after the third book too, and that’s exactly the sense I got.
There’s no conclusions, just character deaths. It’s just an unraveling web that becomes less and less coherent the further it goes.
I’ve read all of them, though not very closely. Unless it was one of a handful of important characters by the 4th book I had absolutely no clue who anybody was. Names kept getting dropped like I’m supposed to know who this person is but there are so goddamn many it’s impossible to keep track.
The last two books are like 3/4s just moving people around, and literally everything interesting that happens happens in the last 250-300 pages or so.
I gave up on finishing those books years ago. It’s been long enough I hardly remember what happened in the last one and the next one isn’t even on the horizon as far as I can tell. It’s not happening.
