George R.R. Martin has revealed a set of new covers for A Game of Thrones and the entire A Song of Ice and Fire book series.
Revealed on his blog, the stunning new covers “capture the vastness of Westeros and the dangerous journey readers will encounter.” The five books are available in a boxed set and will be available online and in stores in October 2024, though no price was revealed.
“There is a raw and gritty quality to linocut and woodcut art,” the post continued. “A certain starkness that seemed to fit the stories, and a long history to the art form that felt right for this world.
“This cover design process paired linocut artist Mark Seekins and designer Tim Green, with art direction from David G. Stevenson. They worked together to develop sketches and carve the designs into blocks of linoleum, where the raised areas were inked and pressed onto paper. The covers feature several colors, which required separate blocks for each color layer. The finished prints were then photographed and incorporated into the covers.”
This boxset doesn’t include the entire A Song of Ice and Fire story, of course, as Martin famously, perhaps infamously, has yet to finish the final two books.
The next entry, The Winds of Winter, is so far 10 years late and seemingly making slow progress. Martin said in November 2023 that he’d written 1,100 pages of the highly anticipated book, the same number he’d written a year earlier.
No writer is blessed with producing a perfect first draft, of course, and Martin’s “writing” of The Winds of Winter will also encompass re-reading, re-writing, editing, planning, and so on, so there’s still plenty of work to be done without actually increasing the page number total.
Martin said in October 2022 the book was around three quarters of the way done, noting he’s completely finished some characters’ stories but still has others to weave throughout them. The overall progress of The Winds of Winter has become somewhat of an ongoing gag within the fiction community though, with even Martin himself getting in on the joke.
An estimated release window for The Winds of Winter was first given in 2011 when the previous book, A Dance With Dragons, was released, and Martin said it would take three years to finish at a good pace. That set expectations for a 2014 release date, but year after year, and delay after delay, Martin still isn’t ready to release the penultimate A Song of Ice and Fire entry.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
