An interesting problem: illustrate a cover for the fiction of Stanislaw Lem. How would you do it? Here is a nice little gallery of rarely seen Lem covers, collected by one of the very best tribu
Browsing for a cheap paperback at Goodwill in Davis Square, I just happened to find a beat up first edition hardcover copy of The Fifty Minute Hour, by Robert Lindner. I grabbed this for the collecti
Of course, I was intrigued by the advertisement in this year’s Boskone mag for the Illustration Master Class. Just the idea of Julie Bell, Donato Giancola, Scott Fischer, Dan DosSantos, Boris Vallejo,
Who was this artist, Steele Savage? His full name was Henry Steele Savage. Born in 1898, in Central Lake, Michigan, he went on to have an outstanding career as an illustrator. His range of work incl
The interesting cover on Arthur Sellings The Uncensored Man attracted my eye in a San Francisco bookshop on Polk Street several years ago. It featured a sort of typical 1960s collage of a man’s face
This year at Boskone, there were some interesting panels, great painting demos by Bob Eggleton and Omar Rayyan, and a nice gallery of paintings from Boskones past and present alongside works by the Artist GOH, Dean Morrissey. Anthropology, SF, and Chad Oliver The first panel I attended was on the works of Chad Oliver, the great anthropologist / SF author from Texas. Amy Thomson, whose work on the encounters between humans and aliens (and between robot girl and humans) remarked that, in fact, she was not influenced by Oliver before writing the Color of Distance and Through Alien Eyes, and only came to appreciate the anthropological aspects of Oliver’s science fiction in retrospect. George Zebrowski told of his long working relationship with Chad Oliver. When he worked with Crown Books as editor for their Classics of Modern Science Fiction series in the mid-1980s, Zebrowski was asked what the first ten volumes should be, and he told them that the three of those ten should include Chad Oliver’s novels: Shores of Another Sea, Shadows of the Sun, and Unearthly Neighbors. Three out of ten? By the same author! Was Zebrowski out of his mind? But, in fact, Crown ended up supporting the suggestion and those novels did appear as the 3rd, 8th, and 9th volumes in the series.
A long lost interview with Doug Adams, author of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has surfaced at the online zine, Dark Matter. Bravo, Ian! LINK