This will be my first time to participate in the Boskone Art Show, woot! I’m having fun getting some prints mounted and ready for the show. There will be four 8×10 prints available for the th
My first impression of Arisia was one of sartorial richness, stirred together with equal parts of humor, history, literary allusion, and performing arts. The non-stop schedule of movies, panels, gaming sessions, readings, parties and demonstrations got lost in the spectacle of costumed attendees swarming randomly around three levels of the hotel, and visible from any number of perspectives along the balustrades of the atrium. Out of this dizzying scene the iconic image of this con, for me, was that of a black-clad woman with blonde dreadlocks, jacked up on really tall stilts, and moving hazily across the rippling lobby carpet while slashing playfully at people with her foot-long razor nails. There were plenty of other costumes…indeed far to many to describe, except to say that the standard for corsets, ray-guns, battle-armor, cloaks, boots, scabbards, gowns, ragged wings, top hats, gloves, goggles, spats, walking sticks, holsters, capes, chain mail, and hardened-leather bustiere was conspicuously high! This managed to fit in with some of the subtexts running through the con, such as hentai anime, freemasonry, and steam punk vs. cyberpunk. And you could follow some of those threads on the con Twitter feed.
On this snowbound Solstice weekend in New England, I happened to be reading reviews of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake, and pondering the ways in which humans have envisioned our first contact with alien life forms. Without going too heavily into the subject, I pondered the range of human-alien frission typically presented in SF, from the over-hyped assumption of instant warfare, or the however improbable love at first site, to the more nuanced anthropological approaches of Chad Oliver and the intensely portrayed psychological gestalts of Theodore Sturgeon. At that point Sturgeon’s amazing story To Marry Medusa (aka _The Cosmic Rape_) popped into my mind, and in particular the lush red cover image for the 1968 paperback by Paul Lehr. This image, so typical of Lehr (with a mountainous half-organic construction looming in the center, while miniscule beings flit around it like so many fleas,) represents the contact between human and alien minds in the realm of abstraction and metaphor. In that sense it fascinates more than the familiar image of some athletic dork with a ray gun zapping the tentacles off of a bug-eyed wierdo.
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,
Enjoyed reading a copy of Heinlein’s novel “Have Spacesuit Will Travel,” with an especially nice cover by Steele Savage. Which made me curious to look up more covers by the same artist. He seems to h
Yes, in the late 1970s there were some *very* weird science fiction fans at Columbia University. Some read stacks of comics and novels every day, then meticulously reviewed them for the Columbia Univ
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
As the sunny day passes, I am reading one of the finest books ever written, The Star Diaries, written by my personal hero, Stanislaw Lem. When I pause to look at the news headlines, it is always a sh