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TOR ACQUIRES UK RIGHTS TO DYSTOPIAN THRILLER BY M D WATERS

Julie Crisp, Editorial Director at Tor UK, has acquired UK and commonwealth rights in two novels by American author M D Waters from Judith Murray at Greene and Heaton. Jennifer Weltz at JVNLA, Inc had an intense auction for the novel in the US, which was won by Denise Roy at Dutton.

The first title is called Archetype and will be published in hardback in January 2014, followed six months after by the sequel Prototype. It’s a dystopian thriller with thought-provoking and chilling echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go with a love story to rival The Time Traveller’s Wife.

In a future where women are a rare commodity, Emma Burke wakes from an accident with no memory of her past, knowing only what her handsome and highly successful husband, Declan, tells her. But her dreams contradict everything he says, showing her a past life she can’t believe possible: war, growing up in a camp where girls are trained to be wives, and, most unsettling of all, intense love for a man who is not Declan. Emma struggles to figure out who she really is and which of the two men she can truly trust and love.

Archetype is M D Waters debut novel.

Julie Crisp commented, ‘I’m thrilled to have acquired this very talented author for the list. With its great mix of a dystopian future, emotive storyline and passionate love story it’s unbelievably filmic and a terrific read. I can’t wait to publish it.’

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1) Blippar
Blippar is an augmented reality app that allows you to bring to life static images. As an example, we could use blipper as part of a marketing campaign to bring an advert ‘to life’, making it interactive or animated in some way for a more exciting reader experience. In this way, we can take a more traditional static marketing visual and move it a few stages further digitally. After viewing the animation, the user can then browse, buy or share via social media, completing the movement from the page to the online world.

2) Colophon
This is a publisher’s emblem, used as an identifying device or branding on its books and other works. So Pan Macmillan has it’s own colophon, with individual imprints such as Tor also having their own identifying symbols. Ours is displayed on the books above, and on the rather dapper fridge magnet displayed at the top of the post.

3) GSM
Grams per square metre: a term used to specify the weight of paper. As an example, a standard piece of A4 paper is 90gsm and a standard printed fiction book might be printed on 52-120gsm. An illustrated book might be printed on glossy ‘photographic’ paper so the pictures show up well, on a heavier weight of paper than used for a standard novel.

4) ISBN
International Standard Book Number. A unique, internationally utilized number code assigned to books for the purposes of identification and inventory control. For those interested, here is a brief history of the ISBN!

5) Kerning
In typography, this is the reduction of letter-spacing between certain character combinations in order to reduce the space between them, performed for aesthetic reasons. Sometimes, if you really need to get that shoutline on one line instead of two, on a book cover or marketing poster, you can shave a bit off the spaces between some of the words to help it fit that space. 

6) Sherpa
A ‘sherpa’ or sherpa proof is a high-quality colour proof. This is so named as it’s produced from a sherpa device, the purpose being to get a good indication of how the finished book cover will look before it goes to press, so amendments can be made if necessary. It’s a hard copy representation of the printed image, made from the same digital data which will be used to make the final printing plates. Wikipedia has more on proofing here. 

7) Signature
In printing terminology, this refers to a very large sheet of paper, printed with several pages, that upon folding and cutting will become a section or sections of a book. In publishing, books are often printed in signatures of sixteen, meaning sixteen pages were printed on one individual piece of paper when the book was printed. However, this does depend on the size of the printing press.

8) Super-matt
A matt book cover finish that doesn’t lose any intensity of colour in the way a standard matt finish would. This is especially effective with black and dark covers. It also has a very different feel to a standard cover finish, best described as soft to touch, rubbery or even velvety!

9) Verso
A left-hand page of an open book or manuscript (as opposed to a recto, or right-hand page). This is short for the original Latin phrase versō foliō – on the turned leaf. We sometimes refer to content being on the verso or recto when talking about books, rather than on the left-hand or right-hand side.

10) Wibalin
Wibalin® is a strong, durable covering material from which the boards of our hardback books are made. And you can see a whole range of colours and other suggested uses for that material here.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed our jargon buster. It’s been fun to think about words which we take for granted, but which our readers may not. To see more publishing info unpacked, have a look at our ‘Tor Tour’ here, where we give details of our publishing day jobs. 

The world of the Clan is mired in a classic development trap — a situation that prevailed for the vast mass of humanity until roughly 1800, and which we have no actual deep understanding of how to break out of. All we really know is that, prior to 1700 or thereabouts, Great Britain was economically not very far out of line with the rest of western Europe. But by 1860 the UK had achieved a mind-boggling industrial Great Leap Forward, becoming the first truly modern superpower: with naval basing rights in 130 other countries, a navy larger than the two next largest combined, and a staggering 60% of planetary GDP, it occupied much the position in the late 19th century that the USA occupied by the late 20th century.

Since then, other nations have undergone similar development leaps. Japan, in 1860, was not obviously very post-medieval; by 1920 they were building aircraft carriers. The USSR electrified and industrialized in two decades flat, despite grossly poor management and a simultaneous reign of terror. Yet other parts of the world stagnated and failed. North and South Korea started off roughly parallel in 1953 — both had been mashed flat by war and were run by military dictatorships — but by 2003, South Korea had achieved per-capita income equivalence with the likes of modern Japan and Germany; meanwhile, North Korea has problems feeding its own people.

So what drives this? It’s a weird kind of singularity: one decade you’ve got an economy trudging along in stagnation, mired in subsistence agriculture, poor or non-existent infrastructure, dysfunctional governing bodies, unenforced or arbitrarily imposed laws, and with a badly-educated population. Then you blink and the next decade they’re building skyscrapers and boasting about their first moon shot. And ten years later the first 747s full of tourists arrive in your home town, chattering and pointing out its’ old world charm …

The world of the Clan is, of course, mired in the late medieval feudal system. It has the added disadvantage of consisting of marcher kingdoms on the edge of a largely unexplored continent. And the Clan themselves have the dismal handicap of a talent which is as much a curse as a blessing; it has made them rich by local standards, but it doesn’t confer wisdom, and the ability to travel to the fully-developed United States of America doesn’t confer a modern American outlook either.

So, for contrast, I decided to throw in another time line.

 The New British Empire isn’t new or British; it’s British North America, as it developed in the wake of the French invasion of England in 1759. (The groundwork for which hinges on the outcome of the ’45 Stuart uprising being different, which in turn hinges on the weather in Edinburgh on a rainy spring morning when a conference of war teeters in the balance…) The 18th century French monarchy was notoriously bad at managing its tax collection system; and the invasion of 1759 was the culmination of what should truly be described as the first world war, a conflict between Britain and France that lasted for decades, and of which the American War of Independence (in our time line) was merely a side-effect.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that, in the wake of a successful invasion of England, the French crown would have attempted to recoup the cost of the war from the English pocket. And the imposition of regional tariff and customs barriers in England, then the largest free-trade zone in Europe, combined with a military government, would probably have thrown a damper on the first sparks of what would otherwise have become the industrial revolution. Meanwhile, in the Americas, the crown-in-exile establishes its capital in New London — formerly New York, and before that New Amsterdam — and has its own problems to deal with; notably the French in Louisiana, the Southern aristocracy (many of whom were descended from Stuart loyalists and had scant affection for a Hanoverian crown), the uppity New Englanders … which is why, when industrialization and development finally kicked off in the world of the New British Empire, it did so a century later and on the opposite side of the Atlantic from our own time line. 

Finally: governance. It’s very hard to separate out the cause of development from the political climate in which it happens. It would be an over-simplification to say that democracy is a necessary precondition; the USSR is the chrome-plated refutation to that. But a despotism that doesn’t respect property rights or that meddles in corporate governance seldom works well. And feudal aristocracy seems to be downright inimical to economic development — why bother, say the princes and dukes at the top of the pile, when we already have our palaces and our private armies and expensive luxuries? It’s noteworthy that those countries that pioneered industrial development and modern capitalism did so in the wake of political eruptions that placed fetters on the unlimited exercise of state power by the crown. The British nations did so in 1649, and again in 1688; France in 1789: the USA in 1776 and again in 1788 (with its then-revolutionary Constitution). What, however, are the odds on a New British Empire based in North America putting up with the tiresome demands of Levelers and Ranters while they’re fighting a global cold war against the French Empire? Or of Louis XVI emptying his coffers when he can re-fill them at will from the spoils of England?

But some kinds of pressure simply keep on building up until they find release, and by the time Miriam stumbles into New Britain, things are getting interesting …

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The Bloodline Feud  was published last month and is followed this month by The Traders’ War. And then The Revolution Trade is out in June. See here for both blurbs . You can also see more posts on the Merchant Princes books on and by Charles Stross on our blog here. And an all-new Merchant Princes series will be along in due course, with info on that here. 

When I wrote my more recent sixth novel, Final Days (set primarily in the 23^rd Century), I had people using contact lenses with integrated circuitry that allowed you to do all kinds of fancy things. But even while I was writing that book, I knew such technologies were going to be around a great deal sooner than two hundred years from now. I figured something like those lenses would hit the shops by the 2030s at the earliest, or maybe a little later. Boy, was I wrong. They’re already here, in beta form at least, and they’re called Google Glasses. How, then, to write about the future, when the present has this irritating habit of catching up with you almost before you’ve finished writing?

It’s worth remembering, however, that so long as science fiction has existed, it has found itself in a world dominated by constant technological and scientific flux. That feeling, for many writers of speculative fiction, of the carpet constantly slipping from underneath their feet is, in fact, nothing new, and it was as present on the day the first issue of Astounding, printed on cheap pulp paper, rolled off the presses way back in the 1920s as it is now. 

Remember that science fiction is both an epiphenomenon and a response to the accelerating rate of technological advancement. When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment had already taken steps towards radically revising our understanding of how the universe works. Her most famous novel was partly inspired by experiments in which dead tissue appeared to be reanimated – to be galvanised – into unholy life by the application of an electric current. It’s rightly known as the first science fiction novel because it’s a response to both the threat and the promise of such experiments. 

Let’s jump forward, now, to most of a century after the writing of that novel. We’re in the early decades of the 20^th Century. If you’d asked the people reading the early sf magazines of the time such as Astounding what kind of world they lived in, they might well have said it was one with strongly science-fictional elements. It may have been a world lacking either jetpacks or working rocket ships, but within a short span of time it had seen the arrival of heavier-than-air flying machines, telephone communications systems spanning the globe, enormous ironclad killing machines roaming the world’s battlefields, and cinema screens that carried entertainment and propaganda in equal measure into the minds of millions. The skylines of cities in America and all around the globe were already being transformed into skyscraper-dominated canyons. 

Most of those early SF fans were born about the same time that both radio and the first flying machines had come screaming into most people’s awareness with all the thudding impact, one must imagine, of a Martian war machine crashing into the English countryside. Had those early fans, then, worried that reality might be outpacing science fiction? If they did, history proved them wrong, and the genre only grew from strength to strength with the passing of the years. 

But here’s a funny thing. Even such initially remarkable-seeming technologies eventually fade into the background. One day they’re just ‘there’ – an invisible part of the everyday, humdrum world we share. When I sit on an international flight, I’m not thinking about how the jumbo jet represents a fantastical vision for the people of a century ago. I’m thinking about the inflight menu, and whether I want to finish the novel I’m reading. 

That’s at least partly because giant flying machines have always been present in my life, but the same can’t be said of the internet. I was alive long before it became an intrinsic part of my daily life, and yet I cannot remember what the hell I did to pass the time before it arrived. I know that when I was a student, or when I was unemployed, and in my teens before that, I must have done something to pass the time. I definitely read books, and taught myself to play guitar, or hung out with friends (when I could find them at any rate – how the hell did I do that without a mobile phone?). Now an internet connection seems as intrinsic and necessary part of my life as electric lighting and running water. Did something so science fictional prove a threat to the continued survival of a genre that had largely, if not entirely, failed to predict its arrival?

Well, of course it didn’t. What happened instead was that our shared definition of what we mean by ‘futuristic’ or ‘science fictional’ got up and shifted its goal posts to accommodate the new reality, same as it ever has.  It’s not harder to write sf in a fast-changing world. In some ways, it’s actually easier. New scientific developments, new theories and new or nascent technologies help generate newer, fresher ideas that lead to new storytelling opportunities. Science fiction is not endangered by change; it is a necessary part of that change, our public and vocal response to technology and what it means for the way we live our lives. Fiction is, after all, at heart about people. And that means science fiction is by definition about the ways in which people’s lives are changed by science and our expanded understanding of how the universe works, regardless of whether or not the science or technology within those stories are invented. 

A case in point: I believe that Google Glasses – or rather, the more streamlined and less visible technologies that will soon supersede them – will, along with 3D printing, bring about a major societal ground shift in the next couple of decades. The story telling opportunities within such technologies are boundless. What could be more exciting than trying to figure out what the world will look like once such technologies become commonplace? Yes, there are some who might choose to regard such changes with trepidation, but I prefer to look forward with anticipation. Even the core image of sf, that of men in space suits exploring other worlds, is gaining new life with the constant flood of exoplanet discoveries. How could we, as human beings, not imagine what it would be like to go out there and see those worlds with our own eyes? Imagination, after all, is not limited by the speed of light.  

Here’s one thing I can tell you for certain. One of these days, when you and I are old and grey, we will look around our kitchens at our desktop 3D printer, while a traffic report floats magically before our eyes as if suspended in the air, and realise we can’t remember what it was like before these things came into our lives. And when that day comes, there will undoubtedly be new inventions and discoveries in the world we can’t yet imagine, but will nonetheless change the world as fundamentally and completely as the internet has. And, I guarantee you, we will be writing stories about them. 

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Gary Gibson’s Shoal trilogy consists of Stealing Light, Nova War and Empire of Light and all are reissued this month. Then next month, we reissue his stand-alones Angel Stations and Against Gravity. The month after, is his outstanding standalone Marauder, set in the same universe as his Shoal books, but much further into the future. Enjoy! And you can see more posts on and by Gary on our site here. 

His debut novel, Stormdancer about the indomitable Yukiko and her battle against a corrupt Emperor with the reluctant aid of a Thunder Tiger,  was published last year to rave reviews, just a few of which are here:

‘What’s that? You say you’ve got a Japanese Steampunk novel with mythic creatures, civil unrest, and a strong female protagonist? I’m afraid I missed everything you said after “Japanese Steampunk.” That’s all I really needed to hear’ Patrick Rothfuss

‘Jay Kristoff’s Yukiko and her indomitable thunder tiger’s entertaining adventures have just sent steampunk gloriously Asian’ Stephen Hunt

‘Stormdancer is an intoxicating joyride into steampunklandia with a magical dose of mythology, the supernatural, violence, dystopian themes, and a top-notch brassy heroine who rivals Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games. Yes, I did say that! . . . The debut novel brings a new twist to steampunk and dystopian fiction that leaves readers clamoring for more’ Huffington Post

‘Stormdancer is quickly becoming a legend in its own right, the reality of reading it is truly worth experiencing’ www.literaryescapism.com

The paperback of Stormdancer is being published in June this year. And the next novel Kinslayer will be hot on its heels being published in September.

A SHATTERED EMPIRE 
The corrupt Shōgun Yoritomo has been assassinated by the Stormdancer Yukiko, and the threat of civil war looms over the Shima Imperium. The Lotus Guild conspires to renew the nation’s broken dynasty and crush the growing rebellion simultaneously – by endorsing a new Shōgun who desires nothing more than to see Yukiko dead.

A DARK LEGACY
Yukiko and the mighty thunder tiger Buruu have been cast in the role of heroes by the Kagé rebellion. But Yukiko herself is blinded by rage over her father’s death, and her ability to hear the thoughts of beasts is swelling beyond her power to control. Along with Buruu, Yukiko’s anchor is Kin, the rebel Guildsman who helped her escape from Yoritomo’s clutches. But Kin has his own secrets, and is haunted by visions of a future he’d rather die than see realized.

A GATHERING STORM
Kagé assassins lurk within the Shōgun’s palace, plotting to end the new dynasty before it begins. A waif from Kigen’s gutters begins a friendship that could undo the entire empire. A new enemy gathers its strength, readying to push the fracturing Shima imperium into a war it cannot hope to survive. And across raging oceans, amongst islands of black glass, Yukiko and Buruu will face foes no katana or talon can defeat.

The ghosts of a blood-stained past.

As always, there are a few tweaks still to be made, but here’s the next cover in Jay’s Lotus Wars series for your enjoyment!

Hope you like it as much as we do!!!

Her only hope lies with her greatest enemies

Gemma is facing the fight of her life. Cursed by beautiful but deadly sirens, her extraordinary powers have a terrifyingly dark side, and becoming human once more is proving her greatest challenge yet. As she struggles to break the curse, the sirens, Penn Lexi and Thea are determined to kill her before she can set herself free.

Gemma’s only allies are her sister, Harper, and Harper’s boyfriend, Daniel. Together they must delve into their enemies’ mythical pasts – to discover their darkest secrets. But Penn has also set her sights on Daniel. Soon, the sirens threaten everything Gemma holds dear: her family, her friends, her life, and her relationship with Alex – the only guy she’s ever loved. Can she save herself and those she cares about before it is too late?

Isn’t the cover a beaut!

“This was a conscious and deliberate choice after much discussion between everyone connected to publishing these exciting, fresh novels. At the start of the Watersong series we’d decided to use the US covers to have a consistent, global approach to the look. However, sometimes the UK and US readers react very differently to covers and the feedback we received indicated that this was the case here. Our UK readers wanted something different . . . dark, seductive, sexy . . . sirens. So we listened, we took the comments on board and we revised our covers to reflect this. And we love them! Elegy will be publishing in August in a similar livery and we’ll be rejacketing and republishing Wake and Lullaby to match” Julie Crisp, Editorial Director

Once we knew the direction we wanted to move in, we then set about briefing our designer on the look and feel of the cover, and what kinds of images we felt would work particularly well. Then it was up to our fabulous designer, Katie, to come up with some draft cover images.

“I started, first off, looking at images underwater, searching for women under water, ink in water, mermaids and images to do with textures associated with water. eg. Scales, bubbles, underwater plants, shells etc. I wanted something really simple and striking and after a while the underwater photography seemed to feel like the right look for the re-branding. There is something magical, otherworldly, beautiful and compelling about underwater photography. The stillness of the female characters, the lighting and the colours I thought could really work across all the titles and the strength is in the actual photograph without me having to add much to it. This is the first Tor book I have designed for so it was a really interesting process as I had to look at a different readership and how I might appeal to them” Katie Tooke, Senior Designer

So there you have it. Watch this space for the cover for the final book in the Watersong series, Elegy. 

Click here to see more posts about Amanda Hocking. 

My other major Tor project was updating www.panmacmillan.com to enable us to sell Tor DRM-free ebooks. We also added the My Account area to keep copies of any ebooks you buy from us safe and ready to redownload if you ever need to. This was a big team effort which we turned around in three months from start to finish! 

My day is spent answering *a lot* of internal questions and liaising with developers and designers on multiple projects. I also attend senior team meetings, business meetings and meetings for areas of the business which I’m focusing on at that point in time. Basically I have a lot of meetings! 

Occasionally I end up doing slightly random things to help out. Recently I had the pleasure of photographing our author Seth Patrick in return for lunch (cough, cough, Julie).

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The Tor Tour is part of a series of regular posts covering the varied publishing roles within the Tor imprint and across Pan Macmillan as a whole. These are the posts so far:

INTRODUCING TEAM TOR by Tor UK Editorial Director Julie Crisp
TOR TOUR: NOT JUST EDITING by Tor UK Editorial Director Julie Crisp 
TOR TOUR: A PUBLICITY DEPARTMENT EXPOSÉ by Publicity Manager Sophie Portas 
TOR TOUR: COMMISSIONING AND SOCIAL MEDIA by Senior Commissioning Editor Bella Pagan
TOR TOUR: THE MARKETOR by Senior Marketing Manager Rob Cox
TOR TOUR: THE EDITORIAL ASSISTANT by Editorial Assistant Louise Buckley
TOR TOUR: THE DIGITAL ZONE by Analytics Director, James Long

Star Trek Into Darkness landed this week (whoop!), and in the middle of all the whiz and bang there’s a pretty cool look at Future London. Which got us thinking: what other futuristic landscapes in any media have really resonated with you? We’ve got a special competition after the jump… 

Head over to our Facebook page and let us know and you could be in with a chance to win a bundle of books all featuring adventures in future cities either thriving or ravaged, including Peter F. Hamilton’s Great North Road, Paul Cornell’s London Falling and China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun. Good luck!

For the record, Tor UK loves the future Los Angeles in Blade Runner: an intoxicating mix of 40s Noir, 80s urban degradation and 90s neon. How could you not want to visit? 

Here’s a free extract from Stealing Light to enjoy, and to tell us a bit more about these wonderful books, here’s author Gary Gibson to answer a few questions.

1. What would be your brief ‘elevator pitch’ to describe the Shoal series, for new readers?

I used to joke that the working titles for the books were SHIT BLOWS UP, MORE SHIT BLOWS UP and NOW I’M REALLY GOING TO BLOW SOME SHIT UP, but that may be doing myself something of a disservice, and implying I don’t try and write anything really thoughtful, when in fact I try and do exactly that.

‘Elevator pitch’ makes me think of myself trapped in a lift with some Hollywood executive with a look of dawning horror on his face as he realizes I’m a writer about to make a pitch. I see the look on his face as if, verily, the doors were about to open on the spiraling flames of Hell itself, and I am its gatekeeper. But in reality, the ‘pitch’ is very straightforward: what if we lived in a galaxy filled with sentient species, but only one of them had ever figured out how to achieve faster-than-light travel? … and what if, one day, a human expedition suddenly stumbled across a star-ship, lost and abandoned somewhere in the depths of space? Heck, is Noomi Rapace doing lunch this week? Because after seeing Prometheus, an otherwise terrible movie, she’s clearly a shoe-in for the part of Dakota. ARE YOU LISTENING, HOLLYWOOD?

2. What excites you about the far future, as a setting for fiction?

It’s not just fiction, it excites me full stop, as it should everyone. We still live in the Enlightenment, in an ongoing revolution of science and technology. It’s impossible to live in such an era and not write about the impact of such change, however you choose to frame your stories.

3. When you are in the midst of writing, what are your reading quirks? For example, do you ban yourself from reading fiction in the same area, immerse yourself in it, only read non-fiction or read no books whatsoever?!

I don’t really have any hard and fast rules, although sometimes I read similar books to what I’m writing, or look at books I’ve already read, to get a handle on how other authors handled particular situations or scenes. Not to steal their ideas, far from it, but when you know what other people are doing, you have a better idea of where your own path lies. The only time I banned myself from reading anything was a clear decision not to read Carl Sagan’s Contact, because it drew on Kip Thorne’s theories about wormhole travel, and I was writing a book, Final Days, based on those same theories. I still haven’t read Contact, but I will eventually. I was worried about being unduly influenced by what I might find in 

Sagan’s book (although I’m certainly familiar with the film, which is wonderful).

4. Can you name any recent scientific developments that you would have thought were the stuff of science fiction, say five years ago?

I don’t even know where to start. We’re definitely living in the future already. Private spaceflight companies, iPads like something out of Star Trek, exo-planets, advances in genetic engineering and our understanding of ageing, Google Glasses … I could write a whole article in itself just about that. If anything, things are moving fast enough it’s getting harder to figure out a way to write anything that feels genuinely futuristic.

5. Lastly, there’s a lot of science-fictional confectionery around for some unknown reason, thinking Galaxy, Milky Way, Mars bars etc. But what would you name a new one or do you know of any futuristic fads that got lost in the mists of time?

As a child of the Seventies, I vote for Space Dust. 

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Gary Gibson’s Shoal trilogy consists of Stealing Light, Nova War and Empire of Light and all are reissued this month. Then next month, we reissue his stand-alones Angel Stations and Against Gravity. The month after, is his outstanding standalone Marauder, set in the same universe as his Shoal books, but much further into the future. Enjoy! And you can see more posts on and by Gary on our site here. 

Curtis McFee also put together a really fabulous new Vurt trailer for us. But here, we want to take a look at the new covers — look at the inspiration behind them, the creative process and various early drafts, plus what messages Curtis was trying to convey. We also wanted to find out how this creative duo met and forged the links that would lead us to this body of work today.

1) What was your inspiration for Jeff Noon’s covers, particularly thinking about Vurt and Pollen? Did you do a lot of picture research? Or is music influential for you?

I have a very disjointed process when it comes to design in that there is nothing formal or structured. Most of the time just hearing the brief for the first time I will see the final work fully formed, or some aspect of it that I know I want to see, and I will start chasing that down. When it comes to getting something that I could actually show however it goes through a very quick back and forth to narrow it down.

With music I find that it is always a part of the process but not an inspiration. All of the designers I have known have been plugged into music whilst working; I think it helps with the multi-tasking nature of the job. I work with music constantly in my ears, but it is there to lift my thoughts away from the physical nature of the mouse and keyboard. It helps to disassociate from that and just concentrate on the image.

I tend to not have much time to research anything; I just scrabble through the net with a handful of keywords and see what I am left with. The first designs were done within an hour and pretty much pinned the whole template I would use.

I wanted to use the spine motif you see on the covers straight away, as a means to link up the series, and the idea of pixilation. I was trying to keep in the back of my mind an element of punk fanzine. There was a whole scene prior to desktop publishing software that involved cutting up, gluing and low quality photocopying. I thought that punk roots mentality might reflect Jeff’s approach in some way. I originally wanted to use actual cut up techniques and form the work as a collage but time was against me.

2) What attracted you to Jeff’s work and how did you discover him,  as a long-term fan who has gone on to work closely with him on his website and other design projects?

I was passed Vurt to read by a friend, even though I had avoided it for some time. A lot of people around me were raving about it and telling me I had to read it but I resisted and resisted. Eventually I had no excuse and I took it with me on a long journey. The first few chapters and I was completely blown away by it. Even as I was reading it I was planning how I would turn it into a script or do something else with it, it was very cinematic. There was so much unsaid that intrigued and I was desperate to fill in the blanks.

The first thing I did after reading it was to try and buy the film rights, which seems ridiculous in hindsight as I had no resources to make a film. I then tried to narrow it down. I played table-top role-playing games for a long time and set out the basics of how the novel could be expanded into a free form story telling setting. Jeff has always been very generous with the ideas of tangents and remixes, so we wrote back and forth about that for a while.

That was the first basis for my discussions with Jeff.  I was honoured enough to have the tour of Manchester, with Jeff pointing out the real world inspirations and equivalents, all research for the game.  It was also the main reason I became a designer, honing Photoshop and Dreamweaver skills to try and make this insanely creative novel into an interactive storytelling experience. It was to be called Vurt: Role Playing Through the Looking Glass. We took a long time making it and for various reasons it never got off the ground. Whilst we were all waiting for things to get moving we all moved on to other things and I ended up designing websites and creating marketing communications. Years later I was able to use these skills for Jeff as a friend.

3) What were you particularly trying to convey, in the latest range of covers you’ve designed for Jeff?

Punk. I was trying to get a sense of the proto-punk cut-up style flyers and promos that were influencing art during the 70s. Jeff has already spoken about that sense of dynamism in literature so I thought I would try and reflect that. At least that was a consciously inspirational process I was working with. Layers and collage. Juxtaposition and conflict.

With Vurt there is always a sense that you are not seeing a pure image. Jeff doesn’t seem to just describe a scene straight on. The information comes in pieces or through the filters of someone’s experience. I was trying to convey some kind of essential icon for the story but then to have that hidden or obscured by the process. That is why I use so many layers in the covers; each layer adds some texture to the colour or shape that takes the image away from pure.

I thought the use of pixilation would be cool to see when it moves from the thumbnail to the full size. At the small size the image would seem clearer and then as you get the higher quality image you would see how broken that image is.

4) Are there any challenges you recognize in bringing Jeff’s work, or specifically Vurt and Pollen, to life visually?

Keeping that very clear and simple primary image proved quite difficult with the others in the series, the hooks for them were much more complex. The image for Falling Out of Cars is one I am most pleased with technically but the Vurt cover needed to reflect the primary nature of the whole Jeff Noon vibe. That one had to be the most direct.There is always some difficulty in creating something for these first novels. They are so important to my history and I know them very well but I was worried that the use of feather and flower was too obvious. I started looking at distorting the feather or using a vastly magnified pollen grain but they were moving away from the feel of the books. In the end it came back to the simple idea; a yellow feather and a flower. With Vurt the more simple and iconic the feather image the better. Pollen also managed to use that pollen grain as the flower centre in the end.

5) Is it possible to see any early drafts or stages that led up to the finished cover for Vurt?

Jeff put the word out to a number of artists asking for their ideas for the covers, starting with Automated Alice and Pixel Juice, to get a feel for what they could do and he asked me to submit something. Naturally I was raring to go.

That was an hours’ worth of work whilst eating lunch, so it shows how the whole thing just pours out once you start. It is always best to run with that instinctive thought as far as you can before considering other ideas. It may never be the final work but the core elements of what you want are normally held in there somewhere; a kernel of the pure motivation. If you can get as many of those first ideas down then they will be available later in the process.

It seems interesting to me looking back at these how close they were to the final images but also how raw they were. The spine motif was one of the first ideas to spring into being and it was always with the full series in mind, that it could tie the range of covers together. With these first designs it showed that I was experimenting with just how ugly a colour palette I could get away with. I think that was another original element that I fixed upon, the idea of pixilating and breaking down the image, distorting it.

Jeff showed that around and there was general positive feedback so I tried to expand a bit further.

These second ideas came from an attempt to abandon the first thought and provide something in the opposite direction; something a bit more refined, understated and simple. I thought the covers could focus on the wording of the tile rather than leaning on a graphic central idea.

I then wanted to see how those ideas would pan out in other covers, so I went to Channel Sk1n. I had not read the work at that stage, only heard the title, but I tried to capture something for it. This was moving towards a full photographic design idea; a third option.

After that initial volley of designs Jeff approved and gave me the go ahead. We met up to talk them through and despite my best efforts to go beyond the first ten minutes work it all came back to the first inspiration.

Now I had to think a bit more carefully about the requirements of this brief. It had to be cohesive and balanced across at least ten covers and it had to scale from tiny thumbnail to possible poster size. I set up a folder structure to start gathering ideas and scoured the net looking for free images, free fonts and anything that would spark interest. We had narrowed down some of the elements of the template I would use in our initial meeting so I knew that I had a visual space to create some kind of icon or primary image that would reflect the mood of the work in question.

Vurt and Pollen were very clear to me, as was Automated Alice and Nymphomation. These were created very quickly. Some of the others were more of a problem and Jeff and I would bandy some key metaphors, or visual cues that would be good to use.  The most difficult to complete were Needle in the Groove, and most especially Channel Sk1n. The first designs for the new novel were going in a whole other direction but didn’t resonate with Jeff. I had to rely on his feedback as the work was so new to me and we managed to pin it down eventually.

Some of the variations for Vurt and Pollen, although they stayed within a structured template, tried to bring in different iconic images. At this stage it was just trying to narrow down on the exact image. With Vurt it was a case of mixing the layer interactions and colour mixes. The final part of the process came down to fine tuning the balance of colour. The chromatic steps ranging from deep red through to violet were hopefully going to look nice when the full set were loaded onto your eBook reader. Side by side the full cover set need to look like a single continuation.

One of the hidden aspects for the covers is that splash of drops across the text. It uses a font rather than any kind of brush, so I was able to write out meaningful concepts. In Vurt I wrote ‘Scribble’ across the page, with Pollen it was ‘Barlycorn’. I like that kind of obfuscation.

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The 20^th Anniversary Edition of Jeff Noon’s Vurt features a foreword by Lauren Beukes and three fantastic new Jeff Noon short stories, all set in the extraordinary world of Vurt. We have also just reissued Pollen, a standalone set in the same world as Vurt. And there are more articles on and by Jeff on torbooks.co.uk here.  

See the recent retrospective on Jeff Noon and his writing in the Guardian here. 
And Vurt or Pollen wallpapers are available by clicking on those titles.