#sci fi books

The Lost World, written by Michael Crichton.

Published by Folio Society, with binding / endpapers / title page / map and 6 internal illustrations by me. Out now only on foliosociety.com!

Huge thanks to AD Sheri Gee, editor Rob Davies & everyone over at Folio Society. What an incredibly talented and hard-working team. Also massive thanks to the hoards of people who contacted us about doing this book over the past year; keeping quiet about it was so difficult.

I only wish he’d written more books for this series so we could keep the party going…

More images to come on Instagram: instagram.com/vectorthatfox

JURASSIC PARK, written by Michael Crichton, illustrated by Vector That Fox, published by Folio Society. Available now at: www.foliosociety.com

More images and info on instagram: @vectorthatfox

In mid December of 2019 I was approached via an email to see if I was interested in a job that hadn’t been approved yet, was in the early stages of being pitched, and probably wouldn’t happen. I got my hopes entirely up and agreed. On the 8th of January (my birthday), I found out that the job was indeed going ahead, and what a bloody gift that was. It’s been incredibly difficult to keep my mouth shut and not show anyone what I was doing for the first third of this mad year, but now it’s finally real.

Enormous thanks to Art Director, Sheri Gee (and for the beautiful typography); everyone working with Sheri at Folio Society; the licensing team; Steve Brusatte for being my palaeontologist consultant; Heather for being ignored / bored by my quotes and “fun facts” for months, and anyone else involved in the process of creating this. This. This beautiful, this official, this illustrated republishing of the 1990 Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park. Complete with textured slipcase and soft-touch laminated cover with a textured spot varnish.

More images to come; hold onto your butts.

#finishedreading:The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells.

“Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.”

~ Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don’t like it anymore.”

~ Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

Yesterday wasthe 95 anniversary of the birth of the greatest Polish Sci-Fi writer, philosopher and a trained physician ~ Stanisław Lem (12 September 1921), who died 27 March, 2006, in Kraków. Compared often to Philip K. Dick, he corresponded also with Arthur C. Clarke, and as not many people around the world know, the very idea of rotating space station which Clarke described in a Space Odyssey, was inspired by the Lem’s theory. Lem was a visionary same as the others and is today the most famous Polish writer of the science fiction genre. In my priv opinion, the second best after him is Jacek Dukaj and I recommend his books too. :)