Tachyon Publications – Page 5

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

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

Design as virus 12: Barney’s faces

Sleeve for I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass (1978), a 7″ single by Nick Lowe. Design by Barney Bubbles.

Continuing an occasional series. Designer Vic Fieger had a guest post at Reasons To Be Cheerful earlier this week examining Barney Bubbles’ use of the human face in his graphic designs. This is one side of the Bubbles work I really enjoy, he had a remarkable facility for demonstrating a versatility with abstract shapes—or found objects, as in the piece above—while playing games with our pattern recognition. A recurrent playfulness was one of the many notable things about his approach to design.

Story title from The Best of Michael Moorcock (2009).

Fieger’s focussing on the faces in Barney’s work struck a chord for me since I’d deliberately tried something similar last year, taking a cue from Barney’s example. The Colour piece above is one of the story titles from The Best of Michael Moorcock published by Tachyon. For each story I designed a different title in a style which complemented the subject; Colour is a science fiction piece in which card games figure, hence the symbols. Mike Moorcock was friends with Barney during the 1970s so there was an additional reason for the reference.

I don’t know whether anyone has noticed the face on the cover of Booklife but it is there, with the two flowers at the top forming the eyes and the book’s title standing for the mouth. Once again, this wasn’t strictly necessary for the success of the design but it gave a rationale for the arrangment of the flowers. There’s also the hope when something is this subtle that the attraction of the pattern impells a browser to pick up the book in a shop without quite knowing why.

Booklife and The Best of Michael Moorcock are both available from Tachyon. Paul Gorman’s Barney Bubbles book, Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life & Work Of Barney Bubbles, will be relaunched later this year in a new edition.

New work: Two forms of darkness

Darkness: half-title page.

I’m still behind with site updates but here are two recent design jobs come to cast a shadow over the summer. Darkness is another fiction anthology from Tachyon, edited by Ellen Datlow and subtitled Two Decades of Modern Horror. Ann Monn’s cover design has a snake writhing through shadow so I carried the serpentine motif into the interior design. The book runs to 478 pages and, as the title implies, features lots of big names including Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King.

Darkness: title spread.

Dark Matter, on the other hand, is a double-CD compilation of singles from Bristol’s Multiverse label which is released this month. If you need a descriptor then many of the tracks here would be classed as dubstep, and a few are doomy enough to serve as soundtracks for urban horror. Skream is one of the featured artists, and his Trapped In A Dark Bubble on Tectonic’s Plates 2 collection (which I designed last year) has a great sinister ambience.

The design is very minimal with silver ink on a matt black digipak. The label requested graphics that mixed esoteric symbols with references to modern physics or astronomy without any of the allusions being too specific as to their origin or meaning. For the fonts I used the Fell types which take the design back to grimoires and old manuscripts.

Weekend links 14

A drawing by Eric Fraser from the Radio Times, 1947. From this Flickr set.

• I helped put together the design for the Pursuit Grooves album recently. FACT magazine interviewed Vanese Smith about her work.

• One of the books whose interiors I designed last year for Tachyon was The Secret History of Science Fiction, a story collection edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. (And a book which I’ve yet to add to my web pages, I’m still behind with updates.) The LA Times has a piece about the anthology here, focusing on the Don DeLillo contribution, Human Moments in World War III.

• It’s been another week of Facebook hate; being a self-satisfied refusenik I can’t help but find this amusing. Too many good pieces to list but Gizmodo had more reasons why you should still quit Facebook, Jason Calacanis gathered lots of links to other stories on his blog while social media expert Danah Boyd got to the heart of the matter with a very cogent polemic.

• If you want an alternative to Facebook, Diaspora is “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”.

• David Toop has a new book out next month. “Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.”

• Coilhouse looks at the late Decadent artist and designer Hans Henning Voigt (1887–1969), better known as Alastair.

come, been and gone.

• “After a sold out season at the Barbican in 2009 Michael Clark Company returns with the next instalment of his critically acclaimed production made primarily to the music of David Bowie. come, been and gone also embraces the work of Bowie’s key collaborators: Lou Reed , Iggy Pop , Brian Eno and touches on some of his influences; The Velvet Underground , Kraftwerk and Nina Simone……This production contains loud music and graphic images.” I should hope so.

• “Why should boys always be boys, and girls always be girls?” Brutal/Beautiful, photography by Austin Green.

• John Foxx, Iain Sinclair and others appear at Short Circuit 2010 next month.

• Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s music and race in America.

• Jane Siberry has made all her albums available as free downloads.

• Ruth Bayer photographs people after they’ve inhaled poppers.

• Swiss artist catalogues mutant insects around nuclear plants.

• Pompeii’s X-rated art will titillate a new generation.

• The Happy, Haunted Island of Poveglia, Venice.

• The Art of American Book Covers, a blog.

• Kanellos, the Greek protest dog.

• Song of the week: Twiggy Twiggy (1994) by Pizzicato Five.