Agents of Imagination
They can make - or break - a writer's career, and every serious author needs to have one. The most powerful agents in the SFF business speak out about the genre publishing world in this roundtable. This panel includes Andrew Zack, Lucienne Diver, Shawna McCarthy, Donald Maass, Joshua Bilmes, Jack Byrne, Eleanor Wood and Nanci McCloskey.
(PUBLISHING SPOTLIGHT)

Star Wars and the Rise of Troy
Author Troy Denning interviewed about his new Star Wars universe novel Tatooine Ghost. It's set before Chewbacca's death, so fans might come to terms with their grief with this book.
(AUTHOR INTERVIEWS)

Anne Sudworth Interviewed
Pastels are an awkward, difficult to control medium, but from magic landscapes to fairies, fantasy illustrator Anne Sudworth has proven she has the technique well under control.
(ARTIST INTERVIEWS)

Offworld Report: March 2003
This month's offworld report looks at the secret history of TV series Red Dwarf, DNA computers, an interview with Betsy Mitchell of Del Rey, has Robert Silverberg reflecting on the Columbia shuttle disaster, and looks at the shocking real life of a Dalek.
(NEWS)

Paul Barnett to Leave Paper Tiger
Paul Barnett, who has been Commissioning Editor of Paper Tiger since 1997, has decided to give up his role as of the end of March 2003.
(NEWS)

Who Watches the Watchmen
Geoff Klock, the author of 'How to Read Superhero Comics and Why' asks some fascinating literary questions of a genre whose main protagonists wear their underwear on the outside.
(ARTICLES)

Cease Fire (Star Trek Enterprise)
Andorian commander Shran calls upon Archer to mediate a dispute between the Andorians and the Vulcans.
(TV REVIEWS)

Stigma (Star Trek Enterprise)
T'Pol becomes seriously ill with a disease condemned by most parts of Vulcan society.
(TV REVIEWS)

The Film Without Fear - or Shame.
In Daredevil, Mark R Leeper finds an uninspired comic book superhero film that borrows everything, while inventing and contributing almost nothing. An uninspiring actor plays an uninspired idea for a superhero in a familiar setting … one that feels like it was stamped out at a factory.
(FILM REVIEWS)

The Second Coming
Rod looks at the controversial BBC TV drama that posits the question, what would the world do if the Son of God returned as a video store assistant in the North of England?
(TV REVIEWS)

Building a Better Battlestar
Yep it's time for Galacticon 2003, announcing the fans' 25th anniversary salute to the stars, producers, writers and crew of the original Battlestar Galactica TV series.
(CONVENTIONS)

BOOK REVIEWS

Science fiction and fantasy authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin, Terry Bisson, Jeffrey Ford, James Patrick Kelly, Ellen Datlow, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Moorcock, John Kessel, Lisa Goldstein, Kelly Link and many others all signed the Artists and Writers' Petition Against War on Iraq. But what do you, the SFF fans of the world think?

Is a second Gulf war the best - perhaps only - way to get rid of this truly evil tyrant, or should we have kept on trying the U.N route, and if that didn't work out, just applied a large touch of the Prime Directive to this troubled region of the world?

We'll be really interested to see the results of this poll. Please vote now ...

Vote at http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/pollarchive.htm

LAST MONTH'S RESULT
In March's issue, we asked after the terrible disaster which struck NASA's last shuttle mission, should we now be looking at building our offworld experience and our space technologies with robot journeys to the planets of Sol and beyond? Or must we keep our nerve and push on with manned missions which will take humanity itself across the last frontier?

Well, a resounding 86% of you were in favour of keeping the space programme fully manned, while only 14% of you wanted to play it safe and make the near-term future of space exploration robot-based.

Books that talk to you? No, it isn't some strange product of nanotechnology where your next Tor novel is going to feature an embedded paper-thin A.I. - it's books on tape, and has our Rod found a site for you this month.

http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/directory/wiz0403.htm

Picture this: A standard SF situation. You travel into the past to kill a dictator. Usually it’s Hitler because he’s the most easily recognised despot, before his rise to power, and so thus prevent World War Two. As there are so many permutations, there’s been enough variations on the theme over the years as to what happened next to fill a library of books.
http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/Holotales/edit.htm

Welcome to the 'Nest's April 2003 issue, SFF'izens.

I was going to talk about the war for this month's piece, but given that Geoff's editorial touches on GW-II, and you can't turn on a radio or TV without getting wall-to-wall realtime on our strange little 21st century hyperwar, I thought I might try for a more escapist subject to take my - and your - mind off the general shitiness of the real world for a little while.

And the subject? Well, the subject is art. To be more specific, the illustrations that appear inside science fiction & fantasy magazines and on the covers of SFF novels, mags and zines.

As regular 'Nest readers might have gathered, I'm a big fan of genre art, and nothing makes my heart flutter so much as seeing the detailed work of a true Leonardo of the airbrush like say, Jim Burns. As something of a failed illustrator myself, I became just talented enough to realize that anything I could produce would always fall short of the watercolour intensity of Alan Lee or the shaped malevolence of Syd Mead. In short, I developed enough taste to realize how bad I was, but not enough to transcend my shortcomings. Such are the disappointments of a callow youth.

Now a lot is heard about the difficulties - real or perceived - of new writers breaking into print (when you pick up the latest copy of Spectrum SF in Borders and see that it's closed to anything but invited submissions, I'd have to lean towards the 'real' side of the camp).

But believe me, it's nothing to the problems that talented new illustrators experience in breaking into the field.

For starters, there was the recent announcement that a stable of long-established US genre magazines (who shall remain nameless here) are dropping all interior art from their publications - presumably for cost-saving reasons. How empty will those titles feel now? Then there's the trend for book publishers, increasingly prevalent I believe, to plaster their novels with photomontaged art rather than illustrations.

You know what I'm talking about. Grab a couple of pieces of stock photography from that CD, load into Adobe Photoshop and let rip. The Quark Xpress monkeys in the layout department can really go to town with these packages. A few blends, a tweak of the shadow gradient, apply a mezzotint filer and voila, art out of a can. No skill required. Well bada-boom bada-bing, Mr Publisher, you just saved the $1000.00 minimum shell-out for a decent cover illustration.

In the real world, productive cash cows like Terry Pratchett get Josh Kirby, the rest of us get Photoshop's Solarize plug-in courtesy of Georgio from the imprint's Creative Services department.

Sometimes before I turn in for the evening, I might stroll through my library and run my hands along the spines; and it's the books' jacket art which project the soul of a novel.

I can't think of China Mieville's The Scar without associating it with the dark textured canvas oils of Edward Miller, or Patrick Tilley's Amtrak Wars series without the cartoon-bright covers of Tony Roberts. But when I get to penny-pinching novels pulled together out of thirty-dollar Corbis stock royalty-free images, they feel like the hide of a skinned animal ripped off and worn by a cheap Hollywood actress.

Time for some new clichés?

Not for me, old bean. Give me those old covers with an alien robot slinging a hysterical sun-bathing supermodel over its shoulder while atomizing a tank any flipping time.

Stephen Hunt
sfcrowsnest@hotmail.com

One of the nice things about being online is that SFcrowsnest can publish slightly off-the-wall material that would never find a home in a highly targeted advertising-ruled print magazine world. An article we always trot out as an example of this, is Uncle Geoff's piece about what the heck fuel & engine combination the Thunderbirds craft might have used in the classic 1960s TV series of the same name.

Let's face it, you're not going to read the likes of that in SFX, Starlog, Starburst, Interzone or the rest of the print mafia's publications! If there's an article inside you - could be continuity errors in Andromeda, your latest work of short fiction, or just why you think Iain Banks' novels are the greatest SF since a little man called Verne put pen to paper - do drop Geoff a line below.

Contact Uncle Geoff in the rainy English countryside at gfwillmetts@hotmail.com

We still fund this puppy's bandwidth and other miscellaneous expenses out of our own pocket, so the spirit of volunteerism is about the only thing that keeps our happy ship in hyperspace. Any time, articles, stories or reviews you can submit are always appreciated.

Current requirements: April 2003

- short fiction
- articles
- comment pieces
- book reviewers (see below)

BTW, if you're interested in becoming a book or DVD reviewer, we'd really, really (no, really) appreciate it if you were UK-based. Posting out the hundred of goodies we get every week is an expensive business, and extra airmail costs could lead to Geoff, Jessica, Mark and Steve eating dog food in a crazed economy-drive of death. Of course, if you're based in the US or Australia and you fancy reviewing your own stash of goodies resulting from your science fiction and fantasy addiction, then that okay by us ... but we can't supply you ourselves! Sorry.

Got your own web site? Then increase the traffic to it today!

Thanks to our nifty new syndication engine, you can now add SFcrowsnest.com's monthly news to your own web site for free. It's a lot of work creating dynamic, fresh content to attract visitors back to your science fiction/fantasy web site. Now - with a one-minute cut & paste of two lines of code - you can take some of the effort out of the process ... and give your users another reason to visit your own fab online offering.

You can find full details of this new tool over at ...

http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/portablenews.htm

Know of any science fiction and fantasy pals who don't yet receive this fine monthly magazine? Forward it to them and let them quiver in awe of your highly evolved and very discriminating SFF-loving taste. Then twist the arms of the little blighters in a cruel-to-be-kind attempt to get them to subscribe free too!

You can use the facility below, centered, to subscribe/unsubscribe to this splendid publication at any time.

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October 2002