la spalla di Orion

la tela di peccato

la rosa velenosa

la stella vuota

la fabbrica di sogno

This is my proposal for a new cover for Ugo Litorina’s The Dream Factory, if and when anyone ever gets around to taking it off the shelf and printing a few million brand new copies. Of course, I have to admit it’s been a while since I last read this one, so I might have misremembered the color of the skies of Peregrine, homeworld of the Oneiromancers. Anyway, Factory’s the middle book of a trilogy which is itself the middle trilogy of a cycle of nine books about the Selenite space adventurer Esteban Volapuk (who had blue skin, by the way, ten years before the Draags of Le Planète sauvage). I should point out that this book shouldn’t be confused with the The Dream Factory: Alessi Since 1921 by Alberto Alessi, which is also a very good book, but is mostly about teapots, clocks, and collanders instead of spaceships, androids, and weird-shaped warps in spacetime.

una vacanza su Aldebaran

Sketch for a new cover for Ugo Litorina’s 1966 novel, A Holiday on Aldebaran. The spaceman, of course, is Lev Podor, who also appeared in The Automatic Giraffe, Hoxa’s Planet, and The Trojan Dragon. The monster, meanwhile, isn’t really a monster, but is instead Rhino, Podor’s trusty Venusian companion. Anyway, I guess you can still find this title, though it’s been out of print since 1970…I last saw a pretty decent copy in a used bookstore in Scottsdale about three years ago. Bet it’s still there, in fact…although now I can’t remember the name of the store. I just sort of remember it’s kind of near the “Sphinx Date Ranch,” whatever the heck that is.

Memory Hole

This is mostly a pretty crummy drawing of nothing in particular. Or, at least, it sort of is of something, but it ended up coming out all wrong, as usual. Good thing my so-called aesthetic’s all built around wrongness. Anyway…at least I’ll be ready to spot-illustrate a story someplace when they get around to reimagining 1984, which I’m sure they’ll do soon enough. Like, they’ll give it the Michael Bay treatment, which means the Thought Police’ll be souped-up Robocops, and Julia will be a Swedish supermodel, and Winston (I’m guessing Mark Wahlberg) will kick O’Brien’s ass hard and will then free all the sexcriminals from the Ministry of Love and also overthrow the Oligarchy with the help of a cute CGI mutant named Mouse (which is just her nickname from the space orphanage – she’s actually half kangaroo, with Tina Turner hair). Or, you know, something like that. And, of course, it’ll be called 2084, ’cause that’s more futuristic. And Winston’s job won’t be in censorship…it’ll be…oh, let’s say he’s a bounty hunter, employed by the leaders of Airstrip One (which’ll instead be named Neo York, or perhaps Victory Dome) to hunt down dissidents, but who has a giant change of heart when he sees Julia in a shirt emblazoned with a catchy slogan. A shirt that’s for some reason wet all the time.

Eden

Somehow, I was able to pass a giant scary test in American Literature earlier today. So that’s good, I guess. Now I can forget every single thing I ever knew about any book ever published in the United States. Which is nice, ’cause I love forgetting stuff. First, I’m gonna forget all about James Fenimore Cooper, then I’m gonna work on forgetting Edith Wharton. Although, I guess I could hold on to a couple of warm old book memories for just a little while longer…like, I’ll wait a week or two before I purge my Cordwainer Smith files. And, well, all right, I’ll admit I don’t want to completely disremember Doc Smith, ’cause there’s something counter-intuitively glorious about awful prose.

Meanwhile, to celebrate, here’s more pointless art, which I did this afternoon instead of doing what I was supposed to do, which was yet more school-related stuff. (Does all this endless schoolwork ever lead anywhere?)

Anyhow, this book cover is, of course, done in a style that’s so un-fashionable, there’s not even half a chance it’ll be fashionable again, even in an ironic way. But, whatever, it’s fun to pretend they’re gonna reissue these books with weird retro covers. Not that this drawing’s a huge success…but, I’m still re-learning how to even draw at all, so I’m gonna leave it alone how it is and move on to other things.

Solaris

This is kind of a waste of time, but at least it’s the fun sort (sort of). Anyway, I got annoyed by the Solaris cover I posted down below, so here’s another version, which I’m sure will annoy me in turn in a week or so. I still kind of wish the space station was down lower, but I needed it where I moved it, for some mysterious reason.

Lem Cover

Just messing around with some half-baked ideas while taking a really short break away from studying. Anyhow, obviously, this sketch is pretty good evidence how much I love Richard Powers and how much I even more wish paperbacks still had covers like they used to have, back in the heyday of the Space Age, whenever that was. Of course, this thing could stand to get developed some more, but I don’t have time to deal with it right now.