Tim Powers – { feuilleton }

Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife

Blade Runner turns up in Nicola Roberts’ television documentary but not for long. Back in 1994 it was still possible to discuss a popular writer by concentrating on the books alone rather than padding the running time with film and TV derivations. The BBC’s Arena strand excelled at these 50-minute biographies of significant cultural figures.

The last time I watched this documentary was on a big TV screen in a house in Los Angeles. Stepping out into the California sun a couple of hours later was like stepping into a Philip K. Dick novel, a slippage between the real and the fictional that Dick himself might have appreciated. Among the luminaries discussing the author’s slippery narratives are Brian Aldiss, Jim Blaylock, Elvis Costello, Anne Dick (PKD’s third wife), Tessa B. Dick (PKD’s fourth wife), Thomas M. Disch, Terry Gilliam, Kleo Mini (PKD’s second wife), Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson and Fay Weldon. There’s also video footage of Dick being interviewed in the late 70s/early 80s. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Blade Runner vs. Metropolis

World Fantasy Awards

Presenting some of the cover art and interior illustration from 2011 which won me the World Fantasy Award for best artist in Toronto on Sunday. (The complete awards list is here.) It was a surprise to be nominated, and even more of a surprise to win since working in different areas—book, music, comics—is never a good way to get noticed for doing one particular thing. It’s also the case that sf/fantasy art awards tend to favour painters or virtuoso digital artists over people such as myself who I suppose are more illustrator-designers; that’s not a criticism, just an acknowledgement of the strength and popularity of highly-refined pictorial art in this area of the literary world. The recognition hazard works in the opposite direction: the design world often gives the most attention to graphic design alone, with the illustration quotient being regarded as secondary content.

I’m not exactly sure what the judges were looking at of my work so these examples have been chosen for being published during the year under examination. They’re also covers that people seemed to like a lot, especially KW Jeter‘s Morlock Night (even though I still prefer Infernal Devices!), and those for Mike Shevdon‘s books. The Jeter and Shevdon volumes are all published by Angry Robot who will also be publishing Lavie Tidhar‘s The Bookman Histories early next year sporting another of my covers. Lavie’s novel Osama won best novel in Toronto while Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (editors of the Lambshead book below) picked up a best anthology award for their monumental The Weird. And to add to the good company, my regular publishers Tachyon saw one of their authors, Tim Powers, gaining best story collection. Congratulations to everyone, and a big thanks to Ann for collecting my award.

I’m always using these posts to point to other artists so it’s only right that I encourage everyone to go and look at the work of the other nominees. Here they are (although Jon Foster’s site appears down at the moment):

• Julie Dillon
• Jon Foster
• Kathleen Jennings
• John Picacio

John Picacio has a rather gorgeous calendar due out soon, details here.

Title page for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager).

Continue reading “World Fantasy Awards”

The Frolie Grasshopper Circus

For a taste of the unalloyed strangeness of the past you have to bypass the fine art and cultivated histories and look to the ephemera. The Frolie Grasshopper Circus (1898) is an uncredited booklet for American children made to promote Quaker Oats, and it does so in a manner far removed from today’s bland and focus-grouped campaigns. The combination of grasshoppers and oats brings to mind crop-devastating swarms of locusts. And who are these slit-eyed insect-wrangling imps? The one on the cover is wearing a pair of stilt shoes like Horrabin the evil clown in Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates while one of his confederates bears the emblem of some sinister insect cult. There’s more to this grotesque parade than meets the eye. The Internet Archive has all 16 pages if you need to know more.

Update: I’ve been informed that the illustrations were by William Cheseborough Ostrander.

Continue reading “The Frolie Grasshopper Circus”

Weekend links 61

Marbles and Butterflies (2011) by Jennifer Knaus.

• “Cutter’s Way is a cinematic masterpiece” says John Patterson. Yes, it is, and it’s often been difficult to see (although it’s now on DVD) being one of those cult films that rarely surfaced on TV or video. Another cult film surfacing at last is Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (yes, again…) which will be out on DVD & Blu-ray next month. I missed this Telegraph piece about the film. You want more? Lint: The Movie is showing at the Kino Club, Brighton, later this month.

• This week’s Eno haul: Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno; Eric Tamm’s 1995 study Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound is now available for free at the author’s website; Imagine New Times is an outtake from Eno’s forthcoming Drums Between the Bells which can be downloaded here.

• Mixtapes of the week: Demdike Stare with a suitably sinister and eclectic mix are out-curated by Current 93’s David Tibet who mashes together a unique blend of folk, prog, riffs, choral works and glam rock.

I began to realize the hypocrisy about sexual freedom in the feminist establishment was as bad as it is in the religious right. They do whatever they want. They look at whatever they want, they masturbate to whatever they want, they fuck whoever and however they like. I couldn’t even say everything I know in the book because it would just be too cruel and personally invasive. But I’ve had it with their lying. I spent so long trying to have these earnest conversations and now I’m like, “Fuck you — you’re as bad as the Vatican!”

Susie Bright interviewed by Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon sounding as happy and positive as she always does.

• The Gnostic #4 is out this month featuring Alan Moore’s essay on magic and related matters, Fossil Angels, and a piece examining the Gnostic influences on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

• “Nobody should be sent to prison for taking drugs,” says Richard Branson. Many politicians agree with him but they’re all too cowardly to do anything about it.

Untitled work by Kilian Eng.

• The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, The English Assassin (1969–70). A comic strip written by Michael Moorcock & M John Harrison with art by Mal Dean & Richard Glyn Jones.

• The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K Johnson is available as a free ebook here.

• “If I was to try to write a mainstream book I would be constantly bumping my elbows up against the restrictions.” Tim Powers is interviewed by Alison Flood.

• HOMO Online, Adventures in Homosexuality: Fiction, Fact, Art and Porn.

• Your Rainbow Panorama, a new work by Olafur Eliasson.

• Self Suck, a poem by Angelo Nikolopoulos.

• Map Of Dusk (1987) by Jon Hassell | Lam Lam (1998) by Baaba Maal (with Jon Hassell & Brian Eno) | All Is Full Of Love (1999) by Björk (Guy Sigsworth mix featuring Jon Hassell).

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