Kyll.Ing.

Funnily enough, just as this thread is starting to discuss Patrick Rothfuss, The Rothfuss thread is currently talking about when TWOW will come out. We've gone full circle now.

Now there are ongoing conversations about Rothfuss in the TWOW thread and about TWOW in the Rothfuss thread, at the same time. The board has come full circle.

Reactning to mockery by proving them right? Well, that's an approach you don't see often.

This baffles me too. I mean, he must be aware of the implications here. After ten years without news, the credibility of the series, as it were, is worn rather thin. Promising to release a chapter - one draft of one chapter out of the whole book - and then not releasing it will NOT look good, no matter what the reason for it may be. If he really has something worth showing (even in draft form, fans would forgive that), not releasing it only serves to fuel the fears that the book will never come. If he really has nothing, why would he make the promise in the first place? That's a very high-stakes card to play, as it puts his remaining reputation on the line. Was it done on the assumption that he would have time to squeeze out something in due time, and then he still kept failing? Or is he holding back for any reasonable reason at all? I can't come up with any.

Anna Volovodov had a pretty big role in Abaddon's Gate, being among the religious leaders who was allowed to pass the Ring gate on the Nauwoo (under whatever name it had at the time) and being competent enough to calm the situation when the fertilizer hit the air circulation device. Nami was her child who was back on Earth during these events. Later books had Anna as a POV character of the devastation of Earth after the asteroids fell, if I recall correctly. Nami didn't have a very big role at that point either.

This will probably keep nagging me until the day I'm too old to remember. In May 2015, he thought himself able to finish by Halloween that year. In August, he realized the Halloween deadline would be untenable, but a two-month extension (until New Year's Eve) ought to suffice. By then, it had been four and a half years since ADWD was released. And now it's more than six years later. In terms of the total time elapsed between ADWD and the present day, that missed deadline was a year or so before the halfway point. What was the state of the book like in August 2015? What made him think he could be four months away from finishing, and what happened that made the book impossible to finish in ... (counts) ... twenty times longer than that? Did he misjudge that badly, or was there an unexpected obstacle?

Or it could mean he has managed to set up an arc for the POV characters, and is tallying in his head: "To resolve all of this, I need five more chapters featuring Daenerys, six or seven more with Jon, four with Bran, eight with Brienne if I decide to go for that side arc ..." and so on for all his POV characters, and concluding that there will be a whole lot of chapters left to write even if some of them feature multiple of the characters. And then there's deciding whose POV to use in those cases, and in which order characters will meet ... That is not to say he is necessarily far from finished. The above is a sort of worst-case scenario. It's just that the statement is consistent with pretty much every interpretation on the scale from "the book is almost finished" to "he has only drafted a rough outline". In short, we could read anything into it, and thus should read nothing into it.

Giving Beric the option to die for an eighth time would sort of ruin his numerical theme. Also, it kinda cheapens the sacrifice of his final death, where he revived Catelyn. It's not entirely unreasonable for the hooded man to be Beric, but it would run counter to what was done to his character already. As for my response to the post above, well, see my signature. That was seven years ago.

I think there is a chance that he at some point gets a burst of inspiration and a burst of not-caring at the same time, and manages to patch together something fit to publish. Mostly by sticking with things he'd otherwise have scrapped and rewritten, and bridging the fragments with a few contrivances. But then none of the resulting pieces of the story would be anywhere near where they should be for A Dream of Spring, never mind the conclusion of the tale, and that's where the series is finally abandoned. In other words, best case scenario is that he manages to shove Winds out the door (in a state he's not entirely happy with, but it's the best that could be finished) before officially giving up. Worst case scenario, he continues to care too much to be unhappy with what he writes, and too much to let others finish the story after him.

Sadder still, I think, is how this view is really starting to solidify throughout the fandom. Even among the fans, few seem to seriously believe we will see Winds, and almost none have hope for the completion of the saga. Even these forums seem to be permeated with the view that ASoIaF will remain an unfinished tale and that the many mysteries will never have an official answer. The hype balloon is deflated. Future expectations are grim. At this point, I think I'm just checking these forums out of habit.

An example I remember is how Andy Weir wrote a prequel chapter for Ready Player One. It was accepted as canon by the author and incorporated as a bonus chapter in some editions of the book, if I recall correctly. The chapter can be read here: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/lacero.html I think Weir also has a sort of gentleman's agreement with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck that The Martian and The Expanse takes place in the same universe, only centuries apart. The only connection, of course, is a ship called the Mark Watney mentioned in passing in one of the later Expanse books.

Descending? We've been at this level for a while. I've seen many Rothfuss threads come and go over the years, and I can't really recall a single instance of us actually discussing the books. We usually manage to fill twenty pages of talk about how the next book is never coming. The conclusion tends to be that it's all Rothfuss's fault.

Before this thread sinks back into the unrecoverable depths of the forum, and before I forget what the book was all about, let me quickly air my thoughts on Truths of the Divine almost a month after I finished it. Beware of some light spoilers. In short ... much the same as I said above. It's well-written, but one eventually gets quite tired of so much of the plot hinging on various instances of "person X knows something that would change everything for person Y, but doesn't tell them". Like, this book and the previous could both have been done with in ten pages if Ampersand wasn't such a sulking idiot. Continuing from the spoiler, it seems like processing trauma is the big theme of the novel, while the alien stuff mostly happens along the way. It's obviously something Ellis knows a lot about, presumably with some first-hand experience too. The book certainly delves deep into trauma and how to get out of it. A strange side effect, that took me a bit out of the immersion, is that all the characters seem acutely aware of how to deal with trauma. Somehow the right words or actions for comfort are always right on hand, every POV character keeps acknowledging how difficult trauma is to treat, but that they are always deeply set on doing their best in accordance with the latest best-practice guidelines. It feels as if every character has been spending years doing therapy, on both sides of the table, and spends their free time keeping up to date on what the best practices are and how to best accommodate a person struggling with trauma. Lindsay is not letting any research or experience go to waste, it seems, but it has the strange effect of making all the characters seem like experienced therapists. I think I will read the reviews before eventually picking up the next novel. A month is long enough to forget some details and letting only the overall impression remain in my head, and generally the alien stuff moves too slowly and the therapy stuff is too voluminous for my taste. It probably fits right into somebody's taste, but for me it takes a direction I'm not too enthusiastic about.

The other characters I was hoping to see again would be the father-daughter pair of Praxidike and Mei Meng. Prax was last seen shortly after the attack on Earth, before the time skip. He leaked the genome sequence of his super-modified yeast and effectively saved billions on Earth from starvation. For this he got into some trouble with the Free Navy, but was released after they misunderstood his confession. The Free Navy ceased to exist shortly after. Whatever became of Prax after that? Previously, his daughter Mei had been involved with the protomolecule at a very young age. Presumably not in direct contact, but still, she has to have known how close she came to infection. How did that affect her, growing up? After the time skip she'd be a woman in her early thirties, probably starting a career around the time the Laconians invaded ... I think her perspective would have been interesting to witness, even though she might not have had any influence on the events that unfolded. Likewise, Annushka Volovodov was last seen boarding a colony ship headed for the ring worlds. Her daughter Nami would have been able to provide another interesting POV of the Laconian war from the perspective of a colony world. ... or perhaps it would just have extended the book further without adding anything to the story, I guess. Half the trick of writing good fiction is to leave the audience wanting more, after all.

There has to be a lot of Nagatas around if nobody ever thought "That Naomi Nagata sure is making a name for herself as a leader of the underground resistance ... and I know a Filip Nagata. Wonder if they are related?" And it's not like Filip has a lot of ways to hide either. He's a (multi-generation) Belter by birth, which means he's bound to a life in space or in weak gravity. He could not have found a planet to settle on and hid away in the crowds, but had to stay on ships and stations, of which there aren't that many. Doesn't the prologue of the first book say there were only ever about fifty million Belters at the very most? Add perhaps a few million Earthers and Martians living part-time in space. If Filip frequently traveled through ring space, or did so at all, his name would probably be picked up by someone in the Rocinante's orbit. Tall Belter named Nagata, there can't have been so many of those around that nobody would find it interesting. But if he stayed in the Sol system, well ... still only a limited number of places for him to be, and a limited-size crowd for him to hide in. And it's a crowd where his mother has a sizable network of connections. Then again, I suppose he could have died or changed his decisions shortly after we last saw him. Perhaps he walked a few hundred meters down a corridor, saw Naomi on a wall screen somewhere, realized he'd be asking for trouble if he kept open about his identity, and hastily changed it to John Smith or something.