I was going to post something about the East Austin Studio Tour and how you should come by our house and check out all the art we have up on the walls and in the garage and growing from our couch, but then I stumbled across a treasure trove of Bob Pepper sci-fi book covers, including one for my favorite Philip K. Dick book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:
from the International Haus of Pictures via ski-ffy.
For more, check out Josh Burggraf’s amazing set of Bob Pepper covers on his flickr.
Also, come by Boongoo Studio, stop #125 on the East Austin Studio Tour this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, from 10am to 5pm! We’ll have a pony keg this time and I got my gouache drawz back from Chicago so there’ll be something new to see.
JG Ballard has passed away. A truly visionary author of the apocalyptic.
Here’s an obit, via posthuman blues.
Some book covers.
From rick mcgrath’s ballard site, via feuilleton.
When I was in Houston I also went to Kaboom Books and picked up a whole stack of musty sci fi. Here’s the first sample:
I really wish that they had “Horizon Alpha”, but I couldn’t find it there and there aren’t any large images of the cover on the internet, unfortunately.
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‘The Pollinators of Eden’ by John Boyd, 1969. Penguin Books, 1978. Cover painting by Peter Cross.” From jovike’s flickr.
I picked up this edition from a Book Exchange here in Austin. I find all sorts of gold at this store. This painting is so weird and otherworldly. What’s unfortunate is that there probably isn’t a scene in the book that matches the strange alien beauty of this cover.
It’s twilight on another world, before the sun rises or just after sunset, and the flower analogues are blooming. But these flowers are just the above-ground manifestation of a rhizomatic network of semi-conscious flora. They have detected the presence of human beings on the planet, and the human-faced seeds are the beginnings of an autoimmune response system that will breed simulacra to try to communicate with the outsiders (concept stolen from Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris).
