George R.R. Martin is facing bleak odds of announcing a release date for The Winds of Winter in 2026, according to a real-money prediction market in the United States that currently gives the long-delayed novel only an 11% chance of being dated by the end of next year.
The Winds of Winter is the sixth planned volume in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire saga, the series that spawned HBO's Game of Thrones. The previous novel, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011. Since then, Martin's occasional blog posts and interviews have been pored over by fans trying to gauge his progress. Hopes tend to spike every few years, only to be tempered by new side projects, fresh television commitments and the author's own admissions that the book has taken him far longer than expected.
