One of my childhood heroes Martin Bower. Like so many of us, I crudely scratch-built toy models of my favorite spaceships and vehicles as a kid - the Millennium Falcon, the Seaview, the Hindenburg. Martin did this, too, only difference was that he was actually good at it - so much so that his talent was noticed by Brian Johnson, who was art director for Space:1999. Martin built 86-odd spaceships for that show, including the Hawk warship he designed. His website is here; you can buy incredibly detailed scratch-built repros of your favorite Gerry Anderson vehicles, or read his Christian testimony.
Artzwild is a site with a pile of different links to art website, including fantasy and science fiction, but with a heavy emphasis on animal art, dogs, cats, birds and stuff like that!
If you like dragons, visit the site of Joe Mueller, who has some really cool, really professional ones - with nicely textured skin, very believable (as you can see from the banner below). Also some very smooth and glossy illos of planes and Porsches. Good stuff.
Check out the nifty digital artwork of Wayne A. Phillips. Very atmospheric, spooky landscapes, sometimes with odd, Richard Powers-like shapes.
Visit the site of fabo high fantasy artist Ruth Thompson - she's done stuff for Magic: The Gathering, Dragon magazine, a raft of book covers for Royal Fireworks Press. Really nifty dragons, excellent black and white linework - and she wears gorgeous, intricate dresses at cons and ren faires, too. Check it out.
Check out the artwork of Alan Beck. He's a nice guy - I met him at Boskone '02 - and he does cool sci-fi and surrealist art, sometimes with visual puns, sometimes with combinations of digital and traditional techniques. He also - way back in 1968 - did some drawings of Bilbo Baggins which look a whole lot like Ian Holm in the Fellowship of the Ring. Check it out:
A cool new artist is comics artist Loston Wallace. Some of his work is inspired by Frank Frazetta, and it's quite vigorous and entertaining.
Check out the website of Duncan Long: SF author, digital illustrator, and so much more. He has some interesting Christian art and some thought-provoking commentary about pacificism and other topics from a Biblical perspective.
A plastic surgeon's Website about nasal deformity in Egyptian and Renaissance art - with computerized images showing replcaed and corrected noses in Rubens paintings and on the Sphinx.
If you're looking for "concrete proof" that alien creatures have landed on earth, click here.
For more UFO information, plus stuff on dinosaurs, plus stuff on all sorts of
fun "stuff" check out the website of Forensic Artist/Concept Designer/Private
Investigator Bill McDonald (William Louis McDonald Sr.). (He's also the
guy who designed the Roswell UFO model kits for Testor!) His website is
here.
If you think you've seen some awful art in your life, you ain't seen nuthin' 'til you check out BadArt.Com, which has such atrosities on display as: "Why am I nude?", "Still life with Agony Faces", "Mona of the Apes", "Stop Cowbird!" and the appropriately-named "Ugliest Duckling"
If you hate clowns as much as I hate clowns, then please check out Jeremy Peyer's amazing site of scary, disturbing clowns.
If you think the counter of your website is too BORING and TOO READABLE, check out the Museum of Counter Art (I'm not making this up), where you can count your visitors with snowmen, Mah Jongg tiles, banana peels, or Klingon numbers.
Artist Shoji Hasegawa, like me, has a great fascination for the world's most beautiful creatures, the nudibranchs (sea slugs). If you like nudibranchs too, the most beautiful website on the Internet is here.
David A. Hardy Excellent astronomical and SF art.
The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA): These are the people who give out the Chesley awards. Don't forget to check out their stolen artwork page.
To visit a site listing 1100 (!) Science fiction/surrealist art sites on the web, click here.
Check out the website of an excellent, surrealistic Byelorusian artist Slava Zakharinsky
You can find the sites of the giant gorillas of literature like Stephen King anywhere.
Here are some sites for some newer, cool writers you might not know about (and these are my friends too):
At World Fantasy Convention '02 in Minneapolis, a bunch of us were standing around in a hallway, bored. Since I was surrounded by writer friends, I demanded that they tell me a story. (Being an artist and not a writer, I was inoculated from such demands - and my writer friends were too thrown out of joint by the request to think that perhaps they could just as easily say, "You're an artist, draw me a picture.") All of them declined, except the mighty Jay Lake. I asked someone else to give me a word, and he said "Banana." Then I asked someone else, and she said "Green." So then I turned to Jay and said, "OK, Jay, tell me a little story with the words "Green" and "Banana."" He tend said that in Africa there are these creatures called African Green monkeys, and bananas when they are unripe - hanging upsidedown as it were - are also green. So the green monkeys can cavort in the green bananas, unseen by predators. However, as the bananas ripen, they turn yellow, and then the monkeys, if they aren't careful, can then be eaten by snakes and alligators. Which, Jay concluded, meant that if you want to hang out with fruits, you need to have the right appeal. Ba-dum bum. Thus was born the "Story Word" - where every day people email Jay words, and then he writes a little flash fiction based on or inspired by that word. Check it out - some of them are pretty funny.
Looking for a way to sift through all that on-line science fiction out there? Trying to find the best so you don't have to read the rest? Then check out Ahmed A Khan's Index of on-line science fiction, which has monthly lists of what he and readers think are worthwhile stories out there. Also a large index of ALL the stories.
"Half of the Seven Nations were consumed by Evil and it took 7 Kings, 7 Uncles
and all their warriors to save the planet!" Thus sums up the epic saga of
Don Lemmon and Michael Coy's Planet
of the Gods. Check it out if you want to read about bare-chested
heroes battling lizards and scorpions weighing hundreds of pounds.
Check out the website of Hilary Moon Murphy, aka Adventures with an Elephant-Headed Muse.
Beth Bernobich, my cyberpal who has/will soon have published stories to the new print SF/literary magazine Full Unit Hookup and the anthology Beyond the Last Star, Strange Horizons and Polyphony, has a website here.
Visit the site of Mindy L. Klasky, author of the Glasswright novel series, and eligible for the John W. Campbell award for new writers.
Mike Jasper was a winner in the Writers of the Future contest; his website contains excerpts of stories he's published and even those he's working on. He's also eligible for the Campbell.
Tobias Buckell was also a Writers of the Future contest winner and also eligible for the Campbell (he missed being on the final ballot last year by two nominations!); his site, which has a nifty journal and other info about Toby, is here.
Charlie Finlay, published story writer and poet, is the only one I know who can work the word "axolotl" into a poem. He's also written some funny poems about writing.
Atk. Butterfly, who takes his penname from the inspiring resistance put up by a tiny butterfly to give its dying mate a few extra seconds of life, has a website here.
Writer Terry Hickman's site has the marvelous name Three Outside the Skinny (it's a cool story how she got that name, but in order to find out, you have to visit her site yourself - I ain't spilling the beans here.). She's also really into Nine Inch Nails and was the one who first told me about the band The Big Wu.
Tom Williams has published an eBook called Terra Nova, which tells of the last survivor after the rest of humanity is wiped out and his journey to a new world.
An excellent site on legal issues for authors, courtesy of John Savage, is at AuthorsLawyer.com. John, of the Savage Beast, has been writing since, ahem, 1215.
A.L.Sirois has, in his own words, "a slightly schizophrenic site that reflects my slightly schizophrenic suite of interests: graphics, writing and music." His site asks such intriguing questions as What if Groucho Marx had played the evil, robot-building scientist Rotwang in Metropolis?
Alan DeNiro's website is here. Alan writes, inter alia, magic realism, and his story "If I leap I shall fall into my hands" has one of the most intriguing titles I've seen. Story's pretty cool, too.
Chris Dolley has a groovy pickie of himself playing guitar wearing Tina Turner hair at his site. From which I quote: Chris "has written two novels, started one revolution and solved an international crime, the details of which take exactly ninety four thousand words to explain."
Eugie Foster and her husband Matt share a website with a variety of interesting stuff, from sci-fi convention reviews to tons of info about ferrets. Ferrets!!! Ferrets!!!! Ferrets!!!!!!
A fabo place to buy movie posters is PixPosters, which even has a little search engine for looking for posters on their site.
Sooner or later everybody comes to Rick's, which has a huge selection of movie posters and related items, and a database of 3000 images.
The Movie Poster Shop has tons of great posters and stuff, including a pile of classic science fiction movie posters for sale - Tarantula, Lugosi, The Fly, The Day the Earth Stood Still - all that cool stuff.
For up-to-the-minute info on Star Wars episode 3, check out the JediNet website.
Also check out Harry Knowles' Ain't It Cool News page, one of my favorite sites, addresses this and other pressing issues for filmgeeks, with lots of late-breaking news about up-coming and in-production SF&F movies, including the new Lord of the Rings and Star Wars flicks. He also carefully puts up spoiler warnings and has a reliable rumor filter.
Another great site for Star Wars prequel info is TheForce.Net, which has a useful compendium of characters, vehicles, locations, etc. for the new film.
Jim Terman, whose great-grandfather invented the IQ test and whose grandfather helped build Silicon Valley into what it is today, has an excellent Babylon 5 site.
Another excellent Babylon 5 sites is Sad Geezer's.
The Gerry Anderson Collectors Page is an excellent place to get your Thunderbirds / Space:1999 / Captain Scarlet / UFO toy fix.
Kimono My House is such a cool anime toystore that it got mentioned in the Mutant Handbook. They have some really, really awesome Astroboy tin toys for sale. If you're in San Francisco, well worth the trip across the Bay Bridge to Emeryville to visit them.
Tom Brennan's Badfinger (and Who and Beatles, etc.) page.
Rob Cerpa has a good page listing all sorts of links for Intellectual Property Law
Maledicta is a fun site with all sorts of uncensored language: prison slang (e.g., "blanket party", meaning to throw a blanket over someone you don't like and beat him so he can't tell who you are), various curses, abuse, insults. You get the picture.
Wanna be scared? Really scared? Well, check out these officials transcripts from cockpit voice recorders from plane crashes around the world - basically the pilots' and co-pilots' last words just before crashing. Words shouted when the engines catch fire, or the fuel tank explodes, or the landing gear collapses on landing, or your big bird slowly slides off the icy runway during take-off, or you collide with a small plane you thought you could go around, or that mountain right in front of you gets really, really large, or (my favorite) both engines fail after sucking in chunks of ice. Find out how to say "shit" in German. Have a safe and pleasant trip.
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