First George RR Martin, now Patrick Rothfuss: the curse of sequel-hungry fans

In Misery, Stephen King created Annie Wilkes, a fanatical reader who becomes so upset at the ending that befalls her favourite character Misery Chastain, that she captures the author, Paul Sheldon – then cuts off various parts of his body while forcing him to write the story she wants.

Looking at the building rage over Patrick Rothfuss’s failure to deliver the third book in his Kingkiller Chronicle series, The Doors of Stone, it’s all beginning to feel a bit Wilkes-ish. As BookRiot recounts, fans are so upset at being kept waiting for the novel since the second instalment was published in 2011, some are now discouraging people from reading the series at all, vowing to pirate the book when it finally comes out to avoid giving Rothfuss any money, and writing messages such as “fantasy authors are demons who are put on this earth to crush your soul and suck the life out of you while you wait endless years for the next instalment”.

Fan entitlement, particularly around fantasy authors, is nothing new. In 2009, Neil Gaiman informed a fan that “writers and artists aren’t machines” and George RR Martin was “not your bitch” for having spent years writing the fifth Game of Thrones book, A Dance with Dragons (which wouldn’t be published for another two). Today, 29 July 2020, also happens to be the deadline that Martin gave himself last year to finish the sixth book, The Winds of Winter. If he didn’t, he told fans they had permission to imprison him “in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid”. He hasn’t. Calls to lock him up have already (jokingly, I think) begun.

This time round, the impatience appears to have spread to Rothfuss’s editor Betsy Wollheim. In posts on Facebook that have since been deleted, she wrote that she had had enough, because “when authors don’t produce, it basically fucks their publishers”, and speculated that Rothfuss hadn’t “written anything for six years”.

I’m a pretty big fan of both Martin and Rothfuss, but I’m not sure ramping up the pressure will help either author finish a book quicker. As BookRiot points out, the expectation of access to creators presented by the internet creates a “truly awful feedback loop of entitlement and agitation”.

Brandon Sanderson, who is nothing if not prolific (and succeeded in finishing off another long-awaited fan favourite, Robert Jordan’s lengthy Wheel of Time series), told me last week that, on receipt of lengthy and demanding emails from fans “about how you’ve done something wrong, how you need to listen to them and do their vision for the character”, he tries not to engage. “That’s not a healthy relationship for author or fan,” he said. “The best we can do is say, ‘I understand you have your vision for the character, and maybe it’s time to sit down and write your own stories.’”

It’s about time we all listened to Gaiman. If you’re waiting for new book in a long-running series, from Martin or Rothfuss, “wait”, he says. “Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic.”