mbranesf | Entries tagged with the double

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My pet project, the M-Brane SF Double: The New People/Elegant Threat is finally close enough to publication (due out May 31) that I can start a pre-order special for it here at the M-Brane website. Featuring short novels by Alex Jeffers and Brandon H. Bell, the Double is a print book designed in the fashion of the old Ace Doubles series. For well over a year, I have been working on making this idea into a real book that people can hold in their hands and set on a shelf. Even in the undeniable age of the ebook, I think there is still a lot of value in the physical book as an object in and of itself, so I tried to make a really nice one. Also, since I thought the old Ace series was super-cool both content-wise and object-wise, I have long wanted to make something similar. While the old Ace books did not always feature content of uniformly excellent quality, they did provide a venue for a lot of really fantastic literature to get published under the cover of a cheap sf paperback--which is better than it never having been seen at all. Sitting right nearby me are copies of Doubles containing the first publications of items like Samuel Delany's Captives of the Flame and Ursula LeGuin's Rocannon's World. I don't really expect very many people to be as captivated by the Double concept as I am, but I hope enough people will buy it so that I can at least recover its cost and pay the authors a few bucks. But I do know that I'm not the only one who thinks that the novella or short novel is a great medium for speculative fiction in general and science fiction in particular. The length (both Jeffers' and Bell's entries are about 30,000 words) allows for a lot more world-building and character development than a short story usually allows, but it doesn't demand the huge, convoluted plot-lines that epic-length books do. If this first attempt at a Double goes well, I may do a series of them.

For close to a year I have been talking about publishing a fantastic book, including two novels published back to back, in the style of the old Ace Doubles. Gradually, I have cleared away the obstacles to bringing this dream to fruition. First, I needed to figure out how the hell, on my computer, to flip half the book's pages upside down (the two halves of the double are compiled in a tete-beche design, each upside down in relation to one another, a book with essentially two front covers, and I didn't want to pursue the project until the formatting issues were understood). I solved that problem. Next, I needed two fantastic short novels of beautiful quality and compelling storytelling. These came to me in the form of The New People by Alex Jeffers and Elegant Threat by Brandon Bell. Alex and Brandon are two of my favorite writers--not just of writers that I have met and worked with as a result of M-Brane SF, but in general. They are both craftsmen of finely-wrought thought-provoking fiction. Their stories forthcoming in The Double will delight and astound readers and make everyone want to read more from them. A lot of luck surrounded acquiring these stories, too. Alex submitted his to the general M-Brane slush, with the comment that he was taking me at my word that there is not an upper word-count limit for submissions to the zine. As I started reading The New People, I understood that I had the first half of my Double. Then, not hopeful of a favorable reply, I asked Brandon if he happened to have any short novels lying about that he might want to submit for the Double. He surprised me by offering to finish his in-process Elegant Threat or write on the fly an entirely new thing set in the Aether Age universe. Either sounded great to me, and he soon presented the beautiful item that the world will soon read.

But one piece of the project remained: this book demanded two lovely pieces of cover art that would not only evoke the tone of the stories but which would hearken back to the era of publishing that I am trying to honor with the Double format itself. I don't quite remember how the thought/decision process played out, but several months ago it became clear to me that the Double's cover artist needed to be my partner-in-all-things, my boy, my #1 crush, the artist known as J, my Jeff. He does not recall how or why he agreed to this. I assume it was a drunken boast to which I then held him accountable. Jeff is very talented visually. If such things run in families, it would make sense since his late father was a commercial artist and a fine artist. Jeff would be horrified that I am posting these comments on the internet, but he never reads my Live Journal, so I can rest assured that he will never know about it (it's like hiding in plain sight).

In the month's since he agreed to create the Double covers, Jeff mostly fought against it tooth and nail, even occasionally denying that he had ever said he would do it. To which I would insist that he had committed in an irrevocable iron-clad fashion to deliver two book covers to me on time. Then he would occasionally acquiesce and act like he was about to start work on them. He would ask me for visual prompts, doubting his own mind's-eye impression. He kept saying, "I don't know sci-fi. I'm not a sci-fi artist." To which I would say, "You don't even know what 'sci-fi' is. But you know how to draw stuff." His process (which I have seen on a lot of other projects, art and otherwise), is to fight, stall and resist until somehow, suddenly, the moment is right. He does not respond pressure on anything (not just talking about art here). But when he decides he sees what he wants to do, then it's suddenly done. In both cases with these cover pictures, he set aside most of the suggestions that I made or that I passed onto him from the authors and went with a subjective impression of the overall attitude of the stories. The New People image catches some literal detail--a faint suggestion of a space elevator cable vanishing into the sky, smoke rising above a city--but does not depict any actual scene from the story in a direct way. The Threat cover is rather abstract in design and depicts no specific event but it feels to me--as one of the few people who have read the story so far--like something of that world. The two together match very well as being two covers of the same book. While they are quite different images, their color palettes and the emotion that J somehow imbued into the paper make them seem like two sides of the same basic thing.

J is very unhappy with the way these images look on the computer, as above. For the actual print book, however, I will be using high-resolution scans of his pictures and they will be nearly as lovely as the hand-made originals. I'll be starting a pre-order special on the book soon, and we estimate December 1 as release date.

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