The fourth edition of DEATH'S HEAD is not merely unabridged, but is also wearing a beautiful new jacket. The combination of Hubble images in the background and foreground character faces and icons designed by MK and executed by Jade make the new covers very atractive. This is the third cover EQUINOX has worn, and we think it's the best. The overall green 'cast' is intended to suggest the light of the giant planet, Zeus, which looms overhead in much of this story. In fact, the planet in Elysium's sky is actually Jupiter in this painting (it was Uranus in the last edition). The planet was recolored and the Great Red Spot thoroughly gotten rid of — it would have been a dead give-away. And here is SCORPIO, featuring the carrier NARC-Athena and the ice world Aurora. The planet was developed in 3D by Dave, and the carrier was designed and 'built' by Jade, using MK's guides. The result is impressive indeed. The back cover uses a small part of a Hubble image, which was then recolored and processed with filters, before the NARC-Athena unit badge was overlaid. STOPOVER preserves a little of the old cover of SCORPIO ... and members who have been with us for some time may recall that those eyes featured on our header banner, on the webpage, for a year or more! New out in 2007, this is the second cover worn by APHELION in its still-short life. The first featured the carrier and the planet Earth, but this one is more in keeping with the new 'livery' which has been struck for the whole series. We particularly love this artwork, because Jade actually painted it as a separate projeft ... MK saw it, was bitten by the inspiration bug, and wrote the book! The image was originally entitled 'The Jungle Book,' but in the last year or so it's become synonymous with the title of TIGER, TIGER. Even Jade no longer thinks of it as 'The Jungle Book. This version of the WINDRAGE cover has been given an extra dose of oomph with the addition of the hands and the gun, painted into the foreground. The background is Alaska (!), with the Alaska Range painted out and the Adelaide Hills painted in ... carefully preserving the avalanche chutes and the hint of hanging glaciers. Rather than being a variation on a theme, like the WINDRAGE cover, the new WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT jacket is entirely new. In particular, we like the back, with its georgeous depiction of Kabir, the 'green gass snake' from the sorcerer's cave at the fortress in the desert! (Don't know what's going on here?! Put the novel high on your wish list! For sheer 'wind-dark sensuality,' and the delicious twist of fantasy, WHITE ROSE is great choice.) Fully rejacketed, THE DECEIVERS is a very attractive volume. We preserved the portraits of Jim Hale and Bill Ryan from the original cover, but the new seascape and schooner are a digital painting using numerous elements. The sea is a shot of the surf at Noarlunga on a sunny, blue-sky day after a storm the night before. The sky is a shot of an amazing cloud formation ... photographed from the backyard. The ship is one of the great American schooners, but which, we don't recall. It was lifted out of a tiny image on the web, and completely repainted. Then, there are masks and filters to rebalance the color and so on. A good example of Jade's work. Everything about this image is digital. The moon was photographed from the backyard; the trees are actually eucalypts pretending to be deciduous elms. The sky was painted in the computer from scratch. Now, the rider on the back cover did start life as a scan of a movie still from a film made circa 1948 ... every pixel was promptly repainted! Several new covers for FORTUNES were mooted, and in the end we chose to go with a repainted version of the original. It's just too perfect for the project to change it. As the wise saying goes, 'If it aint broke, don't fix it.' The tangle of ships in the foreground is a tiny snippet of an obscure painting of the period (late Sixteenth Century). The haunted, haunting eyes seem to look right into you. The rest is all digital. We decided ... not to fix it. Here is one of our all-time favorite covers from Jade — and another where we decided to almost leave it alone. Instead of opting for a new cover, we asked for the original to be retouched, re-color balanced to suit the new printing methods (EPS), the whole thing brightened and made more contrasty. Then the titles were redone from scratch, and for the back of the jacket we reversed the artwork from the cover and recolored it, into blues. It's very evocative ... like the book. This cover for TWILIGHT, which is the sequel to NOCTURNE, is a beauty. It's also completely digital, though you might not believe it. The sky was shot from the backyard; the distant treeline is South Australia; the Saxon church is a snapshot of the church in the village of Eston, in the UK; the gravestones are in two different locations, across the UK; Dave modeled for the figure; and all the photos were daylight! Jade worked a kind of pixelizing magic on them and suddenly they're one image, and it's night. The cover for THE SWORDSMAN has been completely renovated, repainted into a higher resolution, and simply made better. It was always beautiful, and now it's doubly so. This painting has been so popular with readers, we're issuing a poster! Republishing the HELLGATE series for 2008 was a massive undertaking. We knew we wanted to strike a whole new cover livery, and this was done in conference with both author and artist. Mel Keegan also decided that the first book could use a light edit, a freshen-up, to bring it into line with the later books. In the writing of a series, minute details can change. It happens with every seriesm and if you know what to look for, you can spot little points that are not actually gaffs . they're the footprints of evolution! The editing process was (in MK's words), a pleasure to do. It makes an extremely subtle difference to the text ... you might have to be a purist to know what was done. But the redesign of the covers has made an amazing difference. The DEEP SKY cover depicts the icy world of Kjorin (pronounced Shyor-een), a world so cold that the atmosphere has frozen out. The art is comprised of two sections. An image of the Asgaard mountains in Antarctica was flipped, cropped, recolored and masked out to be laid over a Hubble Space Telescope image, which then had a variety of super-luminous giant stars added. It's enough to drive astronomer's crazy, no doubt, because there is no part of the sky exactly like this, even you it really did begin life as am HST image! The art works amazingly well. To see the whole image outside the rest of the cover, visit our Science Fiction List page (accessed from Books...). And now for something totally different! The city of Hydralis at night, from altitude. This is a purely digital painting, a kind of high-rez version of the original CRY LIBERTY cover. It began life as several nighttime cityscapes, and was extensively painted to add the massive lights of a spaceport and a metropolis which stretches on over the horizon. Mick Vidal is the character depicted on the back cover of PROBE, and for good reason ... which we are not about to mention here! Nor will we tell you the name of the probe ship, for reasons just as good! The painting uses multiple overlays. The character study is the same as the portrait done for the first edition, but the Class 7 event on the font cover was constructed of scraps of four different Hubble images, cut and painted together to depict an emergent wormhole. The drift ship was designed by Mel and built by Dave in 3D, using Macromedia software...