Category: {science fiction}

Science fiction

JG Ballard book covers

In a similar vein to the Burroughs cover gallery, Rick McGrath’s site does the same for one of Burroughs’ followers, JG Ballard. The covers below are two typical examples using Surrealist art as their illustration, The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst and City of Drawers by Dalí. I’ve always loved the pairing of Ernst’s painting (my favourite by that artist) with The Crystal World, a design that Panther carried over to their 1968 paperback edition.

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A few thousand science fiction covers

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Seems that this has been around for a while but I’ve only just run across it. Jim Bumgardner has created a browsable “table-top” of thousands of sf magazine covers using minimal Flash and Perl scripting; unlike many Flash-oriented web toys you don’t have to waste valuable minutes watching a progress bar before it starts working. Rest your mouse anywhere on the picture and a cover lifts itself from the mass; double-click that cover and it grows larger. He also has a similar page for covers of Mad magazine and 1001 graphic novels and comics. And an explanation of how it all works.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Wasted Talent: A Scanner Darkly

scanner.jpgWasted talent

John Patterson
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian

If you’re making a serious movie about drugs, it doesn’t hurt to assemble a cast that knows whereof it collectively speaks. And for his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick’s unsettling 1977 masterpiece about drugs, fractured identity, paranoia and betrayal, Richard Linklater has found a quartet that runs the full gamut of the drug experience. You’ve got Keanu Reeves – who for all we know has never even smoked a single joint, but whose name is a byword for stoner inarticulacy – playing Dick’s addict- cum-narcotics-detective Bob Arctor. As Arctor’s dealer-addict paramour Donna, we have Winona Ryder, all grown up since her apparently pill-induced moment of shoplifting madness. Hemp activist Woody Harrelson plays one of Arctor’s drug-addled housemates, while the other is played by no less august an imbiber of chemicals and sacred roots than Robert Downey Jr, who has what one might call an embarrassment of riches in this field.

(More.)

Nova Swing

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The always excellent M John Harrison has a new sf novel out soon, Nova Swing, set in the same future as his masterful Light. You can read a sample of it on his website.

Harrison, along with Moorcock, Ballard, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair, is one of Britain’s finest living writers. He’s the creator of one of my favourite fantasy cities, Viriconium, and author of a number of intelligent (and often disturbing) novels and short stories. He’s one of the few living writers equally adept at working with the big three genres—sf, fantasy and horror—whilst also being able to write straightforward “literary” fiction with far greater facility than the usual suspects that clog the Booker lists. The novels don’t come very often so a new one is an event, and something worthy of your attention.