steampunk – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 348

The Masque of the Red Death (1932) by John Buckland Wright.

• Thanks to MeadesShrine I’ve been working my way through Jonathan Meades’ television essays so this is timely: The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, an “anti-cookbook” by the man with forthright opinions.

• “‘Decopunk’ deserves to be bigger than Steampunk,” says Sam Reader. I consider my work on Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia to be more Futurist than Deco but the period is right.

• “Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!”: 366 Weird Movies

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one—not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

George Orwell discussing the imprecise application of the “F” word

• At The Psychedelic Museum, a report on this month’s art show, Alice’s Adventures in Underground Culture.

• M. John Harrison announces a new story collection which will be published later this year by Comma Press.

• Mixes of the week: Iceland: Foreboding Joy by Abigail Ward, and Secret Thirteen Mix 211 by Fluxion.

• Daisy Woodward on how LSD adventures inspired John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs.

• More Moomins: Graeme Miller talks to Patrick Clarke about his soundtrack music.

• Some recent cultural highlights as chosen by Timothy J. Jarvis.

• Benge presents a list of his favourite electronic albums.

• Is this the underground Everest?

• Strange Things Are Happening (1968) by Rings & Things | Strange Magic (1975) by Electric Light Orchestra | Strange (1977) by Wire |

The George Dower Trilogy by KW Jeter

My latest covers for Angry Robot are a return to the world of steampunk, and also a return to the novels of KW Jeter, the man who not only wrote some of the pioneering novels of the sub-genre but also invented the term steampunk in the first place. Infernal Devices was one of the pioneering texts, and it’s a book that’s been very good to me in its earlier Angry Robot edition, with a cover design that’s been well-received around the world. (It still pops up regularly on the front page of Goodreads.)

The brief for the republication was to create fresh covers for Infernal Devices and for its two sequels; the second of these, Fiendish Schemes, was first published by Tor with (at the author’s request) another cover of mine that matched the Angry Robot design. Grim Expectations is a new novel which makes George Dower’s adventures in an alternate-history Britain into a trilogy. The request for the new designs was to avoid the detailed Victoriana of the earlier editions in favour of something that would suit the content but be a little more restrained. Mention was made of the Picador covers for Italo Calvino that Gary Day-Ellison designed with the Quay Brothers in the 1980s. Those covers are personal favourites so I was happy to use a similar vertical division with small illustrative elements, the details of which relate to the stories but without being too literal. My designs are a lot more florid in comparison to the Calvinos but then the content demanded a shift of emphasis. After having created a lot of steampunk art emblazoned with cogs of all shapes and sizes the one thing I didn’t want to do was use more cogs on these covers. So the background pattern for Infernal Devices is cog-like but is actually an abstract design I found in a book of 19th-century decoration. Similarly, the circle motifs at the top of each cover are also cog-like but are more Victorian embellishments.

All three books will be published in June 2017; a long time to wait but there’s more about the new novel—and the series as a whole—at Tor.com.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk in the Tank
• More vapour trails
• Steampunk catalogued
• Steampunk: The Art of Victorian Futurism
• Steampunk Calendar
• Words and pictures
• Nathanial Krill at the Time Node
• Fiendish Schemes
• Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam
• Steampunk Revolution
• The Bookman Histories
• Aether Cola
• Crafting steampunk illustrations
• SteamPunk Magazine
• Morlocks, airships and curious cabinets
• The Steampunk Bible
• Steampunk Reloaded
• Steampunk overloaded!
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

More Things to Come

The organisers of the Things to Come exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel, sent me their photos of the show earlier this week. As with the other recent exhibitions that I haven’t managed to attend it’s good to see how everything looks in situ, and also see some of the other exhibits.

The art pieces are all related to science fiction old and new, with my airship illustration (as seen in The Steampunk Bible) and a couple of other works representing the old (or new-as-old) side of things. I’m not used to seeing my work enlarged to such a huge size so this was a treat. The only larger reproductions have been a window display for one of the Cradle of Filth album covers which filled a whole window of Tower Records, London, in 2001, and stage backdrops for Cradle of Filth and Melechesh. I can’t identify any of the other exhibits until the catalogue arrives but I really like the iridescent metal construction that’s lying on the gallery floor. All the photos are by Elad Sarig, and are shown courtesy of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. My thanks again to Doreet LeVitte Harten for selecting my work, and to Avshalom Suliman for dealing with the printing and other details.

Continue reading “More Things to Come”

Things to Come

Things to Come is a science fiction-themed art exhibition opening this week at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel. Among the works on display there will be a large print of the fish-shaped dirigible that I created for Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers, editors of The Steampunk Bible, back in 2010. After publication I reworked the picture slightly, adding a frame and trying out various tints, the idea being to produce a large version for print sales. I still haven’t got round to making prints available but I did let the museum have a copy of the framed version so its appearance at Petach Tikva is a first.

My thanks to Doreet LeVitte Harten for selecting this piece, and to Avshalom Suliman for dealing with the printing and other details. The exhibition runs to 20th August, 2016.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk in the Tank

Futurismo!

It’s good to finally have some new work posted on the front page of this website. I’ve been busy since before Christmas but everything I’ve been working on for the past few months is waiting to be revealed until the scheduling wheels have turned their revolutions.

And speaking of revolutions… Pirate Utopia is a novel by Bruce Sterling that will be published by Tachyon later this year. The cover was made public this week so I can post it here. I’m also designing and illustrating the interior but it’ll be a while before I can show off any of the rest of the design, especially since I’m still working on it. Bruce Sterling is a well-known writer and futurist (with a small “f”) who was one of the leading cyberpunk authors in the 1980s; with William Gibson he collaborated on The Difference Engine (1990), an early steampunk novel. Pirate Utopia is shorter and less ambitious than The Difference Engine although both books are alternate histories, the new title being a dieselpunk affair set in the Free State of Fiume, (now Rijeka, Croatia) in 1920. The story concerns the exploits of a torpedo engineer and his gang of rude mechanics, and features appearances from some real-life characters whose identities I won’t spoil. It’s a fun book to read, and it’s great fun to work on. The brief from Tachyon was for a cover design riffing on classic Soviet propaganda posters, hence the vaguely Constructivist style. There will be more of the same inside although I’ve been poring over the works of the Italian Futurists recently, and borrowing motifs and typographic cues from designers like Fortunato Depero. Stock up on the Campari for this one.