User blog comment:Werthead/Official: producers will not wait for Martin to finish the books/@comment-5014364-20130329174340

I've suspected 7-8 seasons based on the simple fact that it's a seven book series and book three is officially being split in half to make two seasons. So "eight seasons" is my functional assumption.

I kind of think of the end of book three as more of the end of the first "third" of the story, seeing as the books were originally planned as a trilogy, and book three's events were supposed to be the end of "book one".

Yeah, I don't know how they do their math:  3 seasons isn't "half" of 8 seasons, closer to a third. Maybe they're just talking about raw number of hours of TV produced, the later books cram stuff in.

Whatever. Approaching this rationally, there is little to debate:

GRRM will finish Book 6, The Winds of Winter, before the corresponding season - Season 7 - is produced. Of that we're all but certain.

I hate how this gets hyped up so much:  the only real fear is that the SINGLE, FINAL season may have to be made before the corresponding book is finished.

Even so, it's not as if the material doesn't exist in some form:  by that point GRRM will only have one more book to go, and it will at least be available to the TV writers in *rough draft* form, i.e. authors don't just blindly write an episode at a time. Martin has had a general idea of how the major character arcs end for years, and over time has been able to refine this more and more.

So by Season 8 Martin will have enough manuscript material for the final novel, "A Dream of Spring", for the TV series to work on, without having to resort to "making stuff up".

It's a difference of one book, not "books" plural. I'm not too concerned. It's small enough of a difference that they shouldn't stop production for it (the child characters would age too much).