More Mortal Engines from Jaguar Lee

As promised in my previous post, here are a couple more pieces of Mortal Engines concept art by Jaekyung Jaguar Lee; Miss Fang's duel with Valentine at Batmunkh Gompa, and the Guild of Engineers deploying MEDUSA.

One of the things I like about these pictures is that they aren't illustrations of the book - they take the basic ideas and images but change them in all sorts of ways. Jaguar's Anna Fang is nothing at all like my idea of her (where's her big red coat? She'll catch her death...) and the sword fight which, in the book, happens on a quiet and snowy balcony, now takes place in front of a wall of burning airships.

That's exactly the sort of change you could expect to see if anyone ever made an actual movie of the books, and you'd think it would be irritating for an author to have their stuff altered in that way. But it's such a long time since I wrote Mortal Engines that it doesn't really bother me - I'm very pleased that my stuff has inspired Jaguar to create these paintings (I just wish I'd had them to refer to when I was writing the book, because it would have been much better!)

Jaguar has been studying at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, where his graduation show opens today.  I think my favourite of the images he has sent me is his spectacular painting of Airhaven, but in an attempt to generate a bit of bloggery tension, I'm going to hold that over till tomorrow...

Predator Cities - Art & Music

Remember the amazing Mortal Engines concept art by Jaguar Lee which I posted here a few months ago? Well, he's still at work, and has just sent me some comics pages which fill in a bit of the books' backstory - from the Sixty Minute War, through the development of larger and larger tanks and tracked vehicles to the appearance of the first Traction City. (They'd also make a great title sequence for a Mortal Engines movie - the way they hint at so much history in just a few images reminds me a bit of the credits sequence of Miyazaki's Laputa - Castle in the Sky. And talking of unlikely flying cities, Jaguar has also done some work on Airhaven, but I'll save that for next week.

And while you're looking at these, you could have a listen to some music by Adam Wheeler, inspired by a recent re-reading of the Quartet.  Dramatic and earbending, it's based on the sound of a Traction City rumbling by.

Jaguar Lee's Sixty Minute War

All images © Jaguar Lee

Justin Hill's Brighton

Tangerine Sea

My longest-serving friend, Justin Hill, has been posting some great photos recently. I particularly love his pictures of Brighton (where we both grew up). Brighton usually seems to be portrayed as a kind of pleasure city (which it always has been) packed with holidaymakers, clubbers, artists and musicians, Gay Pride parades, festivals, and so on. All of which is fine and dandy, but there is another Brighton, a spooky, haunted, melancholy place, filled with odd bits of history and the strange light off the sea. That's the Brighton which Justin photographs, catching the city and its beaches in odd moments of silence, often at sundown, or early in the morning. Look, here's what Kensington Gardens looks like when it isn't obscured by a heaving mass of hipsters...

Kensington Colours

And look at this recent one of the abandoned West Pier!

Wasteland

There are two piers in Brighton (their decks and platforms, and the rusting maze of girders and stairways beneath, were a big influence on the cities I wrote about in Mortal Engines). The Palace Pier is still going strong, but the West Pier has been out of commission for decades. I can dimly remember going on it as a very small child (there were roundabouts and things) but it was damaged by a storm a few years later, and has been slowly disintegrating ever since. There is a West Pier Trust, originally formed back in 1978 with the aim of restoring the pier, but after what was left of was set on fire it seems to have accepted that that is unlikely (you can read more about their current aims and plans here.)

Personally, I've enjoyed the West Pier's decline immensely. It's always changing, and it's always beautiful. When I was an art student it was a wonderful, gull-haunted ruin; in my twenties it looked like a rotting wedding cake, and now it's become this gaunt, skeletal island of corroded ironwork, which hugely improves the Brighton shoreline. Justin's photos catch its different moods perfectly.

The Fog

And he's just as good at capturing the more Ballardian bits of Brighton, out at the eastern end of the city, where the concrete sea defences and the yacht basins of the Marina give way to primeval

tide pools and chalk cliffs...

Lit Stairwell

Dark Matter

You can see Justin's photos on his blog, where he posts three per day, and also on Google +, where he has vast numbers of followers, or circlers, or whatever they call them on Google +. He is known as @Dark_Derek to the good folk of Twitter.

Also - and this may be relevant to your interests as Christmas draws near - Justin's photos are available to buy as cards, prints, calendars, mugs, watches, clocks and box girder bridges from his Zazzle shop, as are his cartoons.

All images © Justin Hill.

The Middle of Nowhere

Geraldine McCaughrean has been my favourite writer since long before any of my own books were published. (In fact it was reading her adult novels back in the early 1990s which made me start writing novels in the first place.) I've never read a book by her which I didn't like, and when a new one arrives I always read it twice - the first time for the story (which will be be perfectly plotted, while still managing to swerve in completely unexpected directions) the second time just for the pleasure of the way she uses words. 

I've only had time for one read of The Middle of Nowhere so far, but I can recommend it without hesitation. Its heroine, Comity, lives in a remote telegraph station in the Australian outback, sometime in the late 19th century. When her mother dies she starts helping her distraught father to transmit telegraph messages. She also makes up messages of her own, trying to conceal from her far-off relatives the truth about her mother's death and about how grim and difficult life on the station has become, especially with the arrival of her father's dangerous new assistant.

Like many McCaughreanian (?) heroes and heroines, Comity is a storyteller. So is her friend Fred, an Aboriginal boy who holds her spellbound with his sometimes wayward versions of tribal myth and mission-school Bible stories.  But Geraldine McCaughrean knows that stories can be dangerous things, and Comity's innocent inventions lead to a whole torrent of dangerous misunderstandings.

I think my favourite of Geraldine's children's novels to date is The White Darkness, an adventure set in the Antarctic. In a way, The Middle of Nowhere makes a perfect companion piece, once again pitting its heroine against a pitiless landscape and a sinister older man. As in The White Darkness, there is madness and danger, and some shocking deaths. But it's also funny, and exciting, and extremely beautiful. The strange desert terrain is captured with a cinematic clarity, and the friendship between Fred and Comity is touching and true. And then there are those trademark GM similes and metaphors, whole interlinked chains of them, which seem to go off like strings of firecrackers as you read...  She is one of those rare writers whose style is instantly her own, and one thing which links all her very different books together is that only she could have written them.

The other thing, of course, is that they are all exceptionally good. The Middle of Nowhere is no exception.

Geraldine McCaughrean and Some Geezer at the launch of The Middle of Nowhere

The Middle of Nowhere is published by Usborne Books, and is available from all good bookshops, including this one.

You can find out more about Geraldine McCaughrean and her writing on her website.  She has also recently joined Twitter.