Shoe may be on other foot for George R.R. Martin fans

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This article was published 10/04/2015 (3831 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you watch HBO’s Game Of Thrones but have never read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, you’re about to get even with the geeks who have.

The fifth season of the richly imagined TV show, which premières on Sunday night, is expected to not just veer away from the Martin novels, but jump ahead of books the notoriously fastidious author has yet to finish.

The five existing novels in Martin’s complex knot of a story, which combines hyper-realistic medieval intrigue with elements of supernatural fantasy, were published between 1996 and 2011 — but not at an even pace of one every three years.

The first three books — A Game Of Thrones, A Clash Of Kings and A Storm Of Swords — landed on retail-store shelves within four years. But it took another 11 for Martin to complete the next two, A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons.

There’s still no publication date for the sixth book in the series, The Winds Of Winter, never mind the seventh and probably final book, A Dream Of Spring. Fans have famously taken to worrying the 66-year-old Martin will never complete the series, given his age and the slowing pace of his production.

A more immediate concern is that the TV show, which debuted in 2011, has already caught up with Martin’s novels, at least where several significant plot threads are concerned.

During the TV show’s first four seasons, fans who’ve read the books have been able to lord their knowledge of the plot over the TV-only newbies, sometimes spoiling the episodes mercilessly. Fans of the novels were also able watch familiar material come to life, albeit in a simplified or truncated manner. Dozens of plot threads and characters had to be excised from the Game Of Thrones TV series out of sheer necessity.

This season will see the most dramatic divergence yet, as producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been forced to depict events that may never appear in Martin’s as-yet-unpublished canon.

According to Entertainment Weekly and other sources, Martin has shared the general outline of his next two books with the TV producers. As a result, some of the events depicted in the upcoming season of the TV show may effectively spoil the books.

It’s a rare, but not unprecedented, case of screen producers taking over from a living and still-productive author as the primary purveyor of new material within a conceptual universe.

When has something like this happened before? Consider 2001: A Space Odyssey, the classic 1968 film, whose screenplay was authored by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and novelist Arthur C. Clarke, and loosely based on an earlier Clarke short story called The Sentinel.

The much more involved film led to a novel credited alone to Clarke. The book was released later in 1968 and eventually led Clarke to write a followup, 2010: Odyssey Two, which wasn’t precisely a sequel when it was published in 1982.

Odyssey Two nonetheless inspired a 1984 Peter Hyams film, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which wound up being more faithful as a sequel to the original Kubrick film.

To this day, fans can debate whether Clarke or Kubrick should be credited with the iconic imagery from the original movie.

Likewise, it will be interesting to see whose plot will be given primacy as the fifth season of Game Of Thrones proceeds to unfold. Martin is in danger of losing his authorial voice to a pair of TV producers — and give his blessing to the process.

Based on the trailer for the season, characters that have not yet met in the novels are about to share screen time in the TV show. For example, it appears that Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage — the closest thing Game Of Thrones has to a protagonist — is about to meet a dragon.

Other characters, such as the gentle giant Hodor and the prescient Bran Stark, are not expected to be seen at all this season.

What is certain, based on HBO promotional material, is viewers will see more of the southern kingdom of Dorne, including the daughters of the late, lamented Oberyn Martell.

In a reversal of fortune, fans of the books may be forced to avoid the TV show in an effort to remain unspoiled. But since there’s no guarantee Martin will choose to follow Weiss and Benioff’s lead — or ever write another word, for that matter — even the novel geeks may just choose to bite the bullet and watch the TV show.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca