We can barely handle the anticipation of one new Game of Thrones season, let alone four, but since when does George R.R. Martin do anything small? The notoriously labored writer reveals there’s even a fifth potential spinoff in development, in the process dispelling a few fan-favorite ideas like Dunk and Egg.

Ever the paragon of modern communication, Martin used a LiveJournal entry to update on four (now five) potential series, which he prefers to think of as stories set in a “secondary universe,” rather than a “spinoff.” Martin also clarified that none of the options would follow existing characters, or take place at any point after the main series.

Additionally, neither Dunk and Egg nor Robert’s Rebellion are on the table, as Martin doesn’t want a new series to compete with his own writing pace again:

We’re not doing Dunk & Egg. Eventually, sure, I’d love that, and so would many of you. But I’ve only written and published three novellas to date, and there are at least seven or eight or ten more I want to write. We all know how slow I am, and how fast a television show can move. I don’t want to repeat what happened with GAME OF THRONES itself, where the show gets ahead of the books. When the day comes that I’ve finished telling all my tales of Dunk & Egg, then we’ll do a tv show about them… but that day is still a long ways off.

We’re not doing Robert’s Rebellion either. I know thousands of you want that, I know there’s a petition… but by the time I finish writing A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, you will know every important thing that happened in Robert’s Rebellion. There would be no surprises or revelations left in such a show, just the acting out of conflicts whose resolutions you already know. That’s not a story I want to tell just now; it would feel too much like a twice-told tale.

Rather than simply working with Kingsman writer Jane Goldman and Mad Men alum Carly Wray, Martin claims to be working with all four to some capacity, including Kong: Skull Island writer Max Borenstein’s treatment and A Knight’s Tale scribe Brian Helgeland’s. The fifth writer’s deal has yet to close, and thus remains unannounced, but Martin says “He’s a really terrific addition, however, a great guy and a fine writer, and aside from me and maybe [Westeros.org curators] Elio and Linda, I don’t know anyone who knows and loves Westeros as well as he does.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee of any new Game of Thrones series making it to air, let alone more than one of the five already in development, but what other topics from the realm might fans want to see?

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