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Untitled art by Yang Yongliang. There’s more at But Does It Float. • “Newly unearthed ITV play could be first ever gay television drama“. Writer Gerald Savory, incidentally, also adapted Dracula for the BBC in 1977, still the version that’s closest to the novel. • Craig Redman and Karl Maier‘s poster designs for the Bavarian [...]

Sine Fiction VI: Nova Express (2003) by Eucci. More Burroughsian music, and a selection that includes another interpretation of The Ticket That Exploded. Sine Fiction is a music project curated by Aimé Dontigny that commissions electronic artists to provide soundtracks to science fiction novels. The project has been running since 2000, and has so far managed [...]

Der Triumph des Tintenfisches from Meggendorfer-Blätter (c. 1900). Via Beautiful Century. Much dismay this week at the news that Coilhouse—the web and print magazine founded in 2008 by Nadya Lev, Meredith Yayanos and Zoetica Ebb—was closing its doors for the foreseeable future. I always loved what they were doing, and was delighted when S. Elizabeth [...]

Kafka (1991). This week I completed the interior design for a new anthology from Tachyon, Kafkaesque, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high calibre of contributions from writers including JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, [...]

Cover painting by Edgar Froese. I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. HP Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark, 1935. It’s become traditional to do this each Halloween so here we go again with another [...]

The Stalker’s dream from Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The innocuously-titled Roadside Picnic is a Russian science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, first published in 1972: Aliens have visited the Earth, and departed, leaving behind a number of artefacts of their incomprehensibly advanced technology. The places where such artefacts were left behind are areas of [...]

The apocalyptic spectacles of Romantic painter John Martin are routinely treated by art critics as kitsch, a dismissal which ignores the considerable power and perennial attraction that many of his best pictures possess. Kitsch is a bad thing, it seems, unless you’re Jeff Koons or Jake and Dinos Chapman. Martin’s most famous work, The Great [...]