For over 14 years, author George R. R. Martin has been writing the next book in his beloved fantasy saga.
The HBO series inspired by the novels extended past his writing long before its final episode aired in 2019, though Martin did provide the broad strokes of how he intended to end his song of ice and fire. His last book, which inspired , the -spinoff currently airing on HBO, was published in 2018. Frustrated fans think will never come.
I was one of those frustrated fans until last week, when both and HBO’s simultaneously existed in our shared cultural consciousness, both shining beacons of Martin’s influence, mirroring or mimicking each other. Now I wonder, do I even need ? For what it’s worth, it’s still unclear just how much Martin contributed to the story of 2022’s GOTY , though we know that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki reached out to him specifically for his fantasy expertise. that he was in charge of building ’s world and the backstory of some of its key characters, but we have scant details beyond that.
Does his writing exist in any form in the DLC? We don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, as his influence is like the wind in The Lands Between—it’s everywhere. Martin, Monsters, Madness, and More ’s lore is as heady and dense as that in any Martin novel, but with clear themes that echo sentiments we’ve seen from him before: the burden one carries when ruling over a land, the danger of those twisted and gnarled by power, the horrors that the com.
