Storms

And today, some of the images of storms I've been gathering....

"Vesuvius" by William Turner

A very stormy abstract by contemporary Dutch painter Eelco Maan

James Lavadour's "Redface"

One of my current favorite works, "Tumult" by contemporary figure painter Zack Zdrale. I love this painting.

"Northern Spirit" by Nineteenth-century Romantic painter John Martin

"Sea Witch" by Frank Frazetta

An illustration by Yoshitaka Amano that I can't find a title for, unfortunately.....

And Now, Space Poems

It's been a fairly poetic week around here and around the studio, and a fairly speculative one as well.

According to the Wiki gods, speculative poetry is poetry that "focuses on fantastic, science fictional, or mythological themes." Although that seems to cover quite a lot of territory, speculative poetry is usually considered a niche endeavor. 

The upside is that it makes it easier to find.

There's an association dedicated to the science fictional type of speculative poetry, and they publish a quarterly journal. Here's the current issue of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. 

Scifi poetry represents a dual challenge: it should stand as good poetry in its own right, even next to non-genre work, while also participating in the traditional subject matter of scifi. This excerpt is a good example; it's taken from David Barber's poem "Waving the Starships Goodbye" from the Autumn 2013 issue (Volume 36.)

"One day, the children will want to leave, tired
of our insistence on the weight of things,
like history, wanting space for its own sake...
....They are frozen in time
and it is us the centuries have aged so much.
Or vast ships, mountains really, wormed all through
by the slow generations born to those
who could choose, as emigrants do, their lives.
Everything is fine, except arriving.
What would such small strange folk do with planets?...."

"Cosmic Hive" by Nikalay Gutsu

And this is an excerpt from "The Other Night (Comet Kohoutek)" from Diane Ackerman's notable 1976 collection The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral:

"Last night, while
cabbage stuffed with
brown sugar, meat and
raisins was baking in the
oven, and my potted holly,
dying leafmeal from red-spider,
basked in its antidote malathion,
I stepped outside to watch Kohoutek
passing its dromedary core through the
eye of a galaxy. But only found a white
blur cat-napping under Venus: gauzy, dis-
solute, and bobtailed as a Manx. 

Pent-up in that endless coliseum of stars,
the moon was fuller than any Protestant
had a right to be. And I said: Moon,
if you’ve got any pull up there, bring me
a sun-grazing comet, its long hair swept
back by the solar wind, in its mouth a dollop
of primordial sputum. A dozing iceberg,
in whose coma ur-elements collide. Bring me
a mojo that’s both relict and reliquary.
Give me a thrill from that petrified seed...."

Another place to find good science fiction and fantasy verse is Strange Horizons, the weekly online spec fiction magazine.




And of course there's often poetry in Asimov's, too, on most newsstands.

The Eschaton Is Nigh

There's an upside to ditching 90% of your paperback collection and going all digital without really cataloging anything: in the past few years, I've been inadvertently afforded the pleasure of rereading some pretty great stuff. 

I forget; I download again; I find out three pages in. This time it was Frederik Pohl's Eschaton series: The Other End of Time, The Siege of Eternity, and The Far Shore of Time.

The Eschaton books are eminently readable but treat on some fairly hard scifi tropes: the politics of first contact, human rights issues, and of course theoretical and speculative physics (matter/antimatter transfer, cosmological theories, and more.) It's thoroughly engaging, even on the second pass.

Frederik Pohl wrote for many, many years and won pretty much every science fiction award there is. His work spanned the decades between the 1950's and his death last year in 2013 and garnered him Hugos, Nebulas, National Book Awards, Loci, and many others. 

(For those hands-busy days, Sci-Fi-London offers this great collection of radio dramas based on classic stories by Frederik Pohl and Isaac Asimov. )

Back to the Eschaton books, though. This trilogy is a later work; I was able to find full, uncropped, untreated digital versions of John Harris' cover paintings. This is a great thing, since Tor's crop job on the second of these was pretty brutal.

John Harris' original cover painting for The Other End of Time, published by Tor in 1996.

Harris' painting for the second of the trilogy, The Siege of Eternity, published in 1997.

And the third, The Far Shore of Time, released in 1999.

Towers

And today, fantastical towers of all kinds....

Above are three drawings by contemporary Swiss artist Andre Beuchat. Here's a link to a gallery representing his work.

And here, above, is a rendition of Kefka's Tower for one of the Final Fantasy franchises by Yoshitaka Amano, award-winning Japanese illustrator and designer. 

Above are three paintings by science fiction's master surrealist, Richard Powers. (I found two vintage Ballantine titles this weekend with Powers illustrations on the covers; an entire post impends.)

And above we have three renderings by the late architect Lebbeus Woods. Woods was interested in architecture, not fantasy, but to date, only one of this projects has ever seen the full  light of steel and glass. 

Not exactly a tower, but this version of "Isle of the Dead" by Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin seems to fit.

Above is Polish fantasy artist Jacek Yerka's "Theory of Tension." And here's a nice article with nice images on Dark Roasted Blend.

And finally, a tower by the very Gothic Polish surrealist, Zdislav Beksinski.