MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A man who repossesses artificial organs must flee from the organization that employs him when he cannot pay for his own artificial heart.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Strong ideas, with one or two interesting action sequences and the occasional bit of cleverness.
CONS: Unconvincing worldbuilding, implausible characters and a surprising lack of guts. (No pun intended.)

Upon seeing Repo Men, I drove to a nearby Barnes and Noble and purchased a copy of The Repossession Mambo, the novel by Eric Garcia on which this futuristic thriller from director Miguel Sapochnik is based. My decision to buy the novel had nothing to do with the movie's quality. Or, rather, it did, and that's part of the problem. The movie presented ideas that were likely handled in the novel with exactly the finesse, skill and gallows wit that its adaptation lacked.

The core idea is interesting, even timely, and sounds rife with the potential for satire in the manner of Frederick Pohl's and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, with a healthy mixture of Thomas Harris and John Connolly. Unfortunately, action clichés mire the execution.

Set in a future where health care reform has all but failed, the movie follows Union employee Remy (played by Jude Law), an average family man who pays for his suburban home by tracking down those individuals who have purchased artificial organs (artiforgs) on credit but who cannot meet their payment obligations. Once he finds them, he must repossess their artiforgs, which means...well, if you've ever seen the "Live Organ Transplants" sketch from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, you know what that means: opening up the individual and returning the artiforg to the Union. But a repo goes wrong, putting Remy into a coma; when he wakes, he learns from his boss (Liev Schreiber, playing it with smarmy gusto) that he's been given an artificial heart to save his life. Upon release from the hospital, his wife Carol (Carice van Houten) throws him out, refusing him even visitation with his son Peter. When Remy falls behind on his payments, he runs away with a woman (Beth, played by Alice Braga) with more artiforgs, and therefore far more to lose, than Remy. (When she learns, in one of the movie's most heavy-handed bits of symbolism, that Remy has an artificial heart, she tells him that that is the only part of her that isn't artificial.) A repo man tracks them down but is killed by Remy, leaving Remy's former partner and childhood friend Jake (thanklessly played by Forest Whitaker), to track him and Beth down before he can find a way to remove their payments from the Union's databases.

On occasion Repo Men manages suspense and a dollop of cleverness. At one point, when a repo man hunts Remy and Beth in an abandoned building, Remy saves them using a piece of old-fashioned technology. Remy, in his first screen repo, reads a statement asking if a tasered individual would like ambulance assistance, then puts on his biohazard gear and begins his work. (As an added touch, he listens to mambo music over a pair of earbuds while he makes his cuts.) When Beth visits an underground surgeon to fix her damaged artiforgs, Remy expresses shock at her surgeon. These moments bring Repo Men close to something resembling life. Unfortunately, most of the movie is about as artificial as the organs being repossessed.

Who are these repo men? Logically, one would think they are serial killers who have found a publicly acceptable niche in society. However, this is inconsistent with the society the movie presents, which is about as ordinary and innocuous as one would find looking outside of one's window. No one appears bothered by even the possible existence of these repo men, which seems out of place for this movie. One would think that a world where serial killers have gained employment doing what they do best would be populated by individuals as ruthless and as mercenary as the repo men and their bosses. Instead, when Carol learns and actually sees Jake perform a repossession outside of her house, she expresses shock and disgust and suddenly leaves her house. And this action raises more questions. Are the repo men sanctioned by the police? They must be, because, except for one throwaway line, they're never mentioned, and in not one shot does the viewer ever see a police car or a patrolman. And if the repo men are sanctioned by the police, or even if they are policemen themselves, wouldn't they instill more fear in people?

Though screenwriters Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner could have solved some of these problems with a few simple lines of dialogue, they also would have better served their screenplay by adding more menace and a much bleaker worldview. Indeed, at its heart, the story is a noir tale with the potential to be worthy of Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis, and can be seen as a companion to Charlie Huston's excellent novel The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. However, director Miguel Sapochnik chooses instead to film it as a typical action picture, with occasional stylish flourishes (including a direct ripoff of Chan-wook Park's Oldboy) but which ultimately seem pointless. And though his casting agent has assembled a solid team of actors, everyone involved (with the exception of Schreiber) plays their roles even more woodenly than one sees in most action movies, thus dampening viewer involvement with the material.

When I picked up the novel from Barnes and Noble (and why would anybody change novel's excellent title to such a bland one?) I read the first sentence and immediately bought it. The line? "The first time I ever held a pancreas in my hands, I got an erection." Which is precisely the mixture of noir, cognitive dissonance, and macbre perversion that one would hope for when one considers The Repossession Mambo's core ideas. Elements, alas, completely absent from Repo Men.

The only other book that springs to mind is Dhalgren by Delaney. That one I started and stopped several times before I managed to force myself to finish it, and I didn't like it one bit. I should have left it alone but it's a classic so I there you go.

But what about you? What books have you stopped reading and why?

[via Edd Vick]

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As you might expect, being a SF fanatic, I like science fiction. A lot. It's my preferred genre of choice for TV, movies, books and games. It's not that I haven't read/watched/played fantasy stuff, I have. Some of it I've enjoyed quite a bit, but even so, there's still a reticence, a reluctance on my part to try new fantasy offerings. It doesn't matter how highly recommended or how much I may have enjoyed a particular book I still won't go running to the newest fantasy offering.

I think I've narrowed down the reasons to the following:

This is why, when the fantasy turns out to be science fiction in disguise, I tend to like that a lot more. Series like Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy come immediately to mind, seemingly fantasy but on closer inspection with a heavy SF underpinning. And thinking further, where are the fantasy settings that take place in a 'modern' world, where 'magic' has taken the place of technology?

Recently there has been move to 'urban fantasy', set in the modern day with vampires and werewolves and such. At first glance these would seem to be more appealing, being set in the modern world with the potential for conflict between science/technology and magic/fantasy. But for me, while many of these stories are more intriguing with wider possibilities, they also suffer from the same thing fantasy as a whole suffers from.

This problem is even more pronounced in epic fantasy were the barbarian hero can't swing a two-handed broadsword without hitting an ancient prophecy, a royal heir in hiding, orcs, elves or an epic quest to complete. The ones that really bother me, and seem to be on the decline, are the Tolkeinesque stories, but even the more modern sword and sorcery stuff, that avoids the Tolkein trappings, still has the quests and heirs and stuff that just gets old, even before it starts.

That said, there is one fantasy series that I love and I read the newest book whenever it comes out as soon as I can. Jim Butcher's Dresden series is some of the best stuff I've read lately and he just keeps getting better.

However, there's one thing, the big thing, that I really don't like about fantasy.

"How did you that?"
"Magic!"

See? Easy! No explanation needed, it's 'magic' FTW! Spell, potion, wand, it doesn't matter, the answer lies with magic. I like something with a little more explanation, or at least something that sounds possible, behind what happens. Magic doesn't generally have that. Why yes, I'm an engineer, why do you ask?

Now I'm not saying fantasy sucks, that no one should write fantasy or trying to demean fantasy in any way. Fantasy is obviously very popular, outselling science fiction on a daily basis and on the whole, people are generally more accepting of fantasy than science fiction. These are just my reasons for not being a fan. I don't hate the genre, but I don't go out of my way to read or watch it, but games? I'll play a good fantasy game (Baldur's Gate II). You may wonder if there are any fantasy books I have liked, and there are. For instance The Name Of The Wind, The Lies Of Locke Lamora, The Thomas Covenant Chronicles, and The First Law series by Abercrombie all spring to mind. I enjoyed these for various reasons, but the general rule of thumb for me is: enjoyment is inversely proportional to how much magic is used. So series like The Kingdom Of Thorn And Bone, The Age Of Unreason and A Song Of Ice And Fire all start out strong but become less interesting as more magic is added. Steve Erickson's Malazan series is also quite good, but I had more issues with that.

So, on the whole, I'd much rather read/watch a good old science fiction story. SF appeals to me more than fantasy does, but if a fantasy book gets enough good press, I'll definitely give it a go. I'm still trying to get around to Blood Of Ambrose as a for instance.

Maybe there's hope for me yet.

• Greer Gilman for Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales [2009, Small Beer Press]
• Fumi Yoshinaga for Ooku: The Inner Chambers, (volumes 1 & 2) [2009, VIZ Media]

The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is an annual literary prize intended to "reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society." The award is named after Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. for many years before revealing her identity and real name.

For more information see The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council website.

Congratulations to the winners!

See also: Past winners.

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Trying to describe The Gone Away World is difficult. It's post-apocalyptic novel that fuses humor and satire with ninjas, mimes, comic books and video game elements to create something that is definitely unique, at times laugh out loud funny but sadly, ultimately, exhausting to read.

In this future, the ultimate weapon makes people, places and things 'Go Away' and replaces them with a fantastical landscape where people's nightmares come to life. Consequently, humanity has escaped into a walled civilization where pipes spray a mist to keep the 'Gone Away' at bay. The story starts with a fire raging at a particularly important pumping station and our hero and his team are called in to put it out, like a futuristic version of Red Adair's oil well fighters.

Harkaway has a unique writing style that can best be described as the bastard love child of Marcel Proust and Minister Faust. If that sounds interesting, it is, when it's firing on all cylinders. Which is the frustrating thing about the book, it rarely does so. Harkaway his prone to lengthy, excruciatingly detailed digressions and flashbacks, in fact the entire first 100 pages or so is one long flashback, peppered with pop culture references and riffs on comics, video games and a bunch of other stuff.

Some of this is really terrific. For instance, the narrator's sensei (master of the 'Voiceless Dragon' fighting style) has an awesomely entertaining fight sequence against a bunch of assassin ninjas. Another scene has the narrator and his date being escorted on their night out by a spec ops team acting as waiters, cooks and maitre des, all while in the middle of a battle field. And lets not forget the digression on the efficacy of using sheep to detect landmines and the hilarious scene of a bunch of mimes entering what's basically a biker bar and using their unique 'skills' to get out unscathed.

And that's the big problem I had with The Gone Away World. The times when Harkaway nails his combination of satire, humor and scene are outstanding. Unfortunately, there is a long slog between them where the writing style and its digressions just wore me out. And being a long book with smallish type just adds that much more stuff to wade through. It was about 2/3 of the way through, after a major event happens to the narrator that I realized I didn't care any more. Sure the good was great, but there wasn't enough to keep me going. The weight of the book was oppressive and I wanted to be done with it all ready, so I decided to stop. Note that I am not saying this book is bad or the writing is sub-par. It isn't. I am saying the style became repetitive and exhausting for me, but Harkaway does write well, specializing in nice turns of phrase. I just wish there was more of the stuff I liked.

Which is rather unfortunate because I'm guessing there is more good stuff in there, I just couldn't bring myself to keep going (it had all ready taken me almost two weeks to get to where I was). Maybe someday I'll go back and finish.

Here's what they said...

So anyway...Here's what I came up with...

Two, right off the bat by Greg Manchess. He does exceptionally good figure work (full figured?) with a perfectly spartan but juicy brushwork and fairly unfettered backgrounds...everything I do NOT do...hmmm.. Next up came Scott Fischer's Titans of Chaos, with a beautifully rendered heroine in a levitation trance.... really exploring the boundaries of her image crop in an unconventional way. I also love Scott's whimsical ornamentation and color use...

I was very pleased to come across Adam Rex's Hawkspar... ok, so she's a sort of hot babe with a weapon...but unconventionally cropped in a beautifully painted abstract-ish shape that plays with positive / negative space and depth... Very sweet indeed. It's great to see Adam doing pieces back in-genre between his amazing kids' books. I'm a bit of a Stephan Martiniere groupie... and he was so omnipresent in the sf and f isle that he really is becoming his own context... My first pic from Stephan, River of Gods, is a solid member of that context, but my second pic, Brasyl, with its neon landscape and larger figures, is a bit of a departure, and one of my faves from him. And that type solution is the best I've seen in a LOOOOOOONG time, by Jackie Cooke of Prometheus/PYR books (I remembered her because she did some of mine for Pyr).

I was quite taken with the Orcs trilogy, which features a fantastically sculpted head by Tom Lauten, starkly photographed by Geoff Spear. That's a great bang for the buck.

I loved John Picacio's Gateway, with his hallmark -surprising and clever- montage of figure and stuff (space in this case). Chris McGrath is probably my favorite of the new-photographic-image-guys-on-the-block. He has a great stylistic treatment that gives a grainy atmosphere, and in Midwinter, his figures are not in a typical "pigeon roost" pose looking noble and concerned, but here, kind of caught unawares in a candid moment of uncertainty. KUDOS to his art director too. Jon Foster's Boneshaker is a great example of using only a face to bring off great personality and tone in his heroine, while utilizing her goggles as a focus to tell us the story, and set us firmly in the Steampunk genre.

Lastly, John Jude Palencar is a huge favorite... His work is so mystical and serene, and exquisitely rendered between long drags of unfiltered cigarettes (buy his originals now!) This square format, lopping off the wing of an angel with an unconventional crop no less, is an unexpected joy.... is that...um....sick?

Now specifically for scifi/fantasy bookcovers, I think we as designers/illustrators also have another job: giving the reader's imagination a really good starting point. I think it's more important in our genre than pretty much any other that we be as true as possible to the descriptions and worldbuilding in the books as possible. Our readers love these books because they want to be swallowed up by the world our authors have toiled long and hard to create - your mind always has the picture of the cover in your mind when you start reading, and if you have to work against that as you read the book, it takes away from the experience, I think. So it's a personal pet peeve of mine, as a fan first, when a cover is blatantly misrepresenting the details in the book. Now don't get me wrong, there's always room for simplification, and artistic license, but you have to be true to the essence of a book, and the tone of the book, the author's voice. When you can do all that AND have a book with good type, legibility, and balance AND be a groundbreaking design idea you haven't seen before is when you have a winner.

Also, in scifi/fantasy covers it's really hard to divorce nostalgia from design when thinking of our favorite covers - some of these books, and covers, have such deep meaning to who we are as people, a lot of good designers have soft spots for laughably bad covers...so I'm really glad you're asking for recent examples! To be fair, I'm going to leave Orbit books out of my picks - you can read my posts on the Orbit blog anytime and read my notes and feelings on the covers as we release them.

RECENT FAVES (in no order of import): This might be a radical admission to some of you, but I'm going to include a bunch of Young Adult books here. I think there's so many adults reading YA scifi & fantasy right now that we can't pretend it's a separate section anymore. I've been really inspired by a lot of the designs coming out for the YA genre books lately, and god I so covet the budgets for effects!

Also, a pet peeve of mine - and I know a lot of you art fans out there - is the issue of crediting artists/designers online. Until the info is easy to find on Amazon/B&N, getting people to credit is impossible. I'm embarrassed to say I am missing credits below, and I looked online for them. Anyone have any good suggestions about how to solve this issue? Because googling for back covers is a pain. Maybe we should all get together and campaign for the big websellers to put art credits in the book info listings.

• The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer (design by Ervin Serrano, Jacket illustration from Isifa/Alamy/Getty) I love the type. That took some TIME, people. It's totally over the top, but it tells you it's awesome, gives you a time period, and a nice balance with the sliver of an image. Really great texture pumped into the image too. (As you can see from my first few picks, I'm a big a Steampunk fan, so that helps catch my eye)
• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (design by Sammy Yuen Jr., illustrations by Keith Thompson & Sammy Yuen Jr.) Again, ridiculously mechanical and over-the-top. I don't think I've ever seen this many effects on a book, it almost jumped off the shelf and punched me in the face.
• Boneshaker by Cherie Priest: (illustration by Jon Foster, Design by Jamie Stafford-Hill) I know, I know, another Steampunk book. But I love the in-you-face zoom right in the character's face. I see that a lot in photo-based covers, but rarely in illustrations. Kind of made me wonder if that was originally the idea, or if the designer zoomed in from a larger illustration during the layout process. Nice type too. I'm a sucker for texture.

• Prospero Lost by L. Jagi Lamplighter: (painting by Sam Weber, design by ??) Sam Weber is my favorite painter right now. If there were 5 of him around to paint books it wouldn't be nearly enough for me. I literally drooled when I saw his illustrated Lord of the Flies for the Folio Society.
• Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow: (design by Suzanne Dean, illustration by Natasha Michaels) I'll tell you a dirty little designer secret I have - I hate hardcover jackets. I think they're annoying. If every hardcover I have could be printed paper-over-board or silkscreened right onto the book fabric, I would be a happy designer. I saw this cover and was pissed I didn't get to do it. That's just about the highest praise one designer can give to another.
• Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick: (design by Lucy Ruth Cummins, photo by James Porto) I love how the image is so subtly colored towards the top. A really subtle touch. And the pearl paper is so nice. Such a spare design, it really was a breath of fresh air when I saw it. Not such a huge fan of the type, but it is more appropriate for the YA section, so I'll let it slide.

• Fallen by Lauren Kate: (design by ?? Art by Fernanda Brussi Goncales) can you say atmosphere? I want to know who that girl is and why she is in despair. Great typeface choice, Elegant but with a little subtle creepiness.
• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl: (design by David Caplan, lettering by Si Scott, photo by Robert Clark) 3 words: Hand. Lettered. Type. You don't get it better than this. It doesn't tell you anything about the book, really, but it's so sexy that you just have to pick it up. The purple foil didn't hurt either, but even flat color online, it's gorgeous.
• Graceling (UK Edition) by Kristin Cashore: design by ?? Art by Larry Rostant) Larry is one of my favorite photo-illustrators working today, and I just thought the lighting on this figure was fantastic. And I love the really spare background. I was so disappointed when I saw the US cover...kind of quiet in comparison.

Other things influence sales - how much advertising is spent; how much money publishers pay in order to have books on table displays (What, you thought they were free?) - but the cover is the best weapon a new author might have. So "successful", in real terms, in terms that feed the author, means the cover which communicates to that casual reader. Sometimes it's making the book look enough like something similar (just look at the glut of Twilight rip-offs); sometimes it's taking an element and modernising it slightly (hooded figures against a white background is nicely high contrast and eye-catching). If it catches their eye (high contrast again) and then informs them about a whole bunch of things they need to know, then it's successful. Then it's up to the writer.

So I think of all these things when I look at a cover. Who's it speaking to? What does it tell customers about the book? What else would they have read that's similar? It really needs to inform the customer enough to make them pick the book up. I don't make buying choices like this - I tend to browse what people say online, and then explore my own quirks and whims, and covers are usually the last thing I'm concerned about as a consumer.

As a result, I don't tend to get blown away by a cover, but I can certainly get blown away by the art in isolation. So let's plug an artist. One that has recently awed me is this guy, Jesse van Dijk.

Hah! Pretty loaded question. I would say as an illustration professional, the most successful covers are the ones that help the book connect story with audience, publisher and author with cash, while at the same time, creating a resonant image that's true to the best intentions of the manuscript's spirit. When I illustrate a book cover, I pursue the intersection of those vectors. I'm hoping to create an image that not only makes an audience take notice, but hopefully resonates in their heads long after first glance.

As far as my personal tastes, the most successful sf/f/h book covers have a sense of "becoming". This can mean a lot of different things. "Becoming" can be an aspect of the tactile making or technique of a piece of cover art, such as the loose paint strokes and shape-making of John Berkey, John Harris, or Greg Manchess. It can also apply to the associative way a traditional/digital hybrid artist like Dave McKean layers disparate materials together to create an image. Becoming can be an aspect of conceptual communication. Look at the works of Brad Holland or the great Polish poster artist Wiktor Sadowski. They present seemingly simplistic images that unfold complex ideas, unveiling a transcendent truth, far greater than the sum of its parts. Becoming can be the way an image might seem unfinished, waiting to be completed, half-seen, or even transformative. It can be the way it suggests just the right combination of narrative questions, rather than the promise of resolution. Becoming doesn't spoon-feed and isn't slave to the latest game of "follow the leader". It isn't the path of least resistance. It favors an audience that is active, rather than passive, dynamic of imagination, rather than static with nostalgia. It favors an image that evokes, rather than an image that crams the frame with every literal detail. Becoming welcomes the audience into the making of the image in some way. It trusts their minds, hearts, and imaginations to complete the picture.

Becoming is a relatively rare thing in today's cover art world. I'm not quite sure why. I aspire toward becoming in all of my work, regardless of subject matter, and yet I feel I often fall agonizingly short. It's not easy and it's elusive, but when it manifests, it's my favorite victory. When I see a fellow illustrator pull it off, it stops me in my tracks. Here are a few recent works by other artists that were successful in that regard for me, and resonate in my imagination:

• Cover art for Jeff VanderMeer's Finch by John Coulthart (Underland Press) [Hi-Res]


• Cover art for Carrie Mac's The Gryphon Project by Sam Weber (Penguin Canada) [Hi-res]


• (Although this image of Weber's is more resonant to me than The Gryphon Project, but is not a book cover): Art for Rachel Swirsky's A Memory of Wind by Sam Weber (Tor.com) [Hi-res]


• Cover art for Lisa Goldstein's The Red Magician by Eric Fortune (Starscape) [Hi-res]

A successful image has to be aesthetically perfect and let the perspective choices, the composition lines, the "weight" of the different parts strike your mind with no mercy. After many years of fantastic illustration and many thousands of books, after generations of artists and almost two decades of Spectrum annuals, the bar is higher for anyone trying to mark his/her passage with an unforgettable work. I like very much what Tor and Irene Gallo have done with the Wheel of Time series, delivering a well-known milieu in the hand of fourteen top-class artists, such as Sam Weber and Dan Dos Santos. We get here an art director and an illustrator trying to outdo themselves at the same time, feeling the responsibility of the event. The recent covers for Fires of Heaven and The Shadow Rising blew me literally away.

Other elements that we cannot underestimate are the name of the writer, sometimes the name of the artist whose style can be recognized by careful eyes, and most of all the type design. Subterranean Press and Pyr Book are coming out with many editions where elegance is the key word. I like so much the covers for Desolation Road and The Taborin Scale.

Where's the secret? What about the ingredients of the magic recipe? What's behind the joint-venture between an art director and the artist's talent, trying to unleash a 3D-cover without the help of glasses? Sometimes it's difficult to explain exactly what's so alluring... the eyes of a character maybe, the lettering, a mixture of color and spells? We artists keep humbly working hard searching for the perfect cover... it's the best statement we can release on behalf of the literary genre we love!

Oddly enough, one recent one that blew me away was for the cover to Red Claw. It's not even art, but a photo involving toy spacemen and dead bugs. It actually made me pick up the book and then buy it once I started reading through it. The design was great and the red color just jumped out at me. It's very stark but that's what did it for me. That and the fact I actually OWN the toy spacemen used, of the same era. And the book is terrific.

Another one was The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove with the cover by Greg Manchess. I love mammoths and Greg's work anyway. End of story there!

And still another was the cover to Gary Gianni's graphic novel version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea... very painterly, like Greg's cover mentioned before, and very colorful.

However, as we often say, break the rules a bit and you'll bring your image to another level.

Well I am always blown away by all the new pieces by my friend Stephan Martiniere. Shrapnel 3, or Terra Insegura, are absolutely awesome. Perfect sense of composition, perfect balance. Even though not strictly "new", John Harris has been having a few good covers that I love, as they go straight to the point in a subtle "painted strokes" way.

I've written in the past about my displeasure for the current trends in cover design. It seems like every publisher is caught in some self-fulfilling prophecy that to sell books, you need to have an Abercrombie & Fitch model on the cover. This, of course, is absurd, and looks painfully cliché on the shelves of bookstores.

Of course, the hooded man applies mostly to secondary world Fantasy, but every sub-genre seems to have its own cliché. I mean... how many tramp-stamped heroines do we really need?

What do I like? I love when an artist is given free reign to be inventive and capture the tone and character of a story. I've often heard the argument that clichés enforce a readers perception of a novel (the publisher wants to make sure that they know what they are buying... or buy something simply because it looks very similar to another book), but I think a good designer can identify a novel while still being creative and artistic.

That said, there are some covers that are terribly traditional... that I absolutely love.

I've picked a few covers that fall into both categories.

• Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie - My favourite cover in years. It captures all the swashbuckling charm of Abercrombie's novels, while also hinting at the ruthless nature of the story within. With The Blade Itself, Gollancz took a chance, produced a cover that looked like nothing else on the market and each subsequent novel since has topped the last.
• The Sad Tales of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington - Lauren Panepinto at Orbit pulled out all the stops with this amazing artwork. Sure, the layout and typography is simple, but the stark, complicated image immediately captured my imagination.
• Red Claw by Philip Palmer - Another cover by Panepinto that takes chances and seems to split opinions. I absolutely love it. Reminds me greatly of playing in my back yard and launching my own adventures into space and onto alien planets.

• The Dervish House by Ian McDonald - Really, you could pick anything Pyr Books publishes and stick it on this list. Lou Anders does a fantastic job of hooking up with the best artists in the industry and letting them run wild. The imagery on The Dervish House is at once familiar and otherworldly.
• The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (UK edition) - In North America, Sanderson's Mistborn series have rather traditional covers. Gollancz (funny how the same publishers keep popping up on this list...) went the opposite direction and created moody, impressionistic covers that both stand out, get their hooded figure and capture the story within.
• Walking the Tree by Kaaron Warren - Angry Robot Books is new on the scene, but their cover for Walking the Tree quickly put them on my radar. What can I say? I'm a sucker for anything green. Screams 'Fantasy', but in a good way, not an I'm-embarrassed-to-be-seen-reading-this-in-public kinda way.

High Fantasy

1. "Eagle's Beak and Wings of Bronze" by Deborah J. Ross
2. "One Small Detail" by Katharine Kerr
3. "Hero" by Sherwood Smith

4. "Kind Hunter" by Pati Nagle
5. "The Merrow" by Steven Harper
6. "Night Harvest Cuvée Rouge" by Vonda N. by McIntyre
7. "Repo Babe" by Jennifer Stevenson

8. "Grow Your Own" by Brenda W. by Clough
9. "East of the Sun, West of Acousticville" by Judith Tarr
10. "Headless Over Heels" by Chris Dolley
11. "Somewhere in Dreamland Tonight" by Madeleine Robins
12. "Daddy's Big Girl" by Ursula K. by Le Guin

13. "Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny" by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
14. "The Thief of Stones " by Sarah Zettel

15. "Not My Knot" by Irene Radford
16. "Dusty Wings" by Nancy Jane Moore
17. "Heart of Jade" by " by Amy Sterling Casil
18. "Feather of the Phoenix" by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
19. "The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea" by Vonda N. by McIntyre

Above you can see the CubeDude version of Jean-Luc Picard, Wesley Crusher, Paul Atreides, and, my favorite, Jay Maynard the Tron Guy.

Check out the gallery and you can also find Robin the Boy Wonder, Buzz Lightyear, Frankenstein's monster, The Tick, Film Slashers (Freedy Krueger, Jason, Leatherface and Chucky), Wonder Woman, Captain America, Green Lantern, Jack Skellington, Lando Calrissian, and lots more.

• Temple Library Reviews interviews Lauren Beukes.
  
• Matt Heppe interviews Christian Cameron.
• Nick Harkaway's Guest of Honour Speech at P-Con (video). (via Cheryl Morgan)
• Suvudu interviews Elizabeth Moon and Jack Campbell.
• John Scalzi's The Big Idea: Carrie Ryan.
• The Extra interviews Michael Shea.
• SciFi Wire interviews Tron Legacy's Jeff Bridges.
  

• Apex Birthday Sale!
• SLF Offers Older Writers Grant.

• SFWA on How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends: How To Talk Doctor! Lesson 1.
• Cindy Pon on Diversity in fantasy mine. (via Tansy Rayner Roberts)
• Jim C. Hines on Novel Survey Results, Part I.
• Nick Mamatas on The Professional.
  
• Victoria Strauss on Content Mills-Just A Stepping Stone in Your Career.
• Michael A. Stackpole on Will Ebooks Kill The Joy of Reading?
• Nisi Shawl on Writing and Racial Identity Versus the Spinrave.
• Nnedi Okorafor on Can you define African Science Fiction?
• Juliette Wade on Insiders and Outsiders.
  
• Missions Unknown on Scrap the Remakes and Film These Books Instead.
• Mark Kelly on Genres of Sequels and Series.
• Brit Mandelo on Queering SFF #1: First Experiences.
• Jo Walton on In Sheep's Clothing: Why Fantasy and SF might be disguised as each other.
• Kristin Cashore on the Flying Trapeze.
• Marie Brennan on First Girl Ever.
• A. Lee Martinez on Abracadabra!
• Nicola Morgan on Conflicting Advice.
• The Rejectionist on 5 Traits That Bag an Boyfriend Agent, Courtesy of Cosmopolitan Magazine.
• Imogen Russell Williams on What's in a name? A lot, when it comes to fantasy.
• Charlie Jane Anders asks: Have You Ever Hated A Book, Then Come Back To It Later And Loved It?
• Flick Gallery: 10 amazing Mars pulp covers.[via Marooned]
• Malinda Lo reads from Ash (podcast).
  
• [Also check out Charles' essay on Fandom and Piracy (Part 3) - Editor]
  

Your Mission (should you choose to accept it): Tell us which cover you like best and why.

Books shown here:

• The Devil in Green by Mark Chadbourn (Artist: John Picacio)


• Blood of Ambrose (French) by James Enge (Artist: Frédéric Perrin)


• Deadman's Road by Joe R. Lansdale (Artist: Timothy Truman)

NOTE: Bigger, better cover art images are available by clicking the images or title links.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The story of how mild-mannered Harold became trapped aboard the airship of an evil genius with only a handful of robots, the voice of his unrequited love, and the said evil genius (now in suspended animation) to keep him company.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Steampunk is used not just for flavor, but also as a vehicle to give the story more meaning; lush prose; attractive, retro-futuristic world building.
CONS: Sometimes tries too hard to be Literary. Because of the diary-like telling, you never doubt where the story is headed.
BOTTOM LINE: This is not only a good steampunk novel, it's also a book with more depth than one might expect.

I've been on something of a steampunk bender lately, the latest entry of which is Detxter Palmer's first novel The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Whereas much of today's steampunk stories are about the romance of the genre, Palmer also uses it as a vehicle to make a statement about technology, thus making it stand out for being one of the most Literary steampunk books around.

Plot-wise, it's the first-person narrative of mild-mannered Harold, a greeting card writer in the early 1900's retro-future of Xeroville, a city that's straight out of Metropolis or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Harold is being held prisoner aboard the airship Chrysalis due to the machinations of evil genius Prosepro Taligent, who is also on board...though he's in a cryogenic suspension chamber. Despite a small team of mechanical men, Harold's only source of human(-like) companionship is his true love, Prosepero's daughter Miranda, who may or may not even be alive as she only speaks to Harold through a series of speakers placed around the ship.

As you may have guessed from character names, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. This is one reason that the book comes off as Literary-with-a-capital-L, though Palmer's lush and well-crafted prose should also be credited. It goes a long way towards creating the steampunk retro-future setting which serves as the well-drawn backdrop for his retelling. Having not read The Tempest, I'm sure I was missing some of the references that were undoubtedly peppered throughout the story, particularly the scenes that seemed "weird" and otherwise out of place. However, there was a noticeable reference to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice via a quote from a stranger named Shylock (encountered inside Miranda's magical "holo-deck" playroom) who cuts himself with a knife to prove he is human, not mechanical, while he asks, "Prick me. Do I not bleed?"

This question encapsulates one of the prevailing themes of the story. The book seems to have something to say about the rapid advancement of technology and how we are losing our identities (our humanity? our purity?) amidst the noise of turning cogs, moving levers and escaping steam pressure. The mechanization of society means we are losing control of our lives, as reinforced through several of Harold's dreams which are used excessively to paint scenes of symbolism. And that technology will fail us, as witnessed by the apparent failing of the perpetual motion machine that drives the Chrysalis. This is the message supported by the steampunk setting.

Delivering a message is also a hallmark of Capital-L-Literature. Palmer just uses steampunk to do it. Instead of using the future to reflect the present, Palmer uses a retro-future, an early 20th century powered by coal and steam. But there are times when the author is trying too hard to capitalize that "L", like in the scene where he himself shows up as a character; or the scene in which a single sentence runs for a page and a half, listing the multitude of sounds emitted from a bizarre piece of performance art involving Harold's estranged sister, Astrid. (This last one you can experience for yourself, as read by the author, on St. Martin's page of book extras.)

To be sure, the steampunk flavor isn't only used as messenger. There's still plenty of tasty flavor in the foreground. For example, there' a sequence about how, as a child, Harold came to meet Miranda. He wins an invitation to Miranda's birthday party at the Nickel Empire, a magical carnival where every attraction costs a five-cent piece that was set up by the mysterious magnate Propsero Taligent. Harold's invitation comes in the form of a whistle that, when blown at midnight, summons a mechanical, flying robot resembling a demon to Harold's residence. Inside the huge Taligent tower in downtown Xeroville, untold marvels await Harold and the 99 other children invited to her party.

And these marvels are shared by the reader as well. The Dream of Perpetual Motion is not only a good steampunk novel, it's also a book with more depth than one might expect.