Ann VanderMeer – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Steampunk Reloaded

Cover design by Ann Monn. Cover image by Dan Jones / Tinkerbots.

Here at last is the steampunk anthology I mentioned back in September and whose interiors I designed. This is another Tachyon publication, and also another anthology edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. I went further with the design for this than I have done for other Tachyon books, partly because if there’s one thing steampunk lends itself to, it’s decoration but also because the book includes illustrations from Ramona Szczerba, Eric Orchard, and others, plus a comic strip by Sydney Padua; adding extra spot illustrations stopped the pictorial material from seeming too isolated.

Title spread. The illustration on the left is one I created last year.

This is a sequel to an earlier steampunk anthology by the same editors but the contents are just as strong as the first collection with excellent stories throughout. (For a review, see here.) By coincidence the book is published in the wake of a recent (and inevitable) backlash against steampunk as science fiction sub-genre and cultural phenomenon. This collection can serve as a repudiation to some of the lazier accusations that writers are ignoring the moral and physical squalor of the Victorian era and the legacies of imperialism; several stories in Steampunk Reloaded address those very issues. For my part I’ve read Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld so I don’t feel in urgent need of a lecture on the iniquities of the 19th century, thank you very much.

While we’re on the subject, the cover of The Steampunk Bible, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers, has been revealed here. Abrams will be publishing this next year and having seen some of the interior pages it’s going to be a splendid book. More about that later. Further pages from Steampunk Reloaded follow.

Update: A couple more reviews here and here.

Contents spread.

A detail of one of the page footers.

Title page for A Secret History of Steampunk, a self-contained section within the body of the book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk overloaded!
• Skeleton clocks
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

Steampunk overloaded!

Yes, it’s the “S” word again, and if there was any doubt that this has been the Year of Steampunk here at Coulthart Towers, look at these recent works. And this is by no means everything I’ve been doing in this area, there’ll be further announcements later on.

The covers for KW Jeter’s novels are a pair of reprintings from UK publisher Angry Robot whose books will shortly be available in the US and Canada. Jeter is now famous—infamous, perhaps—for having given the word “steampunk” to the world in the early 1980s. This was intended as a jest after he and a couple of other writers (including a favourite of mine, Tim Powers) had written a number of science fiction novels set in the 19th century; like many light-hearted neologisms, it gained a life of its own. Angry Robot are reissuing two of these early works as a result of the ongoing steampunk explosion.

Morlock Night (1979) is a pulpy affair which sees the Morlocks from HG Wells’ The Time Machine using the Time Traveller’s vehicle to return to Victorian London and wreak no end of havoc. Infernal Devices (1987) is a rather more substantial confection involving a great deal of clockwork mechanisms (for once the clock parts are justified!), automata, fish people, and a device capable of destroying the earth. I’ve been producing a lot of engraving collage à la Ernst and Sätty recently but the technique seemed especially appropriate here as a means of illustrating works which themselves are collages of Victorian motifs.

Meanwhile, over at Tachyon Publications, there’s this cover for another Victorian adventure, two in fact, from master beserker Joe R Lansdale. Flaming Zeppelins combines a pair of comic adventures, Zeppelins West (2001) and Flaming London (2006), which feature a host of notable figures including Mark Twain, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody…and a talking seal. Publication date is November 1st.

Then from Tachyon in mid-November there’ll be Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, a 430-page anthology edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer which includes fiction and non-fiction from William Gibson, Caitlín R Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Cherie Priest, and many others. Also a comic strip, copious illustrations and a very full-on interior design from yours truly of which I’ll only show you the above page for the time being. Yes, that’s a mechanical ostrich but if you want to know what it’s doing there you’ll have to read the book. More about this later. And more later about The Steampunk Bible to which I’m also a contributor, a glossy, full-colour guide to the entire sub-culture which will be published next year by Abrams. By the time that appears I’ll probably be sick of the sight of clockwork parts, dirigibles, florid typefaces and Victorian decoration; I’ll be needing a good dose of Helvetica and Josef Müller-Brockmann minimalism to calm down.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Skeleton clocks
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

Weekend links #7

The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (and sporting my design inside and out) is now in print. The grotesque creatures on the jacket and inside are from a celebrated set of prints by Arent van Bolten.

• More VanderMeeria: my cover for Jeff’s novel Finch continues to garner attention. Artist John Picacio selected it as part of his contribution to this discussion of genre cover designs (thanks John) and io9 followed up by choosing it from SF Signal’s selection.

• Graphic design: the Ballets Russes at BibliOdyssey; Julian Montague’s “books from an invented intellectual history” at A Journey Round My Skull; Women, Snakes and Stalkers, book covers from the PK (Indo-Iranian languages and literatures) section of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library (also here); I want this book: Arabesque – Graphic Design from the Arab World and Persia.

• Photography: Richard Davies’ documenting of Russia’s wooden churches; Dave Walsh’s fata morgana mirages in the Arctic.

• Illustration: Jacob Escobedo at Sci-Fi-O-Rama; Mahlon Blaine reprinted.

• The gays: Oliver Frey (aka Zack) has originals of his erotic art for sale; 100 is the third book of erotic portraits from photographer Dylan Rosser.

• Silent Porn Star is back. Related: Susie Bright praises sexual expression.

• The Libel Reform Campaign is trying to reform England’s egregious libel laws. Sign their petition here.

• RIP: Victor Arwas, art collector, writer and scholar; Alex Chilton, musician and record producer.

• The record sleeve that’s also the record player.

• Song of the week: Guess I Was Dreaming by The Fairytale (1967).

Schott’s Physica Curiosa

Pages from Physica Curiosa (1697) by Gaspar Schott, a collection of natural anomalies and the usual debatable creatures which belong in a fantastic bestiary. Some of these are similar to illustrations from the same period which I’ve used in Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, due for publication soon by Tachyon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive