Cover Art Spotlight: Dominic Harman

Cover art is one of the most critical tools in a publishers arsenal for selling their book. This is perhaps no more readily apparent than in Speculative Fiction. At SFFWorld, we’ve got a nice running thread on the topic The Positivity Cover Art Thread.

One of the cover artists who has been coming to my attention more and more is Dominic Harman.

Mr. Harman has illustrated all three Morlock Ambrosius novels for Pyr, but I think the best is easily the cover for The Wolf Age:



Harman’s been churning out great covers for the fine folks at Solaris Books, specifically for books by Eric Brown including the book I just finished (and think one of the top 2 or 3 Science Fiction novels thus far published in 2011) The Kings of Eternity, as well as the tryptich cover for Brown’s Bengal Station trilogy:






Also for Solaris, Harman provided the explosive cover for Ian Whates’s debut novel, The Noise Within:




Another terrific set of covers Harman created was for Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels:



One of Harman’s more recent covers looks absolutely stunning, the book is Debris and the author is Jo Anderton. The book publishes in October 2011 from Angry Robot Books:




So there you have it, a nice sampling of art from Dominic Harman. A relatively exhaustive listing of his book covers can be found here at IFSDB.

Mistborn: The Alloy of Steel

Completely knacked from Tor.com




Tor Books has just released lots of new details on Brandon Sanderson’s next work, Mistborn: The Alloy of Law, including the revelation of Chris McGrath’s steampunk-ish cover for the new title! (Oh, how we’re clamoring to get a peek at the manuscript....)

For those yet unaware, The Alloy of Law came about from a short story that Brandon Sanderson wrote last fall while taking a well-deserved break after writing The Gathering Storm, The Way of Kings, and Towers of Midnight. Of course, fantasy stories being what they are, what was a short story soon ballooned into a proper novel. (A novel that, funnily enough, takes Mistborn out of the epic fantasy genre it started within.) Sanderson still reportedly intends on crafting a follow-up trilogy to the original Mistborn trilogy after his current projects are completed.

A longer synopsis for The Allow of Law has emerged, as well.

The short synopsis (mild spoilers for the Mistborn trilogy):

Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds.

Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history—or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice.

One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will. After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.

The fourth Mistborn novel is currently set for release in November of this year in hardcover and ebook.

As soon as I saw mention of this book on Brandon Sanderson's blog last year, the book immediately climbed up my list of anticipated 2011 books. I like that the design of the hardcovers, in terms of border and fonts, is retained from the original trilogy and I can understand why Tor utilized Chris McGrath for the artwork, since he did the covers for the mass market paperbacks of the original trilogy. The art is good, but I *loved* Jon Foster's art on the original hardcovers.

Empire in Black and Gold reviewed at SFFWorld

This week’s review at SFFWorld is a book that received a nice amount of positive buzz when initially published in the UK in 2008. Smartly, Lou Anders at Pyr snapped up the series and published in their proven monthly installment format beginning in March. The book in question is Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the first book in his Shadows of the Apt series/milieu:

What Tchaikovsky does to really set his novel and creation apart is the inventive world building. Nations are associated with an insect totem (or kinden), such as the Wasp-kinden of the title who can take to the air, or the Mantis-kinden known as great warriors, or Beetle-kinden who are considered tinkers of technology. Each of these kinden have a specific knowledge and technical skill, or aptitude, thus the Shadows of the Apt umbrella under which this series falls.

This world; however, isn’t a flat-out horse-and-carriage fantasy world. Oh no, no. In many ways, there’s a steampunk feel to the world, with machinery and factories giving a feel almost reminiscent of the World Wars of the first half of the Twentieth Century. This is contrasted nicely with the magic hinted at throughout the novel. What makes it more impressive is how Tchaikovsky weaves the technology and magic together.

While the book didn’t completely connect with me, I recognize some cool things Tchaikovsky did and will likely return to the subsequent books in the series at a later day.