When the switchboard operators of Retropolis are suddenly made redundant after an efficiency review, they find they’ve been replaced by a mysterious system they don’t understand. Nola Gardner pools their severance pay to hire Dash Kent, freelance adventurer and apartment manager, to find out what’s happened to their jobs.

That simple question leads Dash and Nola down the strangest streets of Retropolis, in the Future That Never Was, where robots consider the effectiveness of collective bargaining; where scientific research has been contained in a single neighborhood – by statute – to limit the regrettable side effects of innovation; where the world’s smallest giant robot rumbles toward its destiny with steps that cover an inch or two at a time; and where that question ‘What the heck happened to my job?’ leads ultimately to the Moon and back in an antique rocket that may be past its sell-by date.

Retropolis has found ways to contain its abundance of Mad Science. But in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom we learn that if a civil engineer goes mad… he knows how to build madness on a scale that’s never been seen before.

Here’s a cover concept and synopsis for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, because I guess I just don’t have enough to do while I edit my way through its (now) slightly more than 103,000 words.

That was irony, if you didn’t notice. I have plenty to do. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made two pencil passes through the printed manuscript, and then applied those edits. That leaves me three short scenes to write (because I wasn’t sure I needed them before) and two large scenes to rewrite; then, after one more complete pass through the book, I hope to have a pretty solid second draft – probably a couple of weeks from now. How solid? Will there be a third draft? Ask me in a couple of weeks.

I try to avoid questions like those by working on cover concepts and the synopsis. I am adept at outmaneuvering my brain.

The synopsis is an interesting exercise but it may also be pretty important. That’s because this time I figure I’ll try shopping the book around to agents and then – who knows? – maybe to traditional publishers. I’d like to see what happens. And a good synopsis, which this may or may not be, is something I’ll need when that day comes.

And then – while the world rejects me repeatedly – I can get to work on the illustrations.

The Kickstarter-funded paperback, clothbound and eBook editions of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Vika’s Avenger are now working their way out to the project’s backers. All three print editions of the book feature my six illustrations; Kickstarter backers who chose the eBook editions are getting a PDF that includes the illustrations, since the digital editions don’t have them.

For the rest of us, the paperback edition (with the illustrations and color cover) is also now available on Amazon.

This was a fun project for me. It’s the kind of space fantasy adventure I used to devour wholesale when I was a teenager, full of airships, rogue scientists, and an ancient planet that’s been up and down the technological ladder so many times that people don’t have a clear idea any more what’s science and what’s magic: in fact the terms are pretty much interchangeable.

So you’ve got sunken towers with lights that never go out, and peculiar people who may not always have been people, and warring factions and Guilds, many of which practice one form of tek or another. And, you know, revenge. Because some things just don’t change.

I’ve fed the gaping, cavernous maw of the PULP-O-MIZER with a couple of new Halloween images; you can find them in the "Holidays & Occasions" panel. I’ve been a little remiss about adding holidays over the summer and this is just my horrific and soul-wrenching way of making amends.

In other news, there are even more Virgil Finlay magazine covers over at The Geeky Nerherder. Because you just can’t ever have too much Virgil Finlay.

In even more other and completely different news, I may have finished the book design for Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Vika’s Avenger. The last task was the dust jacket for the hardcover edition, and we can’t be sure I’ve nailed it until the author gets back from his travels next week. The eBook editions, Kickstarter bonus PDFs, and interior book layout are all ready to roll after a final round of proofing.

The two hardcover editions are being printed by different companies and that does introduce the potential for eldritch, batrachian evils that have not been seen on this world since its earliest, antedeluvian age… when the Old Ones roared from the steaming craters of ancient volcanos, and the Elder Gods ruled unchallenged from their carven basalt thrones, and people who must not be named got a little too carried away by that whole Halloween thing.

Although it seems quiet on the blog front, as usual that just means I’m raising dust and pushing pixels elsewhere.

But while I’ve been stapled to something entirely different, the unsleeping scanner of Mister Doortree at The Golden Age has been treating us all to some wonderful old dust jacket and cover art from mid-century science fiction and fantasy. There’s a smörgåsbord of cover art in every link! To wit:

Hannes Bok

Virgil Finlay

Alex Schomburg

Frank R. Paul

Edd Cartier

Howard V. Brown

Miscellaneous cover artists

There. Don’t say I never gave you anything. I’ll be back soon.

I’ve just run across this PDF version of an article about me from the July 1994 issue of the IEEE’s magazine IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. There are a few little inaccuracies in there (there always are) but on the whole Karen Whitehouse did a pretty creditable job of trying to make sense of me and my work.

My apologies for the quality of these images: they’re taken from the PDF, which was scanned from the magazine.

The picture above (adjusted here to correct its aspect ratio) was an example of a dithering technique I used in the late 1980’s, using just 16 colors to create the illusion of a much broader palette. I never used it for anything that was published – except in this article, I guess – and the technique had already become obsolete by the time the article appeared. Still, that’s one of the things I’m proudest of from my early days in computer graphics. Dan Silva, the programmer of EA’s Deluxe Paint, sort of shook his head in disbelief when I showed him how it worked.

At left you can see a concept image for a game project that might have followed The Labyrinth of Time, had we come to terms with EA or another publisher. I recall what we meant to do, and how we meant to do it, so I have a feeling that we’d have bogged down on the new character methods we had in mind. Character heads would have been scanned from clay models, and what I didn’t fully dread at that time was how messy and unusable those 3D scans would have been.

Still… it sure would have been neat.

For myself what astonishes me about the interview is that even though (I think) we conducted it over the telephone I seem to have managed complete sentences and a couple of quips.

Lawrence Watt-Evans has posted this to his Facebook page, and I guess that means I can post it too, now. Here’s the cover illustration for his Kickstarter-funded Vika’s Avenger.

I’m working on the interior illustrations now. They’ll be a lot like the illustrations I did for Starship Sofa Stories; they’re rendered in the same way I do my full color work but – of course – in greyscale, and I’m aiming for a kind of open layout, with the images enclosing the text, that I hope is something like those wonderful old illustrations by Virgil Finlay and others back in the age of magazines.

Like these two, I mean:

This ought to keep me stapled to my desk for the next few weeks. I don’t mind: I really like working on books. The style of the book layout here will be a lot like what I planned for my next Thrilling Tales book, which is still in a state of primal chaos.

Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Vika’s Avenger is now less than 60 hours from its Kickstarter deadline, and it’s less than $1000 away from its next stretch goal: an appendix called A Traveler’s Guide to Ragbaan that will give readers a broader, different sort of look at the ancient offworld city where most of the story’s events take place.

Now, it could be said that I don’t have a horse in the race any more; with the last stretch goal the budget for interior illustrations brought their total up to six, and they’re going to stay there: the author and I have worked out a plan for which scenes to illustrate, and it ought to make a nice spread throughout the book.

But I have the advantage of having read the unedited manuscript and I know that you and I would both like a chance to see a little deeper into the layers of history – most of it misunderstood, or forgotten – that lie beneath the airship docks, the ruins, and the palaces and taverns of Ragbaan.

And who knows? It’s not impossible that we might learn a little more about this creature, who is not Vika and is not her avenger, which is about all I can say on the matter.

The cover should be finished this week; after that I’ll be diving into those six black and white illustrations. So I know what I’ll be doing: I just don’t know if you’ll be in there with me.