The author of The Witcher books, which inspired both the CD Projekt Red game series and the Netflix show of the same name, confirmed that he’s working on a new addition to the novels that tell the story of Geralt of Rivia, Cirilla of Cintria, and Yennefer of Vengerberg. It’ll be the first new Witcher book in 10 years—the last was 2013’s Season of Storms—but it likely won’t feature any of those beloved characters.
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According to fansite Redanian Intelligence, Andrzej Sapkowski was on a Ukrainian podcast called Fantastic Talk(s) and was asked what he was working on. Perhaps the man is preternaturally disposed to knowing when The Witcher discourse machine is chugging along, or maybe he has a special witcher sense, because he decided to just flat-out say that he’s “quite diligently” working on “a new book about witcher.”
“I never say these things with me because you never know,” he reportedly said (Redanian Intelligence does not detail how the interview was translated to English). “Maybe I’ll do something, maybe I won’t. And so far, when I said that I would write something, and then I didn’t write it, people complained as if I had deceived them and as if I had lied.”
“That’s why I don’t like to talk about what I’m doing until I finish doing it. Because until I finish it, I don’t think it exists. But since I always make exceptions for Ukrainians, I will do it this time too,” he continued.
Sapkowski then said that the next book in the Witcher universe could “take a year, but no longer” to finish. Geralt fans who are mourning the loss of Henry Cavill as the White Wolf in the Netflix series (he’s leaving for unknown reasons and being replaced by Liam Hemsworth), shouldn’t get too excited for more Geralt content, however, as Sapkowski has made it clear before that Geralt and Ciri’s story is over and done with.
Could the next book be a prequel, like the upcoming TV series based on Ciri’s crew of violent teenagers, The Rats, that’s currently in development at Netflix? Could it tell the story of another conjunction, another joining of different worlds like that one that kicked off the events of The Witcher, with elves and humans forced to share a continent together? More importantly: Is Sapkowski keeping the CDPR team in the loop? The studio is working on a new Witcher trilogy, after all….