Visiting Book Cover Developments

The always wonderfully droll Jim C. Hines has a fun blog post wherein he attempts to position himself as ladies on fantasy book covers, including one of his own, are drawn and finds the experience painful. We find the experience hysterical with pictures like this:

Go check out the post at:

http://www.jimchines.com/blog/

This of course brings up the issue, why do they pose the women in those odd positions? It’s actually a complicated cross-influence over many years. Comic book art was a major influence on fantasy and SF art, the comics and paperbacks and magazines all being sold together in the olden days and the comics were lovers of tortuous positions for women from the start.  The cover art out of fantasy and SF art developed its own stylistic ticks, particularly for sword battles, and a period in the 1970′s when there was a distinct, highly successful movement of art that included barely clothed females, leading to the belief that fantasy fiction was obviously filled only with sex, violence and pulp, which was a rather simplistic view of both the fiction and what was being done in the various art. Nonetheless, the cover art certainly often leaned toward tortuous positions for women characters depicted.

The current positioning of women on fantasy book covers  draws on both comics and fantasy art, but has a more complex development.  Laurell K. Hamilton’s highly successful Anita Blake series, a contemporary fantasy series that had been rapidly building up an audience in the 1990′s, underwent a change in cover design at the turn of the millennium. The design was drawn largely from thriller mystery cover styles, with added elements to indicate sensual erotica asspects of the series:

This and some other fantasy covers happened to coincide with a large expansion of titles of paranormal romance from category romance publishers, who had been developing a paranormal romance market since the 1990′s. Combining fashion photography styles, glitz novel cover treatments and again suspense styles with a bit of a 1980′s cast, the paranormal romances used mostly photographic shots of partial female or male bodies in dark, shadowy colors or silhouetted figures turned away or partially away from the camera, sometimes in embraces or drapery:

 

Jacqueline Carey’s bestselling Kushiel’s Dart series also took up this style but as paintings with a more traditional fantasy art look:

 

Very quickly, art departments developed a combo of fantasy art painting, photography and suspense styles to produce more vivid partial body and full figure looks, particularly for the contemporary fantasy novels:

 

 

When it comes to a female main character on the cover, art departments have a hard time resisting doing an altered photograph with a fantasy art/comics impossible spine placement style. Not only is it in those major art traditions, but putting a woman in a goddess position  it is also a tradition of mythological paintings and of some suspense and military  suspense works. Apparently, there is a strong belief that kick-ass women cock their hips, which unquestionably comes out of fashion photography:

 

But publishers play with things as their needs dictate. Right now, amid secondary world fantasies, there is a heavy contingent of just showing a sword or other weapon on the cover. In contemporary fantasy, figures are still popular, but a more spy suspense look is being used to deal with more spy and military stories and consequently the women are posed straighter on covers. Paranormal romances are frequently going back now to couples in embrace, either photographic or by painting.  Historical fantasies are favoring figures put into landscapes. These things will change over the next year and seldom be uniform, but the certain thing is that book covers will continue to draw in from many different traditions and continue to offer idolized portraits of women, or their body parts.

 

 

 

 

Don’t Try This At Home — “A Test of Skill” by Kevin Radthorne

My buddy Kevin Radthorne is not only a talented fantasy author, but he’s been getting more and more attention as a graphics artist, doing book covers and the like. His newest picture is getting a lot of buzz and I can see why:

 

When Good Book Reviews Go Bad

During the holiday craziness at the end of 2011, several friends asked me what I thought of author Glen Duncan’s now notorious book review of Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One in the New York Times, in which he pairs “genre” novels with porn stars and praises Whitehead’s novel by mostly ignoring that book and using the review as a platform to claim that works like his own novel, The Last Werewolf, can’t be properly understood by fantasy fans:

www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/zone-one-by-colson-whitehead-book-review.html

My reaction was of course: poor Colson Whitehead. Not only are Whitehead’s views not in line with Duncan’s, (his response to those wondering why he would ever write a zombie novel was “don’t be such a snob,”) but his big Times review could have easily been assigned to a writer like Lev Grossman, China Mieville, Charles Yu, David Eggers, Catherynne M. Valente or Jeff VanderMeer, who have a clue what they are talking about regarding fantasy fiction, rather than a writer who saw the review as an opportunity to audition for media gigs as a 1960’s curmudgeon.

Whitehead, however, has been frequently paired up with Duncan in media coverage for Zone One, (Duncan’s Werewolf is published by Whitehead’s publisher’s sister house, Knopf,) and it was this reason why I was asked about the book review. Back in the summer, the Wall Street Journal, whose interest in fiction is practically non-existent but whose interest in what big movie deals are percolating was attracted by Justin Cronin’s deal for his vampire apocalypse novel The Passage, did an article that incited a wide ranging discussion on SFFWorld. The article couldn’t be just about The Passage for WSJ purposes; it had to be about a proposed “business trend,” and so it was about how non-genre, “literary” writers were recently now turning to genre fiction, presented as the land of the non-literary, to make money:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576343310420118894.html

The article included Duncan, who also had a film deal, and Whitehead, and several other authors.

http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31197

In the discussion at SFFWorld, I pointed out that Lev Grossman, who was covered in the piece, was not new to this type of fiction as he’s been steeped in the community for years in his work as a critic and then as a writer, and two of the authors touted in the article, Melissa Marr and Michael Koryta, had never been anything else but genre novel writers, Marr writing her YA fantasy series and Koryta writing crime novels. Most of Duncan’s previous novels as well have been suspense and SFFH. His best known novel before The Last Werewolf, I, Lucifer, was a fantasy novel, and there has been no real indication that The Last Werewolf is somehow enormously different from how he’s written his other works, except this time he has had the resources of Knopf behind it in the U.S. The WSJ article was, as has often come up before regarding the imaginary fiction culture war, a bad social science and market research piece that included factual errors, as were Duncan’s assertions into Whitehead’s review about the thinking of fantasy fans, and the follow-up Times piece he got himself, in which he swears it was completely fine to disservice Whitehead in favor of his tirade because some Amazon customer reviews of Whitehead’s novel supposedly proved his point about the rest of us.

I said at the time of the SFFWorld discussion about that Wall Street Journal article that Whitehead had been too lukewarm in his quote in the article for my tastes, but since then in marketing Zone One he’s impressed me. I also said that I hoped Duncan’s novel did well and that this would help other authors get attention as well, even if he was propagating an outdated credo as a PR strategy. So my friends asked if I still had that wish, in light of Duncan’s engineered controversy with the Whitehead review. And the answer is that I do still wish Glen Duncan success, because success for one book helps the rest and success for a fantasy novel helps all other authors doing fantasy, not simply in sales but in media attention, wider awareness, and the kind of understanding about readers of fantasy, science fiction, horror and suspense that Duncan rejects. The Last Werewolf was a bestseller and I do not wish the series ill. For every Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz or Jonathan Lethem, who not only write like a dream but actually understand the historical context and literary power of these types of stories, there’s going to be a Glen Duncan, clinging to a fading dream of an empire that never was and being kind of a jerk about it.

Am I, though, going to read The Last Werewolf? Probably not. There are other writers whose work I value more highly and there’s only so much time in the day. But Zone One by Colson Whitehead? That is a novel I’ll likely try to read at some point. After all, Glen Duncan recommends it, even if he did so as sort of a backhanded compliment.

Happy New Year — May You Soar This Year

To celebrate the start of the crazy new year that is 2012, here’s a partial demo of a new, original song, Summer’s Rain, by the ridiculously talented Briannah Donolo (auditory only video.) Finish this one and put it on the up-coming album, Briannah!

 

Happy Thanksgiving and Muppet Movie Mania

Occupy

You are Not.  Going.  To Make.  Any of Them.  Shut Up.

 

U.C. Berkeley’s Occupy Cal protest’s floating tents after pitching tents on campus grounds was banned by authorities and their encampment raided by the police.

Author Interviews and Roundtable Chats

One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging a lot is that I’ve been interviewing authors for SFFWorld, in particular for the new Author Roundtable chats we’re doing in the discussion forums, where we talk with groups of authors further about their work and whatever silly thing that comes into our heads. Most recently, I’ve gotten to interview Carolyn Crane, author of The Disillusionists fantasy series;  SFF horror writer Tim Marquitz, author of the Demon Squad series; and SFF horror writer Lincoln Crisler, author of WILD. I also got to touch base with contemporary fantasy author John Levitt (Dog Days series,) whom I had interviewed last year, in a Roundtable with him, Carolyn Crane, and J.A. Pitts (Sarah Beauhall series.) Tim and Lincoln are currently participating in a Roundtable with dark fantasy author Jasper Kent (the Danilov series.) Click on the links below to check out these interviews and the Roundtable discussions — good fun all around.

John Levitt Interview: http://www.sffworld.com/interview/283p0.html

Carolyn Crane Interview:  http://www.sffworld.com/interview/298p0.html

Tim Marquitz Interview: http://www.sffworld.com/interview/304p0.html

Lincoln Crisler Interview:  http://www.sffworld.com/interview/305p0.html

Author Roundtable: Levitt, Crane and Pitts:  http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32546

Author Roundtable: Marquitz, Crisler and Kent:  http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32632

Investing is a Risk, But Betting on Humans Ain’t Bad

Over on the Blog Roll I have, you’ll see a link to Kiva.org, which I’ve talked about before:  http://www.kiva.org/

Kiva is a major non-profit micro-loan coordinator. Non-profit and community investment organizations around the world, including some in the U.S., loan out small amounts to entrepreneurs all over to improve and expand their businesses. These organizations work with Kiva who holds money from individuals and teams in accounts, allowing those accounts to pick which loans by these organizations they’d like to help fund.  You can, through Kiva, essentially loan US$25 out to say a pig farmer in Cambodia, which is pooled with other people’s $25.  Over a set amount of time, the pig farmer will pay back his loan in installments. When you get the $25 back, you can loan it out again — to a beauty salon in the Phillipines or a pet groomer in California or a farmer in Kenya. For about the cost of a pizza and sodas, you can help an endless chain of people.

One of the loans I had made, in Afghanistan, had defaulted. It was my first time this had ever happened (and given the state of Afghanistan, not an enormous surprise.) The guy there I’d loaned to had paid back about half the loan by monthly payments, and then stopped. As the months went past, I figured I was going to have to write it off as a donation. It doesn’t happen often on Kiva that someone defaults but it can happen when people are struggling wherever they are.

But today, I got word from Kiva that payments had come in for my loans and there along with payments from other loaners, were two of the missing ones from the guy in Afghanistan. He’s not caught up yet, but it was enough so that I was able to make a new loan to another entrepreneur. More important than the news that maybe the late loan will eventually get paid back, was just that it was a sign that the guy was okay, still going and maybe business was turning around for him. I had bet on him and it might not work, especially in Afghanistan where we don’t know what’s going to happen. But maybe it made things a little better. Maybe it helps put food on someone’s table. And from there, who knows what can happen. Betting on humans ain’t bad, especially compared to the alternative.

Anyway, it made my day sunnier. If you can spare some cash, it’s a great deal of fun and you get to keep doing it as long as you like. You can even join some crazy teams that count your loans as part of their pool efforts such as Nerdfighters: we aim to decrease world suck, or Dumbledore’s Army or World of Warcraft Players: We like to help people out in the real world too! Because we’re just that silly.

 

 

 

Happy Halloween!

Because It’s Many Months Until We Get Any More Doctor Who

Enjoy the silliness: