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Brandon Sanderson is sounding a quiet alarm over The Winds of Winter – and he’s using Star Wars as the cautionary tale.
In a resurfaced 2022 New York Comic Con panel, the bestselling Mistborn and Stormlight Archive author warned about a specific kind of narrative slowness that plagued Star Wars: The Last Jedi. With George R.R. Martin’s long-delayed sixth A Song of Ice and Fire novel still unfinished more than 13 years after A Dance with Dragons, Sanderson’s critique suddenly feels uncomfortably on point.
Sanderson’s ‘casino planet’ warning and the Winds problem
Sanderson’s example is the infamous casino-planet detour in The Last Jedi, a side quest he argues never truly pays off. “You’ve done something and the reader feels like the whole thing is spinning wheels to get back to a main storyline,” he explained, calling that sensation “another version of slowness.”
The issue isn’t side quests themselves, he stressed, but side quests that don’t serve the clear narrative promise. If Finn vows to find Rey, then vanishing into an unrelated subplot makes the audience feel cheated. For many A Song of Ice and Fire readers, that’s exactly what happened as the series sprawled from the laser focus of A Game of Thrones into the proliferating viewpoints and slow progress of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons.
Martin has admitted he’s “always had trouble with deadlines” and isn’t happy about breaching contracts over Winds, even as he insists the book remains a priority as of 2025. Still, the gap between promise and payoff keeps widening.
Readers of Westeros have heard similar concerns before. Martin himself has joked he’ll need to “live forever” to finish the saga, even as he juggles TV projects and side worlds.
Payoff vs. sprawl in the age of mega-franchises
The anxiety isn’t just that The Winds of Winter is late – it’s that when it finally lands, it might double down on sprawl instead of hard-won resolution. Martin has promised the book will open with long-teased battles in the North and Meereen, resolving cliffhangers from 2011, but dozens of dangling arcs still compete for page space.
Sanderson often frames good storytelling in terms of “promises, progress, and payoff.” After five main novels, plus years of theorizing and HBO adaptations, Winds has made enormous promises. What fans fear now is a book that spends hundreds of pages on new locations and minor characters when what they want is movement toward the Others, the Iron Throne, and Martin’s much-teased “bittersweet” ending.
The contrast with Sanderson’s own career sharpens the debate. While Martin battles one monumental manuscript, Sanderson has been steadily rolling out major Cosmere milestones like Wind and Truth (2024), prepping the English edition of Isles of the Emberdark for July 2025, and lining up December 2025 releases The Fires of December and Tailored Realities.
He’s also expanding into multimedia with the official Cosmere role‑playing game, while teasing Mistborn Era Three and global convention plans. That relentless sense of progress has turned Sanderson into a kind of counter‑example to Winds—what it looks like when a vast fantasy universe keeps its promises on schedule.
None of this means Martin is doomed to a Last Jedi-style backlash. But Sanderson’s warning is clear: after more than a decade of waiting, readers don’t want another slow, wheel-spinning middle chapter. They want payoff. If The Winds of Winter can deliver that without collapsing under its own weight, it might yet turn one of fantasy’s most agonizing delays into its most satisfying comeback.
