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Steampunk Reloaded

Cover design by Ann Monn. Cover image by Dan Jones / Tinkerbots.

Here at last is the steampunk anthology I mentioned back in September and whose interiors I designed. This is another Tachyon publication, and also another anthology edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. I went further with the design for this than I have done for other Tachyon books, partly because if there’s one thing steampunk lends itself to, it’s decoration but also because the book includes illustrations from Ramona Szczerba, Eric Orchard, and others, plus a comic strip by Sydney Padua; adding extra spot illustrations stopped the pictorial material from seeming too isolated.

Title spread. The illustration on the left is one I created last year.

This is a sequel to an earlier steampunk anthology by the same editors but the contents are just as strong as the first collection with excellent stories throughout. (For a review, see here.) By coincidence the book is published in the wake of a recent (and inevitable) backlash against steampunk as science fiction sub-genre and cultural phenomenon. This collection can serve as a repudiation to some of the lazier accusations that writers are ignoring the moral and physical squalor of the Victorian era and the legacies of imperialism; several stories in Steampunk Reloaded address those very issues. For my part I’ve read Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld so I don’t feel in urgent need of a lecture on the iniquities of the 19th century, thank you very much.

While we’re on the subject, the cover of The Steampunk Bible, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers, has been revealed here. Abrams will be publishing this next year and having seen some of the interior pages it’s going to be a splendid book. More about that later. Further pages from Steampunk Reloaded follow.

Update: A couple more reviews here and here.

Contents spread.

A detail of one of the page footers.

Title page for A Secret History of Steampunk, a self-contained section within the body of the book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk overloaded!
• Skeleton clocks
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

Weekend links: the Halloween edition

Goddem with Attendants (1924) by Harry Clarke.

• Some of Harry Clarke’s extraordinary illustrations from Goethe’s Faust can be seen at A Journey Round My Skull. And a reminder for anyone who missed them, Clarke’s Poe illustrations at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• HP Lovecraft – Audio Books, Radio Plays, & Audio Documentaries. Out-of-print recordings and (no doubt) pirate copies of more recent things. I found this page by accident so it was a surprise to see my 1999 Lovecraft portrait used there. I used to own the David McCallum Dunwich Horror, an album with a singularly appalling sleeve illustration.

• Better album sleeves can be found here: Prospective 21e Siècle, a collection of foil designs from 1967. Some of the very challenging music within can be downloaded at the Avant Garde Project archive. Related: Have an electroacoustic Halloween with İlhan Mimaroğlu’s Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe (1964) and Wings of the Delirious Demon (1969).

Star Trails and the Captain’s Ghost, a photo by Chris Kotsiopoulos at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

• “The horror industry is totally male dominated from its directors to its slashers, and even its bloggers…and I think that needs to change.” Day of the Woman, a blog for the feminine side of fear.

• 6 of the Scariest Queer Horror Books Ever. I think I’d agree with the commenter in picking The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook (pictured in a graveyard by the looks of things) is interviewed at MyFonts.

• A Weird and Scratching Beauty: The Art of John Coulthart and Call of Cthulhu.

• Is the Royal Masonic School for Boys the scariest building in Britain?

• 50-million-year-old insect trove found in Indian amber.

• The Café Kaput Samhain 2010 mixtape.

• The Groovy Age of Horror.

• Monster Mash (1962) by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers.

Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke

And so to the master. Harry Clarke’s illustrated edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination was published by Harrap in 1919, with a new edition following in 1923 that featured an additional series of colour plates. I can’t imagine anyone ever producing a better illustrated version of Poe than Clarke managed, the morbid quality which some complain about in his work is perfectly suited to that most morbid of writers. So too are Clarke’s haunted and neurasthenic figures, and the many decorative details which provide an analogue to the author’s distinctive prose style. The first four drawings which follow repeat the earlier order of the Beardsley illustrations; an unfair comparison, perhaps, since the subject matter didn’t suit Aubrey’s temperament, but a comparison shows how differently the same stories might be illustrated, and how much Clarke brings the macabre elements to the fore.

There’s no need to post a large selection this time when quality scans have already appeared at A Journey Round My Skull and Golden Age Comic Book Stories. These drawings really do need to be seen showing all their fine detail.

The Black Cat: “I had walled the monster up within the tomb!”

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: “Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl.”

Continue reading “Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke”

Alan Moore: Tisser l’invisible

Arriving in the post this week was Alan Moore: Tisser l’invisible from French imprint Les Moutons Électriques. The book is a substantial collection of appreciative texts and analyses of work by the Northampton Ipsissimus edited by Julien Bétan, and, as the title would imply, is in French throughout. A couple of the pieces are reprints which I presume are receiving their first translation here. Michael Moorcock’s Homage to Cornucopia first appeared in Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman and is also reprinted in Moorcock’s Into the Media Web which I designed and Savoy Books published earlier this year.

Best thing for me about the French collection is seeing some of my Moore-related work printed in colour as a mini gallery at the front of the book. There are two of the poster designs for the Moon & Serpent CDs, The Highbury Working (above) and Angel Passage, and also my 1999 portrait of Promethea and the Kabbalistic Underground map which I created as a design of my own and Alan subsequently incorporated into the Promethea comic series.

And speaking of Mister Moore, issue 6 of Dodgem Logic is now on sale sporting a cover which can either be interpreted as a gloomy Halloween design or a faithful depiction of the nation’s slough of despond; you decide.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
• Watchmen
• Alan Moore interview, 1988

Weekend links 34

Halloween in Austin, Texas this year will look and sound like this.

• “Blade Runner will prove invincible“: Philip K Dick’s letter of praise to the film’s producers. Related: one of the Blade Runner designers, Syd Mead, has recently styled New York’s Bar Basque and Foodparc.

• “I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated…I have played a strange role that none of my students dare to take.” RIP Benoît Mandelbrot.

• Science and poetry: “a richly vexed topic badly in need of rethinking”. Related: Why the Singularity isn’t going to happen.

• In case you missed this week’s earlier announcement, a reminder that I was interviewed at Coilhouse. My vanity: it knows no bounds.

• Franklin Booth’s illustrations for The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) by James Whitcomb Riley.

• On the Verge (1950) by Maurice Sandoz, illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Also this and this.

Bowie Sphinx, 1969. Photo by Brian Ward.

• The Laughing Gnostic: David Bowie and the Occult.

• “Moonlighting as a Conjurer of Chemicals“: Isaac Newton’s alchemical interests.

• “A sense of otherness that goes right back“: Alan Garner at Alderley Edge.

• Jimmy’s End—Alan Moore’s new feature film and spin-off TV series.

• A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley.

• The It Gets Better Project now has a dedicated website.

• Quicksand (1971) by David Bowie.