2011 Chesley Award Finalists

ASFA, the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, have announced the 2011 Chesley Award Finalists. I'm thrilled to be nominated for a fourth time in the category of Best Art Director (I won in 2009), and equally happy to see two Pyr cover illustrations make the list. Congratulations to Todd Lockwood for his nomination for the cover for Tom LLoyd's The Ragged Man and to Stephan Martiniere for his nomination for the cover illustration for Ian McDonald's Ares Express. Both are in the category of Best Paperback. And congratulations to all the nominees. Please follow the link above and check out all the amazing work.

The Hotties: 2010 Year End Awards

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist has issued their "The Hotties: 2010 Year End Awards."

I'm honored that Pyr has been named "Publisher of the Year." Pat writes, "With three Pyr titles in the Top 5 and four in the Top 10, it couldn't be any other publisher! The folks at Pyr celebrated their 5th anniversary this year. Keep up the great work! And long live!"

Meanwhile, Stephan Martiniere's cover for Kay Kenyon's Prince of Storms gets the Best Cover Art Award.

And I'm thrilled to receive the "MVP Award" for the second year in a row. Pat writes, "Yes, two years in a row! Last year I said that as the heart and soul behind the Pyr imprint, this man is pretty damn close to being a genius. Scratch that! He is a genius! Though he doesn't have the means of the genre powerhouses at his disposal, Lou Anders nevertheless manages to work wonders year in and year out. To the powers that be at Prometheus Books: Give this man a raise! God knows he deserves it!" Can't argue with those sentiments.

MultiReal: The Book Cover

The full jacket for MultiReal.Courtesy of illustrator Stephan Martiniere and designer Jackie Cooke. Nice, huh?

Lou Talks in Three Articles

Lots of Lou on the Web!

SFSignal is back with another Mind Meld. This one looks at Hollywood Science Fiction and asks "What other story, or stories, do you believe are deserving of being made into movies and why?" In addition to Yours Truly, responses are from Peggy Kolm, Michael L. Wentz, Michael Blackmore, SciFiChick, and the always interesting John C. Wright. Wright argues that, as a visual medium, "A science fiction movie that does not involve spectacle and special effects is not taking advantage of the primary strength of movies." I concur. I'd pick my list from some newer works though, as nothing dates like the future. Still, as I say in my own piece, with the cost of CGI dropping, there's going to be more of everything, so I think they'll be enough to keep us all happy.

Meanwhile, I'm interviewed about illustrator Stephan Martiniere over on io9.com in "The Future Will Be Bio-Mechanical." Some very nice samples of his work, including the concept art he did for the I, Robot film that happens to be the piece that lead me to put him on our edition of River of Gods.(And speaking about Ian McDonald books, although I'm not in it, there is an interview with Ian talking about both Brasyland the forthcoming The Dervish House up at Post-Weird Thoughts.)

Finally, GalleyCat uses the occasion of Michael Moorcock's Grand Masterhood to quote me and others talking about John Picacio's genius in a piece titled "A Grand Master's Greatest Character Reborn." This is, of course, about Picacio's recent work conceiving and illustrating Moorcock's Elric: The Stealer of Soulsreissue for Del Rey as well as our own The Metatemporal Detective.Michael Whelan's Elric has always been the definitive portrayal of the character for me. Until now. Go see why.

Feast Your Eyes...

Because I can't talk about artwork enough, here are the covers of three forthcoming Pyr books. On the left is Chris Roberson's End of the Century,as envisioned by Dan Dos Santos. (Full illustration, sans text, is here.) This is a tale of a young woman named Alice Fell, a teenage American punker who has been having visions of the London Eye all her life (and before there was such a thing), so follows her vision to the UK and falls into a conspiracy that moves through secret societies (and shadowy assailants) all the way back to the origins of the Holy Grail myth. One part urban fantasy, one part secret history, there are also odd parallels with a completely different Pyr book that was being written at the same time. No I won't say which one. But I will say this is the best thing Roberson has written thus far, and he's a damn good writer.

Then over here on the right we have Stephan Martiniere's cover for Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days, a collection of all the stories that have sprung out of the brilliantly-realized future India he crafted for River of Gods.There's a Hugo winner, a Hugo nominee and a 25k original novella here, so what's not to love, right? I don't think it's unfair to say that this is going to be a talked-about book in 09.

Then back on the left is a cover by Todd Lockwood - our first time working with Todd, who was wonderful - for a really interesting debut fantasy novel, Tom Lloyd's The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reign.This is a tale of Isaak, a "white eye" - a person born with more charisma, more strength, and more anger than average people, created by the gods to be leaders of men, but limited by those gods as well, who is thrown from humble origins into courtly politics (and courtly intrigues, and, of course, killer battles replete with trolls and dragons). It's a really intricate, lush, fully-realized fantasy world, of the grim and gritty variety, a sort of Elric set loose in Middle Earth, that I am VERY excited to be releasing in the States. Todd's full cover is a wrap-around too, so this is only a taste.

More covers starting to appear on our forthcoming books page too. And here's a handy Amazon list too. Please also note that John Picacio's utterly fantastic cover for Fast Forward 2 is still being worked on, so as great as it is, it isn't final (and hence not reproduced here).

Speaking of Cover Art...

City Without End takes Silver Spectrum Award

A huge congratulations to Stephan Martiniere, whose cover illustration for the third book in Kay Kenyon's ongoing space opera quartet entitled The Entire and the Rose, the forthcoming City Without End, just won the Silver Spectrum award in the book category. All of Stephan's covers in this series have been amazing. Book one, Bright of the Sky,made the Spectrum annual the year it was released, and we're hearing good things about A World Too Near- which just hit shelves this week. (For a look at these two covers side by side, see Kay's website.) And now, unveiled here for the first time, the winning cover of City Without End. This is my favorite of the three "Entire" pieces, and maybe one of my favorite Martiniere illustrations ever.

What do you think?

The Big Book Cover Post: Wizards & Spaceships

My good buddy George Mann, consultant editor of newish imprint Solaris Books, recently wrote an article for UK book trade magazine Publishing News on the packaging and branding of SF&F novels. Now, George has put the entire article, "Marrying Authors to their Market: A Genre Perspective," up on the Solaris website. The article is well-worth reading.

Therein, George makes the distinction between two schools of thought in cover design, namely "to package your SF/F novel to appeal to as wide a readership as possible, in the hope of enticing readers from other areas of the bookstore to pick it up on a whim; or to package your SF/F novel to appeal to the perceived core readership of the genre, or indeed, fans of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, people who want a book with a spaceship or a wizard on the front of it."

George goes on to discuss the risks associated with both camps. In trying for the broader market, one risks missing the mark, ending up with a book still shelved in the SF&F section, failing to hit the elusive "mainstream" reader AND failing to appeal to the core as well. In marketing for the core, the novel "is appealing to a much more limited readership and has little or no chance of transcending the genre and breaking out into the bestseller lists."

He states that from its inception Solaris decided "for better or for worse – to place ourselves directly in that second camp." This was done both because their parent company - Games Workshop - had eight years experience marketing directly to a niche audience with their Black Library imprint of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 titles. But also because of a perceived market niche not being serviced: "Essentially, at the heart of the genre, the midlist was disappearing. The result of this was that the core SF/F readership was not being as well served as it had been in the past; people who went into a high street bookshop to browse the SF/F section were not necessarily seeing those aforementioned books with wizards and spaceships on the front."

George's sentiments are very close to my own thoughts and ongoing decisions for the Pyr imprint. In setting up the imprint to begin with, we made the decision to go for books which Norman Spinrad, writing in the pages of Asimov's, once described as "science fiction written specifically for experienced and intelligent readers of science fiction, with a bit of fantasy more or less in the same mode thrown in." Although there are exceptions to the rule, we have largely forgone literary experimentation or watered-down "mainstreamed" SF&F for (to quote Norman again) "actual science fiction...and fantasy...of an overall higher literary quality."

And this is reflected in how we've chosen to package it.

Personally, I do not not not like the move away from illustration to design that I see coming out from a lot of houses (though it has its place for individual books - I'm talking about a general trend). I think to forgo illustration is to sacrifice one of the core strengths of SF&F and one of its unique selling points. I do, however, think you can have cake and eat too. There is a world of difference between what Tor art director Irene Gallo has done with John Scalzi's Old Man's Warcovers - which do indeed feature spaceships and planets, albeit beautifully rendered in John Harris' very "painterly" style - and the sort of archetypal cheesy metal bikini and Bug Eyed Monster cover that is sometimes associated with the worst of genre illustration. Both styles of cover prominently feature the central SF&F imagery, but one does so with taste and the other, not so much. What's more - I'm not married to the core imagery so much as I am to the idea of provocative illustration. I also really like the way Bantam here has packaged Lightand Nova Swing- cats and dice, cats and cards - doesn't necessarily say SF to me at, but they do say cool. I'm intrigued by the image. Those are nice looking books and I enjoy looking at them. And, hey, if I'm going to shell out $25 for a hardcover, I want more than the author's name in enormous type with a stylized sword or an embossed fleur-de-lis or some other squiggle of design.

I am not talking about creating a book that appeals to both genre and mainstream people in the crossover way George suggest. I am talking about creating a book cover that appeals to genre fans, fully celebrates genre elements, but does so with some artistic merit to it. I think both John Picacio and Stephan Martiniere (to name two of my favorite artists) fully embrace those aspects of genre fiction that embody sense of wonder, yet present them in a way that also qualified as art. (As does the latest illustrator to work with Pyr, Sparth, pictured right.) Which is how I think you reach, not the never-read it, never-will uninitiated, but what Gollancz editor Simon Spanton once defined as the "lapsed catholics" of science fiction - those who read more as children and now read maybe one book a year, generally by an author they know. These readers have grown up - show them their fiction has grown up with them. I think what makes a success like John Scalzi or Richard Morgan is not going after mainstream readers, but going after the whole field, from the core to the fringes, and that you do so, neither by hiding/omitting your genre elements nor presenting them in an off-putting, garish manor, but by presenting them in a mature, intriguing, attractive, inclusive, compelling 21st century light.

George and I were talking all this over with the aforementioned John Picacio, and this is what he had to say (and kindly consented to allow me to republish here): "The field must visually celebrate itself, rather than run away from itself. Couldn’t agree with you [George] more. And I realize the context in which you’re saying this, regarding the midlist specifically. When sf/fantasy publishing shows an insecurity about its visual strengths, that insecurity rubs off negatively not only on our audiences, but in the broader media, and we push ourselves backwards every time we do that. How often do we hear sf/fantasy film actors make apologies for the 'sf-ness' of a film or TV show, or say that 'if it didn’t label itself as sf, more people would check it out'? Complete bullshit. But when I hear comments like that, I think that attitude reflects two important things. It’s bad because those comments get doled out via the larger media and that attitude gets disseminated to the larger populace as a popular opinion, which is damaging, but more importantly I think it reflects how poorly the field sees itself at times, and by 'the field' I mean us over here in publishing as the root of that problem. My point is, the field can’t expect larger audiences and bigger sales numbers, unless it stops being insecure about itself and stops projecting visual insecurity via cliched design decisions that hide the gusto, spirit, invention and provocativeness of a book. I’ve always been a firm believer that it’s real simple — the book is God. It’ll tell you what it wants to be every single time."

Well said. Meanwhile, I'm delighted to see that over at The Genre Files, "Ariel" has managed to tie George's philosophy in with Wired-magazine main man Chris Anderson's brilliant The Long Tail, when he writes (emphasis mine): "In this Internet-enabled information age, data on the variety and wide availability of a range of products in a given product area is - for practical purposes - both limitless and free. From the point of view of the Long Tail audience for a particular product, the most pressing task is therefore to filter that vast flood of data in order to select the products that offer the best fit for the customer's needs. In short: they need to boost the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where they can reach an informed purchasing decision. Similarly, from the point of view of the producer, the trick is to somehow rise above the vast sea of info-noise; to make their product stand out and be noticed, yet to do so in a manner that emphasises its authentic appeal to the potential customer."

To make your product stand out and be noticed. Get above the signal-to-noise ration. That means let your SF&F light shine - not hide it under a bushel! Hey, what's a bushel anyway?

22nd Annual Chesley Awards Final Ballot

The Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists has just released their list of the 22nd Annual Chesley Awards Nominees. ASFA members can download the Final Ballot here, and vote by August 10th.

Obviously, I'm thrilled that Stephan Martiniere's wonderful illustration for the Pyr edition of Ian McDonald's River of Godstops the list of the "Best Cover Illustration -- Hardback Book." Stephan is nominated again in the category of Award for Artistic Achievement.

Meanwhile, my dear friend and illustrator for all five of my own anthologies, John Picacio, is also up twice, for the amazing work he did on the cover of the Eos reissue of A Canticle for Leibowitzand for the cover of Interzone magazine's 204th issue.

But beyond all that, I'm deeply honored to have shown up on the shortlist myself for Best Art Director. I don't know if this is the first time someone from editorial has made the shortlist, but it's got to be a rare occurrence if not a unique one. So I want to say upfront that while I'm very pleased and proud, what this nomination means is that people think our books look really damn good, and that is a credit to a great many people. Beyond the fabulous illustrators we've had the privilege to work with -- Picacio, Martiniere, Caniglia, Brian W. Dow, Greg Bridges, Bob Eggleton, Jim Burns, Dave Seeley, among others -- my parent company Prometheus Books has a fabulous art department, and one that is very patient to put up with me breathing over their shoulders to the degree that I do. Jaqueline Cooke, Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger, and Nicole Sommer-Lecht are all tremendous, very talented, and I am very grateful to them to work so hard and so well in the service of the Pyr line. What's more, I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Irene Gallo and John Picacio, who have both been very free with their time and their advice and are much wiser souls than I.

Now, here's the full list:

Best Cover Illustration -- Hardback Book
* Stephan Martiniere, "River of Gods", by Ian McDonald, Pyr, Mar 2006
* Jon Foster, "The Demon and the City", by Liz Williams, Night Shade Books, Aug 2006
* Donato Giancola, "The Thirteenth House", by Sharon Shinn, Ace, Mar 2006
* Todd Lockwood, "Temeraire: In the Service of the King", by Naomi Novik, SFBC, 2006
* James A. Owen, "Here, There Be Dragons (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica)" by James A. Owen, Simon & Schuster, Sept 2006

Best Cover Illustration -- Paperback Book
* John Picacio, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", by Walter M. Miller, Eos, May 2006
* Daniel Dos Santos, "Moon Called", by Patricia Briggs, Ace, Feb 2006
* Vince Natale, "Queen of Attolia", by Megan Whalen Turner, Eos, Jan 2006

Best Cover Illustration -- Magazine
* Steven Gilberts, "Dark Wisdom: the Magazine of Dark Fiction", Winter 2006
* Renee LeCompte, "Fantasy Magazine", Summer 2006
* John Picacio, "Interzone" #204, May/June 2006
* r.k.post, "Dragon" #336, January 2006

Best Interior Illustration
* Tony Di Terlizzi, "Care and Feeding of Sprites", by Holly Black & Tony Di Terlizzi
* Omar Rayyan, "Cricket Magazine"
* Yvonne Gilbert, "The Ice Dragon", by George R.R. Martin, Starscape, Oct 2006
* Justin Sweet, "Kull: Exile of Atlantis" by Robert E. Howard, Del Rey, Oct 2006
* Ruth Thompson & Lawrence Allen Williams, "The Book Angels" by Todd Jordan, Sterling 2006
* Michael Kaluta, "The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden" by Catherynne M. Valente, Spectra, Oct 2006
* James A. Owen, "Here, There Be Dragons (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica)", by James A. Owen, Simon & Schuster, Sept 2006

Best Color Work -- Unpublished
* Jim Burns, "Dryad of the Oak", acrylic
* Donato Giancola, "Tristan and Isolde", oil
* Stephen Hickman, "Galadriel's Harp"
* Michael Whelan, "Retrospection", acrylic
* Benita Winckler, "Changing", digital

Best Monochrome -- Unpublished
* Donato Giancola, "Red Sonya", pencil & chalk
* Stephanie Pui-Man Law, "Plum Blossoms", ink
* Alex McVey, "Love Bites", pencil
* Tom Fleming, "Spring", pencil
* Joe Bellafatto, "The Great Temptation: Angel of Death"

Best Three Dimensional Art
* Laura Reynolds, "Ice Dragon", mixed
* Gabriel Marquez, "Cthulhu V2", porcelain
* Scott Webb, "Head over Heels", polymert clay
* Forest Rogers, "Sea Maid's Music", clay and misc.
* Luke Eldridge, "Gargoyle Descending", wire

Best Gaming Related Illustration
* Carl Critchlow "An Ill Wind Blows"
* Ralph Horsley "Thri-Keen"
* Todd Lockwood, "Dragons of Fearum"
* Richard Sardinha,"Coils of Set"
* Eva Widerman, "Seed of Undead"
* Paul & Michael Bielaczyc, "Knightly Order of Ansalom"

Best Product Illustration
* Douglas Fitch, production design for LA Opera's,"Hansel and Gretel"
* Nathan Crowley, architectural design for the movie, "The Lake House"
* Eugenio Caballero and William Stout, production designer and conceptual designer for the movie "Pan's Labyrinth"

Award for Artistic Achievement
* Stephan Martiniere
* John Jude Palencar
* Kinuko Y. Craft
* John Howe
* Alan Lee

Best Art Director
* Irene Gallo, Tor Books
* Matt Adelsperger, Wizards of the Coast
* Lou Anders, Pyr
* David Stevenson, Del Rey
* Jeremy Jarvis, Wizards of the Coast
* Judith Murello, Berkley Publishing Group
* Nicolas Sica, Bookspan (SFBC)
* Justin Stewart, Apex Magazine