As fans and network executives alike come to terms with the grim reality that there may be as few as 13 episodes left of "Game of Thrones," HBO isn't ready to give up on the idea of a spinoff.

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“All I can say is that we’re exploring it," Casey Bloys, president of original programming, told journalists during the Television Critics Association's winter press tour. "We don’t have any scripts, we’re not even close to saying ‘Oh, let’s do this.’ But it’s a big enough property that we would be foolish not to explore it. It’s a really rich world. We’d be foolish not to look at it.”

Talk of a prequel set in Westeros was dismissed last year by co-showrunner David Benioff, who said, “At a certain point, especially if it’s a serialized story, it falls apart and loses its heat and its momentum because there’s a carrying capacity even a world the size of ours has. When you reach that carrying capacity and you try to push it further, people start to wonder when this is going to be over and hope that it will be over soon so they can move onto the next thing. That’s not what we ever wanted.”

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However, author George R.R. Martin noted in September that there's plenty of material to fuel prequel. "I do have thousands of pages of fake history of everything that led up to ‘Game of Thrones,’" he said, "so there’s a lot of material there and I’m writing more."

The most obvious candidate for adaptation is, of course, the "Tales of Dunk and Egg" stories, set about 90 years before the events of "A Song and Ice and Fire" novels, and follow the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall, a future commander of the Kingsguard, and the future the future king Aegon V Targaryen.

(via Variety)