Recently Read: Ramses

As an archaeologist with a foot in the anthropology and history camps, historicals have an inescapable appeal for me. Since the early months of 2016 I have been pursuing the best-selling (eleven million copies) five-volume Ramses series by Christian Jacq, fist published in the original French between 1995 and 1997, with English translations about two years later. As the author noted in his foreword, it was quite an experience to travel, as a writer, in the company of such a monolithic figure in history, and to attempt to do justice to his stature both as man and as legend. For me, as a reader versed in ancient history, as well as a writer, the experience was fascinating.

The writer’s “take” is certainly a romantic one, and Ancient Egypt has been sanitised to a very comfortable degree, creating an immediately acceptable and understandable world in which Egypt is the crucible of all that is best and which strives to be the shining light of human civilisation. Perhaps Jacq’s efforts to make the world of the second millennium BC familiar and comfortable go too far, there are moments when Ancient Egypt feels like the modern world in kilts, minus technology; there again, human nature being what it is (certainly borne out by the writings of ordinary folk which have come down to us in the archaeological record from Dehr el Medina above the Valley of the Kings) maybe life then was not so different from life today, and some may feel this is an acceptable way to depict it.

Certainly Jacq knows his Egyptology (as well he should, holding a doctorate in the field from the Sorbonne), from his descriptions of material culture to his citation of songs and prayers, as they were written. His geography is excellent and his knowledge of the technology, language and diet of the times forms a textural backdrop to the events. The events themselves are the conventional dramatic sweep, encompassing the spiteful plotting of frustrated siblings, vengeful emissaries of deposed figures of the past, the tensions between the Egyptian and Hittite domains, black magic and fury, the clash of civilisation and barbarism, lust, passion and romance – the full palate of the human experience. The high points of the life of Ramses are all covered, the building of his great works, the battle at Kadesh in Syria, the peace treaty with the Hittites and his marriage, late in the piece, to a Hittite princess; politically, the wavering of the border states between the empires, the revolt of the Libyan tribes, the consolidation of Nubia and Kush as provinces of the empire, are all solidly featured.

However, artistic license is certainly used with a bold brushstroke, to say the least. Homer lived in the 8^th century BC, not the 13^th, and wrote retrospectively of the Trojan War – he did not accompany Menelaus and Helen to Asia Minor, nor adopt Egypt as his home after the former popped in for a while to plot and scheme! That said, this Homer is a confidante of the king to the end of his life, and provides many philosophic interludes. Ramses is thought to have had a vast number of offspring, over 100 I believe, and Jacq’s assertion that all but three (names known from ancient sources) were state adoption, a kind of royal talent pool from which the succession could be assured, while an interesting idea, may come under the heading of sanitisation to make the king more sympathetic to modern sensibilities. Similarly, Jacq’s assertion that slavery was outlawed in New Kingdom Egypt runs contrary to accepted historical evidence. It is true that Egypt was touchy about it and defined it rather differently – had terms of indentured labour, and other forms of forced labour which differ from our conception of slavery as it was practiced elsewhere – but to assert that the institution did not exist in Egypt is a comfortable sanitisation which makes Egypt the glossier and more admirable to the modern reader. For a discussion of slavery in the region and period, here is an interesting read: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/slavery.htm Certainly, the great coffee-table volume Egypt, World of the Pharaohs does not contain so much as an index listing for the term slavery, so something is afoot.

The five volumes, The Son of the Light, The Temple of a Million Years, the Battle of Kadesh, The Lady of Abu Simbel and Under the Western Acacia, form a narrative of the life of the Pharaoh Ramses II, from age 14 or so to the end of his days, constituting a large part of the 13^th century BC. The narrative expands through the eyes of five friends, boys together in the Memphis academy – Ramses, Moses, Ahsha, Ahmeni and Setau. Each is destined for greatness, though in very different ways, and the course of their lives is charted as they circle, vortex-like, around the institution of the Pharaoh. I can appreciate what a daunting task it must have been to plan such a foray, and to have known from the beginning that it required a grand treatment. In the Pocketbooks paperback edition, the series has a collective length of 1802 pages – but the simple truth is it could actually have been twice as long if properly developed. The books have a similar length range – 344 to 374 pages, as if written to a specification, and these days publishers seem to ask for sheer bulk to engender respect in the casual buyer.

Business aside, I was struck from the beginning that Jacq seems to underplay much of his material. He excels at characters, drawing them, setting them in conflict or in harmony, and his dialogue is at times magnificent, as are his descriptive powers – but not always. Sometimes his expression is flat, brusque – one is tempted to blame it on some loss of nuance in translation, but this may be an injustice. Often he skips over events I would have taken to be important, magnificent moments worthy of full development, yet they are treated in an almost off-hand manner, dusted off in a short paragraph of peremptory description. In the first novel, when Seti orders his son to drive the royal chariot to the river docks, and to accompany the Pharaoh on an expedition into the south, the grandeur of the moment struck me with its cinematic scale, but Jacq did not treat it that way. Much later, when discussing the fortress of Buhen, seat of the Viceroy of Nubia, his descriptions make it seem rather ordinary, whereas to (any other) archaeologist it is one of the stand-out structures of ancient times, of vast size, and pre-guessing the castles of the Middle Ages in its curtain walls, towers, moat and drawbridge – none of which were mentioned. Battles are half-described, over too quickly, and lack any sense of simpatico with the realities of combat. Where are the sweat and blood, the straining effort, the red haze of madness, the screaming and roar of a multitude, the awful tide of human carnage that was war in antiquity? Virtually absent. Characters are introduced with nigh word-for-word repeated paragraphs of description throughout, almost cookie-cutter writing, as if Jacq was tired of his subject and racing to finish. Pacing is another area where his style may rankle some, as time flows by at a variety of rates – leave two lines and four years have gone by. Jacq seemed to run afoul of his own chronology toward the end, as the last novel compresses some 35 years into one thread, and his references to dates, ages and relative years going by frequently do not tally.

The first four novels follow the king from a 14-year old prince who has rarely ever met his father, Seti I, to a seasoned monarch of 42, both victorious and grieved. The four novels form an interlinked story of intrigue, the linchpin of which is the scheming of Ramses’ older brother Shaanar, passed over by their father for the indolent and corruptible bureaucrat he is, not fit to stand in his brother’s shadow. Their sister, Dolora, is a weak personality easily swayed and is a close element of the plotting, which expands to include ministers and officers, and wholeheartedly embraces a Hittite spy ring under the control of a black magician from Libya hell-bent on reasserting the royal line of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaton.

To this add a swathe of colourful figures – Seremanna, the gigantic Sardinian pirate who became head of Ramses closest bodyguard, Iset the Fair, first lover of the king, Nefertari, the incomparable Queen, old Nebu, High Priest of Karnak, the royal family of the Hittites, Ramses’ lion Invincible, saved as a cub in Nubia and his inseparable companion in life and battle – and the making of a long and complex narrative is complete. The passage of time is not always comfortable or smooth, however, and one feels at times more should or could have been made of some elements before the relentless passage of the years consigned them to the past. The narrative structure tends to feel as if months are elapsing, when decades are going by. That said, the personalities become companions, and when they depart, the reader feels it keenly.

In a way, the main storyline is finished after four books, but Ramses is barely middle aged, and the fifth book feels like an uncomfortable graft. It would have been tempting to let the series go at four, but that would have meant closing in tragedy, the passing of Queen Nefertari on the very day she saw the temple complex of Abu Simbel, built for her by Ramses. Even so, the writer is obliged to leap ahead in time, twelve years have gone by before the next volume opens, and there were surely other stories worth telling in that period. The last volume has a certain sadness about it – the reader knows it can only end one way, and as the book progresses one character after another succumbs to old age, battle, suicide or murder, and final forays into intrigue and action have the feeling of merely delaying the inevitable.

The series’ sales figures cannot be disputed, Jacq clearly pleased his primary readership, but more recent reviews are harsh and place this series with romantic fiction, not historical. I find it reasonable to expect historical fiction to do the best it can to reflect history as it is known, and Jacq’s choice to perform a Xena-like mash-up of eras and elements comes under the heading of alternate reality. The moment Menelaus, Helen and Homer sailed into Egypt I knew he was going in some direction of his own, and viewed everything thereafter with a different expectation. Some reviewers assert that literally every detail is inaccurate in some way – whether due to sanitisation or the need for the world depicted to be comfortably familiar – and that Jacq’s work is a disservice to the earnest reader, not to be compared with, say, the Egyptian novels of Pauline Gedge.

Certainly Jaqc chose to tell the apocryphal version of the battle of Kadesh, the one in which Amon imbued Ramses with supernatural power, enabling him to battle the enemy alone, the story repeated on monuments throughout Egypt. For a more objective view of the historic battle (which Ramses got away with by the skin of his teeth) see Mark Healy’s 1993 scholarly work Qadesh 1300 BC: Clash of the Warrior Kings (Osprey, Campaign #22). Throughout the series, Jacq’s emphasis is on the tangible verity of Egyptian mysticism, and while it is quite correct that they were a society for whom religion was a living companion every moment, it is somewhat surprising to see a narrative couched in this form – from Kadesh to the end of his days, Ramses’ magic and communion with the gods are described as practical reality. Miracles and revelations, communion with deity and everyday magic such as divination and prophecy occur throughout the text with frank acceptance. This is contrasted with the treatment of Moses and the ten plagues with which Egypt was struck – dismissed easily as natural phenomena (e.g., the Nile turning to blood, a “red tide”) and rather inept hoaxes (e.g., flies, attracted to livestock kept in squalor). The parting of the Red Sea was implicitly apocryphal, and a historically reasonable sequence involving salt marshes and the incoming tide preventing the Egyptian chariots from reaching the Hebrews was substituted – an interesting contrast to the explicitly divine intervention at Kadesh. Jacq seems to be every bit as great an Egyptophile as Rosemary Sutcliff was a Romanophile.

 At the end of the day I can say I was hoping for more – a more serious treatment, a more in-depth exploration of a lost age, focusing on one of the giants of history who has come down to us as a figure of such monolithic scope as to preserve an aura of might evoked even at the whispering of his name. These novels are entertaining, they are touching and engaging, but they are somewhat less than great literature. I do not regret the time I spent reading them, but they are the shadow and shape of what might have been, and perhaps one day another writer will tackle this titanic theme and tell it seriously, honestly and frankly. Jacq’s view is that of the romantic, and while brutal realism may be equally unpalatable for different reasons, there must be a middle ground which respects the facts and can avoid undue bias.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First of the “Big Three”

Much has been written about the three towering names of weird fiction in the golden age of pulps, probably every definitive comment has been made by the likes of August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Colin Wilson, Gene Wolf and a hundred other literary authorities, but a subject so foundational to speculative fiction as we know it today can always stand a little more.

The “three” were of course H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clarke Ashton Smith (of whom I have spoken previously). They were the backbone of Weird Tales, that market-leader in the strange, the creepy and unsettling in the 1920, ‘30s and beyond, and were the flag-carriers for the magazine’s glory days. Between them, they must have contributed hundreds of stories which, eighty years later, remain well known to fans of the macabre.

 I knew Howard’s work as a kid, encountering the Marvel Comics Conan franchise around 1975, stumbling upon the art of Frank Frazetta in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan and rapidly expanding to the Ballantine artbooks of the period. I found the Conan anthologies in the Sphere paperback edition, itself the first mainstream, mass rerelease since the famous Lancer Books edition of the 1960s, for which Frazetta produced his seminal covers. (Above, a 1975 Sphere and a 1969 Lancer original, straight out of the personal library) I expanded to King Kull in the comics, and El Borak and others in paperback as the years went by. But of the other two I knew nothing at all, and learned of them piecemeal, a comment here, a reference there.

Smith I first became aware of when Grenada released a selection of stories in their Panther imprint in 1987. I bought Lost Worlds Volumes 1 & 2, I remember the shop where I got them, and it probably has not existed in twenty years. There were six books in the range, providing a good slice of Smith’s work, though still not exhaustive. His prolific output has since been gathered in other editions and definitive collections have put in an appearance, but, other than the Ballantine volumes of the early 1970s, his work seems to have been somewhat lost against the expanding panorama of modern writing, and I never heard his name in my younger days.

Howard Philips Lovecraft is a name it’s hard not to stumble over. He is widely considered the father of modern American horror, building upon the foundations of Edgar Alan Poe, Lord Dunsany and others, and his macabre creations, his sense of the strange, are every bit as powerful today. He was writing earlier than his colleagues – born 1890, his first professional story (The Tomb) is dated 1917. (He wrote in childhood but his earlier opus, also horror even then, may be placed apart from his adult material.) Ninety-nine years ago! He went on to pen reams of tales (63 under his own name, many more besides), ranging from brief vignettes to short novels, and did so with an often lush and classical prose filled with the ponderous solemnity of the 19^th century which today verges on the ‘high style,’ echoing medieval expression. Smith’s was still the richer, a prose filled with image, sensory input, and with pointedly clever literary devices, including use of archaic forms (as Lovecraft also used). Neither would get by gatekeepers today except as a curiosity – their very linguistic fireworks would factor against them because the general modern readership has no patience with it. If a story isn’t verbally stripped to the bone and surging ahead with its events by page two, it’s considered poor writing. (To be fair, Lackington’s Magazine is one of very few who actively seek lush, surprising prose, so the delight in such literary form is not completely dead.) In this much, many of Lovecraft’s early stories are almost bereft of a plotline but are composed entirely of exposition which itself forms the story – The Doom That Came to Sarnath, for instance, or Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family. One cannot help feeling that writing was more attuned to creativity in those days, for the simple fact these tales could be told as they were.

Lovecraft is of course the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is a cycle of stories in which he explored a fabulous cosmology, in which Earth was visited in ancient times by extraterrestrial beings of vast power, aloof intellect and unspeakable nature – foul and terrible. These beings were worshipped as gods, and were in turn driven out by gods. Explicitly, they are pan-dimensional, and over and over, strange and distant places present the aspect of parallel worlds, a reality removed from our own. This concept has been explored by many other writers: Howard and Smith featured Lovecraftian parallels in their own work, and there are “easter eggs” to them in Lovecraft’s in return. Since August Derleth founded Arkham House Publishing in 1939 to commemorate Lovecraft’s work, a great many writers have contributed stories falling into and expanding the mythos – one could almost call it an “expanded universe” surrounding the original core material. To this day, “lovecraftian” storytelling is an active field, and publishers are seeking the 21^st century’s take on his themes.

Oddly enough, despite having become quite familiar with the other two, Lovecraft’s work is the last for me to sample. I looked up the publishing history of the Cthulhu anthologies and there have been surprisingly few, in editions of just a few thousand copies. I was about to dig deep and order up some collections online when my sister suggested we check “Project Gutenberg” for classic literature out of copyright, and, lo and behold, there it was… The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft, over 700 A4 pages, in .pdf form, and it’s a free download! I have the unique process of starting with his first story and working forward chronologically, which should be an experience to savour.

Lovecraft and Howard were in some ways birds of a feather. They were both isolated, social misfits, deeply introverted and fascinated with the dark. In Howard’s case, he was a boxer, a fighter, his sympathies lay with the fighting man wherever he was found, and his heroes are tough guys of the classic form, taking on evil magic and foul and ancient terrors. Lovecraft was a sickly young man whose symptoms resemble chronic fatigue syndrome, and he lacked social confidence; his protagonists are often “everyman” characters, as mentally and physically unimpressive as their creator, humans lost in a nightmare to which they can only be spectators, as indeed were some of Smith’s. (His 1920 story Celephaïs features as protagonist a clone of himself in all significant ways.) Both writers also died young, within a year of each other, Lovecraft at 47 from cancer, Howard at just 36 by his own  hand in the depths of depression. Smith was shaken to lose his colleagues, and wrote little after 1937. They all corresponded but there is no evidence they ever actually met.

To say eighty years separate us from the days when these three writers supplied chills and horrors to an enthusiastic monthly audience is a commentary on our collective memory. Their stories evoke the dark spaces of our own minds, the race memory of olden times and the terror of that which lies unknown for it predates record-keeping, the communal memory of our culture. Ruins crumbling with time, cities taken over by jungle, relics thrown up by cataclysm from beneath the sea, and a thousand other devices, all whisper to our fear of the unknown, play to tropes such as the Atlantean model of prehistory, and notions of cyclical time, that what was shall be again, and again, epochs in which the human race has prospered, waned and perhaps fallen completely. Today we can say these concepts are stock-in-trade for science fiction and fantasy, but in the 1930s they were both new, disturbing notions, and more closely associated with horror. This was before Guy Smith, Stephen King and their many cohorts perverted horror – a respectable genre – into splatterporn, for which a case can be made that it is anything but respectable.

An interesting observation can also be made of the pointed difference in the underlying narrative assumptions of the three writers. Lovecraft has been called a racist, a Nietzschian, certainly a devotee of Social Darwinism, and is said to have made no secret of it, not to his contemporaries, not to his audience, though many commentarists have challenged this interpretation. The late Colin Wilson, in his 42-page introductory essay to The Necronomicon, the amazing docu-drama/mockumentary tie-in to the Cthulhu Mythos, speaks of Lovecraft as an ardent anglophile who despised the Irish, and in Lovecraft’s 1919 story Beyond the Wall of Sleep (very much science fiction) he dismisses the American “mountain man” as physically and mentally “degenerate,” a subhuman order of being. Neither Smith nor Howard expressed such notions toward peoples in the modern world, much as they may speak of tribes and communities in the past in neo-evolutionary terms – Howard’s Picts were always described as seeming low on the developmental ladder, harking back to the Neanderthal state, a conscious seeking for a connection to the Stone Age. At least, insofar as I have yet read the work of either, I have not encountered any explicit statement to lead me to think they shared Lovecraft’s prejudice. Howard loved his brawling Irishmen, whether Turlough the Black, Cormac Mac Art or the indomitable Francis Xavier Gordon.

Lovecraft is, at a technical level, the most unpredictable writer of the three. Smith had him beaten for pure literary genius, while Howard does him to death for solid stories, viscerally told, and both were more consistent. Though Lovecraft has standout pieces – for instance, his 1919 story Memories is a flash-length gem – he penned plenty of pot-boilers, falling back on his florid prose and stock-in-trade themes of the old, the dark, the loathsome and the mysterious. That prose is often repetitive, verbose, a torrent of adjectives (he was known to have 15 in one sentence, which was also unfortunately pretty much his entire vocabulary) and unremitting hyperbole, and today’s editor would call them a boring veneer on top of doubtful storytelling. Wilson comments that Lovecraft appeared written-out by the time Weird Tales began (March, 1923), though this may be unfair, given some of the seminal elements of the Cthulhu Mythos date from the late 1920s. And, in all fairness, despite the shortcomings apparent in his less than stellar episodes, the balance contains some very memorable and very enjoyable tales. It seems his style varied with his influences, such as his exposure to the writings of Lord Dunsany after which he produced pieces such as Memories, The White Ship, Celephaïs and The Quest of Iranon, told with a smooth, lyrical style and seeking not to horrify the reader but to beguile them with a vision beautiful as well as challenging. It is during these outings I cannot much store by the comments of those who call Lovecraft a poor writer. Perhaps, as with any artist, his product changed over time with his inspirations, and, in his case, very much with his mood.

A psychiatrist would have a field day with the writings of all three, but perhaps most with Lovecraft. As with the late, great H. R. Geiger, Swiss surrealist and creator of the well-known “xenomorph” of Alien fame, Lovecraft based much of his work on dreams. Geiger painted to exorcise the memories of unremitting, horrific nightmares, as if giving them tangible form robbed them of their power over him. So, too, did Lovecraft, expressing in prose what many would call a “dream diary,” springing awake after a torrid excursion of the subconsciousness and committing it to notes, then developing it as a story to capture the essence of the moment. In many pieces one can almost sense this process, Nyarlathotep, for instance. From the perspective of one not troubled with such preoccupations, it is easy to view Lovecraft and Geiger as both being at least somewhat mentally ill, though it is fair to speculate that the habit of transcribing dream images into creative productivity may perhaps be a self-reinforcing cycle – the more one does it, the more dreams might reliably come to feed the mechanism. Perhaps – and if so, it was a grim cycle. That said, many, perhaps most writers, draw on the fully-formed symbolic imagery of dreams as inspiration – myself included.

I am over 100 pages through the Lovecraft collection at time of writing, and have enjoyed a re-read of the 1980 Necronomicon volume, and will post about that exercise in literary cleverness in due course. Geiger’s famous art book of the same name pre-dates it by a few years and is a topic worthy of its own commentary.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update X

My latest successes are two-fold and I’m excited to announce I have a novel under consideration with Flame Tree Press in the UK. As a contributor to a number of Flame Tree projects this year (none selected for publication, as it happens) I was sent the call-for-submissions for Flame Tree’s new line of spec-fiction novels, and queried promptly with a project hard to characterise – is it SF? Well, it’s certainly scientific, and not a single human being appears in it! My novel Morning of the Earth piqued editorial interest and was solicited; it was given a fresh draft and submitted this past week, so fingers are definitely crossed.

The second item – I’m delighted to announce my short story “Vital Dispatches” has been picked up by the Canadian magazine Phantaxis for inclusion in their issue for January 2017. It’ll be available online and in ebook and print formats, so widely accessible.

This is my eighth placement overall, and I have four shortlistings in play, so it’s looking pretty good as I head into the holidays.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

The Influence of Art: Bruce Pennington

The immediacy of art makes an impact, and before the age of wall-to-wall visual entertainment paintings were the form of inspirational stimulus. Science fiction book covers were (and still are) an artform all their own, and it is interesting to look back on the talents who influenced one’s own development. I could cite many – and will discuss them in future posts – but this time I’d like to talk about Bruce Pennington.

Many of the covers featured here are photographed directly from my own copies – some have been in my collection forty-plus years!

Bruce Pennington (72, a native of Somerset) may be less well known on the US side of the pond than the UK, but he was an artist who defined and was signatory to the science fiction of my childhood and teenage years. He was a principle contract artist to New English Library, supplying an amazing number of their covers in the 1970s, including some which have become icons of the field – such as his series of covers for Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, most especially Dune Messiah, a painting which gives me shivers to this day.

Stylistically, Pennington’s work is graceful, no matter how horrifying or bizarre his subject matter, and it is colourful – the breadth of his pallet knows no bounds, and his near-primary-coloured alien skies, grading tonally through subtly blended brushwork are a trademark. Classical training and knowledge drip from his compositions (he attended Ravensbourne School of Art), and his figure work often embodies the gestural or mannerist style of the Renaissance, lending the dignity and credibility of tradition to imagery which is, as all science fiction art must be, both surreal and avant garde. A further signature element of Pennington’s work is the geological or mineralogical formations he creates, landscapes filled with shapes the eye has trouble picking as either natural or sculptural. While a distinct stylistic device, I feel there is at least a conceptual complimentarity to the bizarre mineralogical formations which featured strongly in the work of the late, great Johannes Franciscus Vandenberg (“Jhofra”).

It’s worth noting Pennington seems never to have worked in airbrush: he was once described as perhaps the only artist of the period who never succumbed to the “imitation Foss craze” (or was allowed to by his publishers – Peter Jones’s first published cover was a Foss homage Jones described as “a flaky yellow spaceship” whose design was extracted from the lines of the F-4 Phantom II, and was commissioned to be exactly what it was. Art directors knew what was selling.)

I was first exposed to Pennington’s work through NEL’s 1974-1976 magazine Science Fiction Monthly, whose gimmick was an unstapled tabloid format with pull-out, large size, double-sided full colour posters. Enjoy the accompanying gallery of SFM covers! Among the work of Foss, Hardy and other giants of the day, Pennington was heavily featured, and as a young teen I would study his work with wide-eyed delight. I tried some of his imagery – rippled deserts and strange figures – in watercolour on cartridge paper, not that I could wrap my head around it at the time, but all life is a learning process.

Perhaps something of the colour, vivacity and avowed strangeness of imagery embodied in his work coalesced in my own thinking, as to this day when I visualise an alien world to be described in a story’s background narrative, it is often a Penningtonian scene that flashes to mind. It may be a Foss-eqsue or Elson-esque vessel in the sky above, but the planet itself will glow with warmth in my mind’s eye, and I will struggle to succinctly evoke such an image without belabouring the exposition, while envying the richness of prose the late, great Jack Vance would have brought to the same task.

Pennington’s canon of work across decades has become part of the science fiction heritage. It is expressly commercial, but maintains the tradition of fine art down the centuries and is as visually evocative now as forty years ago. If you have never seen anything of his work, give yourself a treat, follow the links here and be prepared to be submerged in a universe of colour and form whose creativity and innate skill are so very different to the crystal exactitude of the computer-mediated imagery of today – but that’s a whole other post!

The Art of Bruce Pennington

His Wikipedia entry

His Facebook fan page

The Fantastic and Apocalyptic Art of Bruce Pennington/Tor.com

Bruce Pennington Archive -- Rainfall Books

Cheers, Mike Adamson