George R. R. Martin says some fans of his A Song of Ice and Fire books and Game of Thrones TV show have already worked out the epic saga's biggest secrets. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Martin said that given the size of the A Song of Ice and Fire fanbase that has built up in the 18 years since A Game of Thrones was first published, it was almost inevitable that some people would have worked out Westeros' mysteries — mysteries such as the true identity of Jon Snow's mother.

"So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories and while some of those theories were amusing bullshit and creative, some of the theories are right. At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I'd planted in the books and came to the right solution."

But Vanity Fair, which quotes Martin's talk at the festival, says the author won't change the seven-book series' plot just because imaginative fans have guessed his roadmap.

"I wrestled with that issue [of predictability] and I came to the conclusion that changing it would be a disaster, because the clues were there. You can't do that, so I'm just going to go ahead. Some of my readers who don't read the boards, which thankfully there are hundreds of thousands of them, will still be surprised and other readers will say: ‘see, I said that four years ago, I'm smarter than you guys.'"