HBO picks-up 'Game of Thrones' for a third season

HBO has announced they’ve picked up Game of Thrones for a third season. According to the pay cable network, the second season of the fantasy series has attracted 8.3 million viewers and is poised to surpass the Season 1 average of 9.3 million viewers.

It’s also been reported, though not fully confirmed, that the third novel season three will be based on, A Storm of Swords, will be split into two seasons. There are some advantages to this, of course. It enables the series to expand the story by not sacrificing so much of the original 973 page novel. But it also, perhaps, gives author George R.R. Martin some breathing room, as he is notoriously slow, but highly detailed writer. He has said that the original idea of his A Song of Ice and Fire was a trilogy, before it was expanded to 7 novels. Now their are claims that Martin will need eight books to finish his series.

By splitting A Storm of Swords over two 10 episode TV seasons would give Martin a chance to get volume six out, even though there is no timeline for its release. If this is successful, HBO would not air a TV version of volume four -A Feast of Crows- until 2015 and  (theoretically) split the longest (to date) fifth novel, A Dance with Dragons, into two seasons as well, in 2016 and 2017, with book six sometime in 2018. For me, I would hope that by that time Martin had finished the series, which he started in 1996.

Much like Stephen King, who spent a better part of two decades to finish his Dark Tower series, realized his own mortality after nearly being run-over and killed. Unlike Robert Jordan, who never lived to see his massive Wheel of Time series end, King’s near death experience gave him a better perspective on writing. It gave him the inescapable conclusion that while we all die, he did not want some other author to finish off what he started, such as happened with Brandon Sanderson, who is finally finishing the Wheel series in January of 2013, almost exactly twenty-three years after the first book was released.

Martin is 63, and while I’m sure he’s in relative good health, waiting -perhaps- another 5 to 10 years (if not more) for 2 to potentially 3 more books in his series is asking a lot, even for the nerds like us who devour this genre.

And if the ratings continue to be good for HBO, expect them to continue ordering new seasons on a yearly basis. I cannot see them ordering a new season without any books, though, so George R.R. Martin better get writing, or see the TV version end abruptly after book 5.