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Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam is a forthcoming anthology in the Gay City Anthology series from Seattle’s Gay City Health Project and Minor Arcana Press. The publishers describe it as “a multidisciplinary anthology of amazing queer monster and ghost fiction, poetry and art.” I’ve created a cover design for the book, and also have [...]

Yes, it’s all happening this month… Unlike other work that’s surfaced recently the cover art for issue 41 of How It Works magazine was completed less than a month ago. Headlines obscure much of the artwork but the picture is also run full-page inside, something I wasn’t expecting. How It Works has major newsstand distribution [...]

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian. • The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show. [...]

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 [...]

The “S” word again. One of the jobs from earlier this year is now available for purchase from publishers Tachyon and other outlets. Steampunk Revolution is the third in a series of steampunk story collections edited by Ann VanderMeer (Jeff VanderMeer was co-editor on the first two volumes). I designed the previous title, Steampunk Reloaded, [...]

Couple with Clock Tower (2011) by Louise Despont. Assuming such a thing doesn’t already exist, there’s a micro-thesis to be written about the associations between the musicians of Germany’s Krautrock/Kosmische music scene in the early 1970s and the directors of the New German Cinema. I’d not seen this clip before which shows the mighty Amon [...]

Now that Angry Robot books has revealed the cover design which kept me busy throughout July I can do the same here. The Bookman Histories is an omnibus reprinting of Lavie Tidhar‘s steampunk trilogy which comprises The Bookman, Camera Obscura and The Great Game. The stories are frenetic, crowded with incident and feature a huge [...]

Golem by Jiri Barta. There are always more golems. Among recent reading I’ve been catching up with the works of Michael Chabon, and have just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a novel concerned with several things that obsessed me when I was 13, namely Harry Houdini, conjuring tricks and the Empire [...]

This animated short by Anthony Lucas isn’t exactly obscure but I’ve only just noticed that the distributor has the whole film available for viewing on YouTube. The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello blends silhouetted characters and decor with elaborate steam-powered machinery in a manner that looks like the kind of thing Lotte Reiniger might have [...]

The Pastel City (New English Library, 1971). Illustration by Bruce Pennington. There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. […] His prose [...]

Another piece of work from the end of last year has now been unveiled. The brief this time was from UK company Cybercandy who asked for a steampunk-themed cola can. If this sounds like the mechanical shark has been well-and-truly vaulted then it’s necessary to note that Cybercandy specialise in novelty food products with science [...]

Three new cover designs of mine for Angry Robot which were made public a few hours ago. The Courts of the Feyre is a fantasy series by British author Mike Shevdon set in present-day Britain and involving “a world of dark magic and strange creatures hidden in plain sight.” Two of these titles are reprints, [...]

Untitled art by Katie Scott. “…the very fact that people cannot get published by the big-name publishers in the way that they used to has meant that you’ve got some really interesting and often really beautiful little small publishing houses that are springing up and coming into existence. And the stuff that they’re providing is [...]

Today’s post is another guest piece at Tor.com where I talk a little about using collage to create steampunk illustrations and designs. The post is part of their Steampunk Week, and I take the opportunity to acknowledge the influence of some artists who have become familiar points of reference here, namely Max Ernst and Wilfried [...]

Eternal Pain (1913) by Paul Dardé. (And also here) Rain Taxi caused a stir this week with its savaging of Hamlet’s Father by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. The book is another of Card’s blatherings about the hell of being homosexual dressed in garments stolen from the unfortunate William Shakespeare. Rain Taxi made the [...]

Among the many books inspired or influenced by the events of September 11th, 2001, Jim Harter’s Initiations in the Abyss: A Surrealist Apocalypse is one of the more obscure titles, and one you’re unlikely to hear about elsewhere. Harter is an American artist and archivist best known for his collections of wood engraving illustration published [...]

The phone line trouble was resolved quicker than I expected thanks to a couple of efficient engineers and a new line. Normal service is now resumed. Last month seemed to be one rush job after another, of which this was one of the results, a cover for a forthcoming collection of pieces from SteamPunk Magazine. [...]

Faustine (1928) by Harry Clarke. • This week’s Harry Clarke fix: 50 Watts reposts the Faust illustrations while Golden Age Comic Book Stories has the illustrated Swinburne. • What Goes Steam in the Night is an evening with contributors to The Steampunk Bible hosted in London by The Last Tuesday Society on September 6th: Co-author [...]

The Exposition gateway. In a blizzard of work this month I finished another project with a Victorian theme (not more Steampunk!) which I won’t reveal just yet as I dislike spoiling the surprise for publishers. Part of the preparation involved yet more trawling through scanned volumes at the Internet Archive, looking this time at British [...]

Neutron Drip (2011) by Amrei Hofstätter. • The Lavender Scare is “the first feature-length documentary film to tell the story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay”. A film by Josh Howard based on the book by David K [...]