Over the course of Comic-Con, George R.R. Martin let a few tantalizing details slip about what fans can expect from The Winds of Winter.
George R.R. Martin has ample experience at evading questions about the future of his epic A Song of Ice and Fire series. But while participating in Game of Thrones promotions at this weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con, Martin did share a few tidbits of information about the series’ hotly anticipated sixth installment, The Winds of Winter.
The first hint came from Friday’s packed Game of Thrones panel. While addressing the subject of divergences between the HBO series and his novels, Martin dropped an announcement that though Robb’s wife Talisa has died on the show, her literary counterpart Jeyne Westerling “is still alive – and will be seen in the prologue of The Winds of Winter.”
As the point-of-view characters of his prologues and epilogues have uniformly met fatal ends, some fans were concerned that Jeyne’s presence in the prologue boded ill for her continued survival. But, Martin clarified in an interview with Zap2It, this is not necessarily the case.
“I didn’t say she was the viewpoint character,” he explained. “I said she was in the prologue.”
Another hint about The Winds of Winter came from a Sunday interview arranged by the Marriott Courtyard. When asked for a hint about the coming book, Martin gamely conceded.
“For season five, I think you’re gonna really enjoy meeting the Martells of Dorne,” Martin said. “Particularly Oberyn Martell’s three daughters, the Sand Snakes.”
Noting that the three formidable women have been cast for Game of Thrones season 5, Martin continued, “I hope you like them, because you’re also going to be seeing a lot of them in The Winds of Winter.”
In related news, Martin also announced that for the first time, he would not be penning an episode for the upcoming season of Game of Thrones.
“As you may know, there’s this book that people are getting kind of antsy about delivering,” he chuckled to Zap2It. “It takes me roughly a month to do an episode, so I decided… to skip this one this season and just concentrate on finishing the book.”