Cover art: Podkayne of Mars

Check out this Flickr gallery of cover art portraying Podkayne of Mars, the title character in Robert A. Heinlein’s classic 1963 juvenile novel. More than 25 pieces of beautiful artwork, including covers from Britain, Germany, Finland, Brazil and Japan. Interesting how few covers include both Podkayne and a phallic rocket! I had difficulty determining some of the dates of publication, so additions or corrections are welcome.

The Forge of Mars – 2002 hard SF novel by Bruce Balfour

The Forge of Mars (2002), a hard science fiction novel by former NASA employee and writer Bruce Balfour.

Paperback original (New York: Ace Books, 2002) $6.99. Cover art by Jean Pierre Targete. The blurb from the back cover:

A NASA team has discovered alien ruins buried in the canyons of Mars, at the site called Vulcan’s Forge. The first man who touched them died, making them very, very interesting. NASA needs to figure out who left them, and what they might mean to earth exploration.

Tau Wolfsinger is the NASA researcher to do that. Brilliant and intuitive, he’s as much an outsider at the agency as he has been everywhere, all his life. Nobody likes using him, but he's the best.

What Tau doesn't know is that the Mars ruins aren't the first of their kind. The others are in the hands of the Davos Group, a shadowy international organization whose members have been hiding similar artifacts for decades, trying to unlock their secrets. Tau has sworn that his talents will not be put to military use, but dangerous people are watching him now, and they do not intend to be stopped.

Bruce Balfour has devoted an entire website to The Forge of Mars. It includes a cool globe of Mars, an excerpt from the novel, and a Reader’s Guide with discussion questions. Interestingly, the main character, Tau Edison Wolfsinger, "sees the world through the filter of Navajo Indian traditions and experience."

The Forge of Mars was reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer of the SF Site, Christian Sauvé, and the late cryptoterrestrial Mac Tonnies.

Chinese cover art: Barsoom

Check out this Flickr gallery of beautiful Chinese cover art portraying the classic Barsoom series of novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Interestingly, the covers include English subtitles. Note that one of the covers is mistitled The Master Mind of Mars (1928). It should be titled A Fighting Man of Mars (1931). Additions or corrections are welcome!

Haydn of Mars, 2005 fantasy novel written by Al Sarrantonio

Haydn of Mars (2005), a fantasy novel by horror and SF author Al Sarrantonio.

Pictured: Paperback original (New York: Ace Books, 2005) $6.50. Cover art by Matt Stawicki depicts Haydn of Mars. Here is the promotional piece from the back cover:

On the planet Mars, in the distant future, the princess Haydn’s arranged marriage to a man she doesn’t love will no longer preserve her beloved Republic. Her archenemy, the warrior-woman Frane, seeks to overthrow the Republic and make herself queen while Haydn -- the legitimate heir to the throne -- must flee for her life.

With a bounty on her head, Haydn remains a reluctant symbol for those who would restore the monarchy. Considered too young and unprepared to assume the throne, Haydn is determined to become a great queen. To that end, she will make an arduous desert trek, give birth to offspring who will be targeted by assassins, find her true love amidst the chaos, meet unexpected allies -- and unexpected treachery.

And she will come to realize that -- in order to save her world -- she must sacrifice all that she holds dear...

Haydn of Mars is the first novel in a trilogy. It was followed by Sebastian of Mars (2005) and Queen of Mars (2006). All three novels were republished as a single hardcover volume: Masters of Mars (Science Fiction Book Club, 2006).

Cover art: Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Check out this Flickr gallery of cover art portraying the lovely Thuvia, Maid of Mars, one of the characters rescued by John Carter and Tars Tarkas in Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920), the fourth novel in the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. More than 25 pieces of beautiful artwork, including covers from Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, and Japan! Additions or corrections are welcome.

Cover for new YA anthology Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier

Australian editor Jonathan Strahan has revealed the cover for Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, a new Young Adult science fiction anthology of stories that is being published by Viking and is scheduled to be released in April 2011. The artwork is by French artist Stephan Martiniere, who recently won a British Science Fiction Association award for the cover art on the Pyr reprint of Ian McDonald’s 1988 novel Desolation Road. Rockets and trains never go out of style!

[via SF Signal]

Mock cover art for The War of the Worlds

Graphic art student Tim Phelan has created some interesting mock cover art for a series of novels by seminal science fiction author H.G. Wells to be published by the fictitious house Spine Publishing. Phelan adopted the Franklin Gothic family of typeface and faced some unique challenges in completing the project. Here’s how he describes his cover for The War of the Worlds, pictured above:

“I drew inspiration from the Orson Welles' radio adaptation that panicked America in 1938. As extracts of the novel are written in a formal journalistic style, my starting point referenced torn newspapers and half-tone patterns. The looming radio mast on the front cover is also a slight homage to the tripods, indicating the controversy and terror created by the broadcast was purely concocted by man and not Martian.”

Roger Zelazny inducted into Science Fiction Hall of Fame

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction & fantasy writer Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) was inducted into the Science Fiction Museum's Hall of Fame in Seattle on Saturday, June 26, 2010. Zelazny’s classic short story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” set on the Red Planet and first published in the November 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is one of my favorite pieces of Martian SF&F!

Pictured: Wrap-around magazine cover art depicting a scene from “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” by Hannes Bok.

Cover revealed for forthcoming The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

Earlier this month, the cover for The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (Night Shade Books, August 2010), edited by Aussie anthologist Jonathan Strahan, was revealed. Sadly, it looks more appropriate for a high school astronomy book than a collection of twenty-two short stories and novellas spanning the entire career of a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction author. In any case, the forthcoming volume includes three stories previously published in KSR’s collection The Martians (2000): "Arthur Sternbach Brings The Curveball To Mars" (1999), "Sexual Dimorphism" (1999), and "Discovering Life" (2000).

Cover art: A Princess of Mars in age of POD

I’ve compiled a gallery on Flickr of more than 20 different covers of A Princess of Mars (1917), the seminal SF novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, all from the current digital age in which public domain works can be printed-on-demand and covered with DIY art. Some of these covers are pretty lame, but a few are actually quite creative. My favorite is pictured here, with artwork derived from Frank E. Schoonover's timeless piece for the classic first edition.

Artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010)

Frank Frazetta (1928-2010)

Read opening chapters of new Pyr reprint of Ian McDonald's 2001 novel Ares Express

Thanks to the generosity of editor Lou Anders, you can read the opening chapters of the new Pyr reprint of award-winning British author Ian McDonald’s 2001 magic-realist novel Ares Express. Set on a terraformed Mars, starring a young woman named Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, and featuring fusion-powered locomotives, Ares Express is generating positive reviews. Meanwhile, according to WorldCat, nearly 100 public library systems have purchased copies of Ares Express, including:

Austin Public Library
Brooklyn Public Library
Cleveland Public Library
Denver Public Library
Detroit Public Library
Greensboro Public Library
Idaho Falls Public Library
Iowa City Public Library
Los Alamos County Library System
Louisville Free Public Library
Milwaukee County Library System
Palm Beach County Library System
Palo Alto City Library
Seattle Public Library
Skokie Public Library
Virginia Beach Public Library System
Wichita Public Library

All aboard!

Pictured: Ares Express (2010), cover by Stephan Martiniere.

10 astounding Mars pulp covers

I’ve compiled a gallery on Flickr of ten Mars science fiction & fantasy pulp magazine covers, all from Astounding Stories and Astounding Science Fiction, ranging from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. Please let me know which cover you like best!

Corpus Earthling, a 1960 SF horror novel by Louis Charbonneau

Corpus Earthling, a science fiction horror novel by Louis Charbonneau (1960)

Pictured: Paperback original (New York: Zenith Books, 1960) #ZB-40, 160 p., 35¢. Here's the promotional piece from the back cover of the book:

Paul Cameron heard voices. There were two of them. They were whispering to each other in the bones of his skull, wearily, interminably, making monstrous plans to conquer the Earth ...

Cameron was an educated man, an English professor at a leading university. Was he going insane? Or was he really tuned in somehow on the telepathic conversations of a recon patrol for a terrible Martian invasion? He tried warning the others, but nobody believed him.

And then one day the voices stopped for a moment. "Wait," one of them said then. "There's a listener. We've got to get the listener. When you find out who he is, kill him ...”

An appendix of recommended reading in Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005) includes Corpus Earthling.

Charbonneau's novel was adapted into an episode for the classic 1960s television show The Outer Limits. The episode, "Corpus Earthling," aired on November 18, 1963.

According to various signed copies of Corpus Earthling for sale on AbeBooks, Louis Charbonneau attended the 2003, 2007 and 2008 Paperback Show in Los Angeles.

Cover art for Pyr reprint of Ian McDonald’s novel Desolation Road wins BSFA award

Congratulations to French artist Stephan Martiniere, British author Ian McDonald, and American editor Lou Anders of Pyr! Martiniere’s exquisite cover art for the 2009 Pyr reprint of McDonald’s acclaimed debut novel Desolation Road (1988) recently won a British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award in the category of Best Artwork. When you've finished admiring Martiniere’s work, check out a Flickr gallery of about 10 other Desolation Road covers!

Pyr reprints Ian McDonald's 2001 magic-realist novel Ares Express

The Pyr reprint of award-winning British author Ian McDonald’s 2001 novel Ares Express has landed on bookstore and library shelves. The follow-up to Desolation Road (1988, 2009), McDonald’s acclaimed debut novel, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars and stars fusion-powered locomotives.

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colourful, witty SF novel; Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet's circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future -- or futures -- of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas and trains as big as city blocks.

SF&F critic Rich Horton reviewed Ares Express for the SF Site in 2002, concluding, "This may not be the most serious or the most significant SF novel of the past year, but it just might be the most fun. I loved it wholeheartedly."

More recently, Publishers Weekly gave the Ares Express reprint a positive review, concluding “McDonald’s fantastic Mars is vividly detailed and owes much to Bradbury’s Martian stories. Despite a bit of hand waving around technology that is glibly indistinguishable from magic, this sequel is entirely worthy of its rightly lauded predecessor."

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist has three copies of Ares Express that it is giving away. The announcement was posted on April 14, 2010, but I'm not sure when the deadline is.

Pictured: Ares Express (2010), with artwork by Stephan Martinière.

Interview with Jeff Loew, creator of new comic book The Regulators

Comic Book Bin has an excellent interview with Jeff Loew, creator of The Regulators (2010), a new politically-charged future thriller one-shot comic book set on Mars that was just published by Visionary Comics. Paired with a three-page preview, here is a snippet from the interview:

Comic Book Bin: I just had the privilege of reading this one-shot debut. It really feels like a classic 2000 A.D. jaunt into the far-flung future. Was the book The Regulators influenced by the sci-fi stories in that British magazine, and what other stories have influenced this title?

Jeff Loew: 2000 A.D. and Judge Dredd blew my mind when they were reprinted in the U.S. in the early 80s. Those stories have definitely influenced my writing. My proudest publication credit is probably a short story I had printed in the small press section of the Judge Dredd Megazine a few years back. I’d say that The Regulators is also influenced by the same 1950s and 1960s classic science fiction that influenced 2000 A.D., folks like Robert A. Heinlein. The structure of the story, with Pax Manfreddy, the lead character, hunting for another lost regulator on Mars, is pretty archetypal for a hard-boiled noir mystery. I even re-watched John Ford’s classic western, The Searchers, when thinking about the best way to tell the story -- the Martian landscape stands in for the American West.”

The cover art is a bit lame, but some of the interior artwork looks pretty cool.

Artist John Schoenherr (1935-2010)

SFScope reports that award-winning science fiction illustrator and cover artist John Schoenherr died April 8, 2010. Born in New York City in 1935, Schoenherr did the cover art for several Maritan SF novels, including: The Bird of Time (1961), by Wallace West; Mars is My Destination (1962), by Frank Belknap Long; The Martian Sphinx (1965) and Born Under Mars (1967), by John Brunner; and The Sword of Rhiannon (1967), by Leigh Brackett. I’ve put together a small gallery over on Flickr.

Devil’s Planet, a 1942 scientifiction novel by Manly Wade Wellman

Thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive, you can read or download Devil’s Planet, a complete book-length scientifiction novel penned by American writer Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) that was published in the Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1942 issue of Startling Stories magazine. Set on the Red Planet, the plot revolves around an intrepid Earthman and Pulambar, a Martian city of pleasure. Here are the opening lines:

       YOUNG Dillon Stover woke easily and good-humoredly, as usual. He knew he was in bed, of course -- but was he? He felt as though he were floating on a fleecy cloud, or something.

He stretched his muscular long legs and arms, yawned and shook his tawny-curled head. He felt light as a feather, even in the first waking moment. He was alert enough to remember now. This was Mars, where he weighed only forty percent of what he weighed at home in the Missouri Ozarks. He'd come here to carry on the scientific labors of his late grandfather, which labors he'd inherited along with old Dr. Stover's snug fortune. For the first time in his life Dillon Stover had fine clothes, independence, money in his belt-pouch -- and responsibility.

That responsibility had brought him to Pulambar, Martian City of Pleasure, for study and decision...

Devil's Planet was republished as a stand-alone novel in 1951.

Pictured: Mars art by Rudolph Belarski depicting a scene from Devil's Planet.

[via Tinkoo Valia of Variety SF]

Black Hole Sun, new YA SF novel by David Macinnis Gill, to be released in August 2010

Black Hole Sun, a new Young Adult science fiction novel written by American author David Macinnis Gill that is being published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of behemoth HarperCollins, is scheduled to be released in late August 2010. Gilled as a "future-dystopia kick-ass action novel set on Mars," here is the promotional piece from the publisher:

Durango will take on any mission -- as long as it is dangerous, impossible, and hopeless. As long as it pays enough for him and his crew to get by. He doesn’t have a death wish, exactly, but he’s got a lot to run from and a whole lot to forget. Fortunately for Durango, he’s also got Mimi, a symbiotic nano-implant, to keep him on the straight and narrow (and to keep readers laughing along with the adrenaline rush), and a crew of loyal buddies -- male, female, and other. Readers of The Hunger Games and Pratchett’s Nation -- from casual fans of future dystopia to hardcore gamers who like fiction with depth -- will enjoy this action-jammed, cinematic saga set on a terraformed Mars.

Memo to marketing: Cover sucks. Done by third-grader?