George R.R. Martin praises fantasy artists, refutes claims about his Winds of Winter progress

Yesterday, George R.R. Martin took his Not a Blog to discuss one of his favorite topics: the Hugos, awards given out annually to honor the best works of science fiction and fantasy.* For this entry, he discussed who he felt should be nominated in 2016 for the Best Professional Artist award. Unsurprisingly, his suggestions included people with whom he’d worked on products related to A Song of Ice and Fire, which seems like as good an excuse as any to dive into their work.

First up is Magali Villeneuve, a French artist who worked on the 2016 A Song of Ice and Fire calendar—that’s the cover in the header image above. Martin recalls seeing the work Villeneuve did on Fantasy Flight Games’ Game of Thrones collectible card game. “Her stuff impressed me so much that I told Random House I wanted her to do the next ICE & FIRE calendar. Magali knocked that one out of the park as well, as all of you who bought the calendar (it debuted last summer at Comicon) can testify…Magali has never been nominated for a Hugo. She should be.”

If the bulk of Villeneuve’s stuff is as good as her work on the 2015 A Song of Ice and Fire calendar, that seems like a no-brainer.

Martin also praised Gary Gianni, who worked on the 2014 A Song of Ice and Fire calendar. More recently, he provided the illustrations for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a short story collection that tells the tale of Dunk and Egg, two characters who loom large in Westerosi history. Gianni has also never been nominated for a Hugo, despite producing art like this.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms sold very well, which can’t hurt Gianni’s chances come nomination time. Hopefully, this’ll be his year.

Martin also talks up John Picacio and Michael Komarck, each of whom have contributed art to the Wild Cards books, a superhero and science fiction anthology series that Martin edits.

Also of note: in the comments for this post, Martin addressed a recent editorial that appeared in The Concourse, which is operated by Deadspin, which is owned by Gawker. Basically, the author of the editorial suggested that Martin had written exactly NO new pages of The Winds of Winter since A Dance of Dragons was published back in 2011, apparently ignoring all the sample chapters from Winds that had been made available in the years since. Nevertheless, the editorial became a viral hit, and the author was quick to dissuade anyone who might believe it

"No pages? Really?? Astonishing, the things you can learn on this interweb.I have learned to ignore crap like that. I was not even aware of this one until your post."

So there you go. Martin has written pages of The Winds of Winter. As for when it might be done, that’s still anybody’s guess, although sonething tells me I’ll be checking in with Not a Blog a little more than usual over the next couple days, what with 2016 around the corner.

*A solid chunk of Martin’s writing on the Hugos this year centered on a controversy involving a faction of Hugo voters called the Sad Puppies. More on that story here.