When I do reader surveys one refrain is fewer posts on science fiction and fantasy. I’ve honored this request insofar as I post very little on such topics now (in the early years of this weblog there was even a “fork” weblog devoted to this).

But indulge me for a moment. Many of us believe that the last season of the television show, Game of Thrones, went off the rails. There were some good moments. The episodes leading up to the Battle of Winterfell and that particular episode itself were good, I thought. It was just the rest of the season that left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

George R. R. Martin’s series has two more projected books. It has now been nine years since the last book. Martin is 71. It is certainly plausible that the next two books will be published, but I sometimes wonder, does anyone care? They’ll sell well, and be massive successes, but the tardiness and the fact that the television show ran ahead of Martin means they won’t have the impact of the first books.

It’s really strange thinking back to the reality of the fact that I began reading the series in January of 1999, which was now a generation ago. As it happened, I read Game of Thrones and Clash of Kings within a week. I waited a bit over a year for Storm of Swords, and ordered it early from England. In 1990 and into the early 2000s I evangelized for A Song of Ice and Fire. But the next two books took a decade. The whole of the teens somehow passed without another book. It will be an interesting cultural exercise to compare those of us who read the books over time, to those teens and young adults who are going to read all eight books of A Song of Ice and Fire in 2035 in a month-long binge.