Richard Powers, Part First

As one does, I've been saving up for a dedicated Richard Powers post. The problem's been that I don't know where to stop. 

Other people just give up and dedicate whole blogs to the guy. I certainly understand. There's so much material, and it's so darn good; a person could spend many fruitful hours with this one artist's work. Surrealism, abstract expressionism, primitivism, street art, collage-- it's all there. Like Frazetta, Powers successfully straddled that fraught divide between fine art and illustration.

He died in 1996, but his birthday would be coming up on February 24...a Pisces, of course. 

The above sketch, probably a preliminary drawing for another illustration, is actually for sale here. 

The above painting was done in acrylic for the cover of Murray Leinster's War with the Gizmos, published by Gold Medal in 1958. 

Some of these images were found as part of an excellent article on Design Observer. On the image above, from Rick Poyner's "Unearthly Powers: Surrealism and SF": 

In later cover paintings, which are shown without type in The Art of Richard Powers by Jane Frank (2001), Powers constructs ambiguous pictorial spaces that seem to be both psychic and cosmic, molecular and planetary.

Some of Powers' paintings use mark-making in a way that remind me of nothing so much as Jean-Michel Basquiat, who worked much later with some of the same techniques. Powers liked to layer different styles and then use a visceral scrawl on top, creating an artificial palimpsest all his own.

Definitely more to come on Richard Powers.

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.

Games with Lovecraft

The hubby and I will soon be playing a round of Mansions of Madness with some of our board game group friends. We're also fans of other Lovecraft cardboard such as Arkham Horror and The Stars are Right. 


Mansions of Madness is an Ameritrash classic, with minis and murder and monsters and mayhem. Lovecraft's writing has inspired countless artists and designers of all stripes.

Seems like everyone wants to visit Lovecraft's world, if only for a few hours.

Above, illustrator Matt Buck depicts H. P. Lovecraft himself. The tentacle is everything. (I originally found this image on the Tor website, which has an entire page of Lovecraft artwork by contemporary fantasy artists.)
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Above is a depiction of the finale of The Dunwich Horror by Alberto Breccia. You can find the entire graphic adaptation in English translation on the Ragged Claws blog.

If you find yourself interested in Breccia's work, this link will take you to a downloadable version of the entire Los Mitos de Cthulhu. These are nine stories that Breccia and collaborator Norberto Buscaglia adapted in the 70's. The text is in Spanish, of course, but art is art.

Above is a gorgeous map of one of Lovecraft's other dimensions, The Dreamlands, created by Seattle-based artist Jason Thompson. 

And here we have a 1976 cover by illustrator Murray Tinkelman, found on the blog Too Much Horror Fiction, which has a nice collection of cover art. 

This is an illustration for Lovecraft's "The Temple" done by Stephen Hickman for Science Fiction Age magazine, which went sadly out of business in 2000.


But now, back to games....

The Stars Are Right is a Steve Jackson game in which you, for some reason, are attempting to summon various Old Ones. To do so, you have to make sure that certain constellations appear in the sky by collecting cards and making patterns of them.

The artwork is fun and the game is reasonably quick. It's only ranked at 1513 on Board Game Geek, but I like it, especially on a cold foggy night.

Fantasy Flight's Arkham Horror is probably my favorite of them all. It's a long, long game with tons of fiddly bits and Byzantine rules. It's cooperative, and it's hard to win.

There are also countless role playing games based on the Lovecraft stories; Call of Cthulhu first appeared in the early 80's, and may be the original.

Yog-Sothoth is a website dedicated to the Call of Cthulhu rpgs and all their spinoffs.

Meeting Jack Vance

For some reason, just before grudgingly entering a week of reading deprivation imposed upon me by a program I've undertake with my husband, I started reading Jack Vance's Cadwel chronicles. Araminta Station is proving to be more of a thriller than a speculative novel, in many ways, but it's also a bot of a political exploration and a social novel. It's okay. Not great, but okay.

For some reason I was expecting space opera; maybe it was the cover art.

Above is the original Tor 1988 hardback cover by Boris Vallejo.

And above, here's a 1989 paperback cover by Bob Eggleton-- well, the upper center strip of artwork is by Bob Eggleton, and what a shame that's all we have, too.

This is the original original, published by Underwood/Miller in 1987 six months before the Tor/Vallejo edition. The cover art is by Tim White.

And above is a 1991 Tor reprint with somewhat more titillating art by Doug Beekman.

This one may be my favorite. It's a 1995 Geman Heyne edition with cover art by Dieter Rottermund. Mad Mountain indeed.