I know you’re all busily enjoying The Manual of Aeronautics, but it’s the time for Fan Art Friday Fortnightly! And as a bonus, this FAFF is actually a fortnight after the last one. (Tiny w00t.)

And so we begin with this from Sandra G:

Somewhat larger w00t!

Thanks to you all for your comments and enthusiasm. It’s been really fun seeing the book out in the world.

Next, we have this pissed-off Leviathan by Nicole Marquez (AKA adventaim on DeviantArt).

I like it when the airbeast can haz all the feelings, even when the foremost feeling is hey-I’m-going-to-kick-yer-butt!

And speaking of emotions (masterful segue!) check out this lovely pencil work of a laughing Deryn from Lauren S:

I like how happy Deryn is in lots of fan art. It was really important for her to be a joyful person, given that Alek was depressed all the time. Of course, as the series progresses, the two of them switch places to some extent.

This piece by jurodo was part of Dalek Week, which we’ve already covered, but I missed it. And it rules! So here it is a few weeks late:

And here are two more Spore pieces from Oskar, a message lizard and a monoplane, because everyone likes message lizards, especially when they have big kawaii eyes that seem to say, “Please give me a message, I’d love to take your message somewhere!”

Nice monoplane too. The Spore stuff is all so friendly.

And finally, in honor of the Uglies quartet boxed set that just came out with the new covers . . .

Alert! Shameless advertising in the middle of FAFF!

. . . here’s a remix of all four covers by Hannah A:

Those are pretty cool. I wonder if a time will ever come when we all just put our own covers on books, because they’re either all print-on-demand or electronic or something. That would be cool.

Okay, that’s it. Hope you’re all having a good end of summer. It’s the first day of spring here in Sydney, because we do it all backwards and on the first instead of the 21st of the month! (Wait. You do your seasons backwards? And offset by 21 days? Isn’t that, like, one thing too many?)

Heh.

My inbox just received this boo-ti-ful image. It’s the painting for the Chinese cover of Leviathan. The artist is Li Tao. (Li is the surname, and the artist is male, just so you know.)

Click here for the bigness, because the bigness is bigger.

Needless to say, I love this cover image. It has a wonderfully exuberant forward motion to it, not unlike this Chinese propaganda poster. Or this one! (I mean, it’s just dying to be remixed into a poster, IF THAT SHOULD OCCUR TO ANYONE.) I also really love the styling of the Leviathan overhead, and the Hapsberg seal. So much heraldry!

Can’t wait to see the final version with text and my name in Chinese on it. (Just to be clear, this is the simplified Chinese version, for the mainland.)

Dr. Barlow portrait from The Manual of Aeronautics coming soon!

I have officially declared the voting for the Manual of Aeronautics art reveal to be over, and to be a tie between #1 (portrait of Dr. Barlow and Tazza) and #2 (rigger’s uniform).

SO YOU GET THEM BOTH. Now, we just need to vote again to see which one to show first . . .

“Um, but that would be stupid,” you say. And you would be right. So instead I shall flip a coin.

*flips coin*
*realizes hadn’t chosen which side was which*
*flips coin again*

We start with the rigger’s uniform!

compressed air rifle: check
rigger’s knife boot sheath: check
safety harness and clip: check
steampunk goggles: check

I don’t know how Keith remembers all this stuff, because I never do.

Oh, and I also promised you the rank and specialist patches that go on the shoulders:

There you have it! Enjoy, cosplayers! PLS SEND PIX 4 FAF.

I’ll be posting the portrait of Dr. Barlow in a couple of days, and the new and astounding cover for the Chinese edition of Leviathan very soon.

(Usual blah, blah: You can pre-order the Manual from Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or IndieBound. Or support your local bricks-and-mortar store by buying it on Tuesday, August 21.)

The Leviathan series artbook, The Manual of Aeronautics, comes out on August 21. That’s just two and a half weeks from now, so it’s probably time for more art revealings.

Here are the previous art reveals, in case you missed them:
The Bridge of the Leviathan!
The Cyklop Stormwalker!
Clanker uniforms!
Flechette bat!

Shall we vote on this? We shall.

Would you rather see . . .

1) A portrait of Dr. Barlow? (with bonus Tazza!)

2) A rigger’s uniform? (with various specialist/rank patches)

3) Or the message lizard? (carried over from round 4)

And all of it in glorious color!

Please vote by number. As always, use this comment thread to wrangle, browbeat, and bludgeon your co-commenters into agreement. They like it when you do that.

Let the voting begin.

You can pre-order the Manual from the usual online joints: Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or IndieBound. It will land at your local bricks-and-mortar store on Tuesday, August 21.

So there’s this movie coming out soon called Taichi O . . .

From IMDB: Young genius Yang Luchan travels to Chen Village to learn the forbidden secrets of martial arts, but quickly learns that the village is menaced by a formidable battalion of Steampunk soldiers. The villagers realize that in order to save their home, they must trust this strange outsider with their knowledge of Tai Chi.

I love that the hero of this movie, Yang_Lu-ch’an, was a real person, an influential martial artist who lived from 1799-1872. For me, steampunk works better when wrapped around historical people, places, and events. I’m trying to work out exactly why I feel this way. (Maybe because technofantasy tends to drift off into isn’t-this-cool gadgetry unless grounded in the gnarly power relations and other unpleasant realities of the 19th century, or something.)

Anyway, steampunk soldiers versus soft-style martial arts FTW!

Click here to watch the trailer bigger, better, steampunkier.

PS This is not the first steampunk martial arts movie, by any means. That might be K-20, WHICH HAS A BIG-ASS TESLA CANNON IN IT. But there are no doubt earlier ones, depending on how much you’re willing to stretch the definition of steampunk.

Greetings from Sydney, home of the on-time Fan Art Friday!

Also useful for getting this post up on time is that July 8-14 was Dalek Week over at Deviant Art’s Alek-and-Deryn group. Each day of that week, the Alek-and-Deryners posted art based on themes like “Obsession,” “Parents,” or “The Roaring 20’s.” The results can be found by clicking here.

Here are a few examples (not the “winners” of the day, just some random ones I like):

One of the themes was “Blindfold,” which inspired a lot of cool art. Some had Deryn and Alek tied up, others with eye injuries or sleep masks, but this one by CMCanary was elegant and matched the colors of this blog beautifully:

Love the inky goodness of this art. And you can tell how ANNOYING Deryn would find this.

Another theme was “Roaring 20’s,” imagining what Dalek would get up to in the decade after the war. This decade was called “roaring” because everyone basically decided to have a big post-war party (until the Depression came along, of course).

I quite like akatsukicloud227’s flapper version of Deryn:

I also appreciate that Deryn is enjoying the Roaring Twenties more than Alek. (Oh, yes. I think she would.)

The “Obsessions” theme generated lots of cool pieces. This one from Peachdust imagines Alek growing obsessed with the new art form just starting up in 1914, moving pictures!

And you would totally take Bovril to the movies, right?

The theme entitled “Generations” also took people in lots of unexpected directions, like this piece from Jurodo:

According to the comment thread, that’s a young Deryn and Alek if they’d somehow met when their parents were still alive, and had gotten to hang out together. Which is totally awwww . . .

There was also a “Parents” theme. Most of the entries for this imagined Deryn and Alek as parents in the future, but this one by stkidd points out that both of them had non-biological parental figures in their lives, like Klopp and Jaspert:

Also very awwww . . ..

Overall, Dalek Week looks like a huge success to me. The randomness of the themes seems to have inspired a lot of non-canonical extrapolations, which is the kind of fan art that I find most interesting. I love it when readers go off in strange new directions with my characters.

Like, um, this Legend of Korra-crossover piece (also from Jurodo)!

Yip, yip, yo.

See you next week, if not before! Don’t worry, I’ll be posting more regularly now that I’m back home, and what with the Manual of Aeronautics coming out in . . . 25 days!

CRAP.

Hey, thanks for your patience while I was traveling. I had a great time and saw lots of lovely people. The signings and panel at San Diego Comic Con were lashings of fun, so thanks to everyone who came to them. Perhaps I’ll go through my photos from the trip and try to find some cool ones.

But right now it’s time for the Manual of Aeronautics art reveal! The votes have been voted and they have been counted, and what you guys wanted to see was the flechette bat.

A BAT. THAT POOS SPIKES. That’s what you wanted to see. Seriously, what does that say about you? I mean, you had a choice of many beautiful images, but you used your sacred voting rights to vote on a spike-pooing bat. Really?

Okay, as someone who wrote a trilogy featuring bats that poo spikes, perhaps I can’t point fingers.

EXCEPT AT THIS . . .

What’s that you say? This picture of a spike-pooing bat isn’t big enough? YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS BIGGER? Then I think that you should click here.

Or perhaps you’re asking me, “How did you come up with the idea of bats pooing spikes?”

The true answer is: I don’t remember. But flechette bats appear in the very first short story I wrote in the Leviathan universe, called “Mr. Darwin’s Favours.” This story was never finished or published, but it contained this somewhat familiar passage:

Jones and two others waited for him at the bow, where the Goliath’s colony of flechette bats were clustered to bask in the rising sun. They had grown noisy at the sight of the men, jousting for position on the half sphere of the bow. In their thousands, the ruckus of echo-location chirps sounded like an audience of old ladies clucking at some off-color joke.

“Now, now. Wait your turn,” Jones said, looking at Newkirk for approval.

The older man nodded sagely, and the three junior tenders began to throw the feed. In the hard light of dawn, flechettes sparkled among the grain, and waves of bats lifted from the envelope to catch mouthfuls of wheat and metal. Although he knew the bats were bred to do so, Newkirk always felt vague discomfort in his stomach at the thought of eating and passing the cruel pennies. Though, as Captain Digby often said, the strangeness of originated species only showed the extent of man’s mastery over natural life forms.

“Mind you don’t leave that lot out,” he said, pointing at a cluster of smaller bats on the starboard aerilon.

“Like feeding ducks as a wean, sir,” Jones said, casting a glittery handful in that direction. “Could never get bread to the little ones. No matter where you tossed it, the bullies always had their way. Nature’s way, I suppose.”

“Nature’s way is hardly our line, Jones,” Newkirk said, though he was glad to hear that the boy had at least made that long-ago attempt at equanimity. In the long run, animal lovers made the best tenders.

Weird, huh? As you can see, this story is partly from Newkirk’s point of view, and has no Deryn in it. There was no Alek either, just a few other POV characters on the airship, which was called the Goliath. Also, Newkirk is rather older, with the rank of “tender” rather than midshipman.

“Mr. Darwin’s Favours” only reached 2500 words long. I pillaged a couple of character names and some bits of dialog (like the above) but some stuff was really different. Like, message lizards were called “parrot dragons.” Shows you how much things change from the first draft of a novel (or a world) to the end.

Anyway, please use the comments below to answer this question: How many of you have explained the flechette bat’s unique poo-attack to parents, teachers, or friends? And how did that go?