Some followup on WILD CYBERS

Now that the cover art and design are complete, Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman is moving into the final stages. The file has been sent to the printer so advance copies can be printed and sent out to reviewers (and if any professional reviewers reading this are interested, let me know). The exact release date is still being settled — the process seems rather more flexible for small publishers — so for now I can just say it’ll be out in the summer. There will be a Kickstarter campaign to fund the book starting pretty soon, and Kickstarter backers will be the first to receive the book before its general release.

Since I reblogged the cover announcement from eSpec’s WordPress site (first time I’ve ever tried that), I didn’t get to share my thoughts about the cover before. Mike McPhail put it together from a stock illustration for the background and butterfly and a 3D robot model of his own, I gather, with some input from me on the direction we wanted to go in. It’s not a literal depiction of anything in the stories, more a symbolic expression of some of the concepts and themes, but I like that it tells a story of its own, with a robot that could easily seem forbidding and looking somewhat timeworn standing in such a beautiful setting and reaching out in appreciation, like it’s discovering new possibilities. It fits with the general themes I go for in my work — optimistic science fiction that isn’t devoid of struggle and hardship.

My preliminary cover thoughts had been running more in the direction of a montage conveying elements from several stories, maybe something with a more professional rendering of my designs for the aliens in the stories, and ideally highlighting the various heroic women featured in most of the stories — particularly Emerald Blair, who has a brand-new story inside. But that’s a lot to cram into one cover. Better to have a single, striking image that catches your attention enough that you take a closer look, and I think this cover does that.

It just now struck me that the Wild Cybers cover is kind of a complement to the Only Superhuman cover. There, you had a vibrant, living feminine figure within a hard, mechanistic environment, her arm extended in an act of aggression, while here, you have a hard, mechanistic masculine-ish figure within a vibrant, living environment, its arm extended in an act of gentleness. They even invert the order of the title and byline. It’s a nice coincidental contrast, since these two books between them encompass the entirety of my published fiction in their universe to date. (Also, both figures have their midriffs set apart in one way or another, and both have pretty well-defined abs…)

Oh, speaking of Only Superhuman, I discovered that some of the interview and essay links on my page for the novel had expired, so I fixed them. Two of them are still online at different addresses, while the third is preserved on the Internet Archive.