Sunday 7 April 2013

Phoenix news!

Major announcement: the artwork for my new book Phoenix is now complete!  Dave McKean, who also illustrated the Varjak Paw books, has been working round the clock, and this week, he finished all the interior artwork, plus the cover!  I'm going to be sharing some of his incredible images with you in the lead-up to publication in August - but I'm going to start by sharing some of the images I gave him for inspiration while he was working on it.


The biggest thing I gave him was a beautiful book of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  Phoenix is set in space, across an entire galaxy.  It starts with a boy dreaming that the stars are singing to him...


... and in the course of the story, he meets Aliens who believe that the stars are in terrible danger.  Together, they must find a way to save the galaxy!  


The Hubble has produced some of the most detailed and astounding images ever made of stars, galaxies, nebulae...


I looked at these images a lot when writing, and was glad to learn that Dave also finds them very inspiring!


For more information on space and the stars, the NASA website is always worth a visit.  And for more Phoenix news, come back soon... I'll be posting lots more about it between now and August!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi this is Thomas, these pictures are AWESOME!!!!! I'm so excited about Pheonix, how many pages will it be?!

SF Said said...

Hi Thomas! Thanks very much for your awesome comment! It looks like Phoenix will be an epic 496 pages in total (though a lot of those are illustrations, as Dave McKean has done lots of fantastic artwork). To put it another way, it's nearly three times the size of Varjak Paw - so it's like a whole Varjak trilogy in one book!