Stolen from Wert (and posted various other places around the web):
Certainly miles beyond the speculated US cover, though I do miss dancing-one-handed-Rand! The UK edition is being published by Orbit Books.
Posts Categorized: Art
Stolen from SFSignal’s Book Cover Smackdown:
Caribbean born novelist Tobias Buckell established himself as a gifted new voice in science fiction with his stunning first novel Crystal Rain. Now, in his first collection, Buckell demonstrates his strengths in the short form, offering readers a collection of stories that are compelling, smart, wonderfully imagined, and entertaining.
Tides from the New Worlds contains 19 stories that range from multicultural science fiction to magical realism, some in print for the first time.
Table of Contents:
Fish Merchant
Anakoinosis
Aerophilia
In The Heart of Kalikuata
The Shackles of Freedom (with Mike Resnick)
Shoah Sry (with Ilsa Bick)
Her
In Orbite Medievali
Four Eyes
Trinkets
Spurn Babylon
Death’s Dreadlocks
Smooth Talking
Tides
Something In The Rock
A Green Thumb
All Her Children Fought
Necahual
Toy Planes
Though I’m not a huge fan of montage images on covers (especially when they involve giant, floating space-heads), the art itself is fun, the typeface is nice and the colours work. His novels are known to be short, snappy works, so I can only imagine his style translates well to short fiction. Certainly a book I’m eager to get my hands on!
Tides from the New Worlds is available from Wyrm Publishing.
Yet another gorgeous cover stolen from the Pyr Blog:
The Defense and Wellness Council is enmeshed in full-scale civil war between Len Borda and the mysterious Magan Kai Lee. Quell has escaped from prison and is stirring up rebellion in the Islands with the aid of a brash young leader named Josiah. Jara and the apprentices of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp still find themselves fighting off legal attacks from their competitors and from Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous heirs — even though MultiReal has completely vanished.
The quest for the truth will lead to the edges of civilization, from the tumultuous society of the Pacific Islands to the lawless orbital colony of 49th Heaven; and through the deeps of time, from the hidden agenda of the Surina family to the real truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago.
Meanwhile, Natch has awakened in a windowless prison with nothing but a haze of memory to clue him in as to how he got there. He’s still receiving strange hallucinatory messages from Margaret Surina and the nature of reality is buckling all around him. When the smoke clears, Natch must make the ultimate decision — whether to save a world that has scorned and discarded him, or to save the only person he has ever loved: himself.
Edelman’s trilogy has been on my radar since the release of the first novel, Infoquake, and I’ve been waiting anxiously for the final volume to be released so I can jump on in. As usual for Edelman’s covers, Geosynchron is graced by another beautiful painting by Stephan Martiniere, who’s quickly becoming one of my favourite SF artists out there.
Nicked from the Pyr blog:
A devilish plot to assassinate the Queen, a Cold War enemy hell-bent on destroying the nation, incredible gadgets, a race against time around the world to stop the ultimate doomsday device…and Elizabethan England’s greatest spy!
Meet Will Swyfte – adventurer, swordsman, rake, swashbuckler, wit, scholar and the greatest of Walsingham’s new band of spies. His exploits against the forces of Philip of Spain have made him a national hero, lauded from Carlisle to Kent. Yet his associates can barely disguise their incredulity – what is the point of a spy whose face and name is known across Europe?
But Swyfte’s public image is a carefully-crafted façade to give the people of England something to believe in, and to allow them to sleep peacefully at night. It deflects attention from his real work – and the true reason why Walsingham’s spy network was established.
A Cold War seethes, and England remains under a state of threat. The forces of Faerie have been preying on humanity for millennia. Responsible for our myths and legends, of gods and fairies, dragons, griffins, devils, imps and every other supernatural menace that has haunted our dreams, this power in the darkness has seen humans as playthings to be tormented, hunted or eradicated.
But now England is fighting back!
Though Chadbourn’s World’s End didn’t click for me, I’m curious about this novel. I first encountered Chadbourn’s work through his short story, Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast (REVIEW), from The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, which features Swyfte and found it quite enjoyable. I’m curious to see if Chadbourn’s prose might not be better suited to this Elizabethan setting rather than the modern(ish) setting of the Age of Misrule novels.
One of my criticisms of the short story was:
I felt the story lacked context and setup, as though I were supposed to know already why Swyfte was so well known around England, how he was so resourceful and why he wasn’t the least bit surprised by the all magick that occurs over the course of the story.
Hopefully The Silver Skull adds some of that context I was looking for.
I hadn’t heard of this book until I stumbled across the cover art for it on the official Orbit Blog. Now I’m curious.
Pretty cool, eh? Lauren Panepinto talks about the process behind the design:
Jemisin creates a very cool world and a very well-described landscape and characters, and it feels both epic and character-driven all at once. Since it’s the first of a trilogy, there’s even more pressure to get the look right because you have to carry it over 2 more books. We agonized a bit over the right illustrator, and decided on the dark and textural work of Cliff Nielsen. He did a fabulous job of depicting the city of Skye, and got a great rich dark tone set for the cover. We drove him a little crazy I think, poor guy, with color adjustments and revisions…and I hope he forgives us because I can’t wait to see what he does for the next two books.
Once I got the art back from Cliff, I must have gone through a hundred different fonts and layouts for the cover — there’s a lot of text that needs to be there, but of course, you don’t want it to look like there’s a lot of text on the cover, you want the art to be the star. But after a little hair-pulling and head-bonking-on-desk on my part, I think we nailed it.
Also, a synopsis:
“Yeine Darr is heir to the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She is also an outcast. Until, that is, her mother dies under mysterious circumstances.
Summoned by her grandfather to the majestic city of Sky, Yeine finds herself thrust into a vicious power struggle for the throne. As she fights for her life, she comes ever closer to discovering the truth about her mother’s death and her family’s bloody history – as well as the unsettling truths within herself.
With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate are bound inseparably together, for both mortals and gods alike.”
Though maybe not the most original plot out there, the setting seems interesting and I’m always up for a good bout of political intrigue. Certainly looks like a novel I’ll be keeping an eye on.
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