My latest book - my 4th - is an eBook, available only on Amazon, entitled: Impland: An Alien Utopia : A 40th Anniversary Retrospective
From the Amazon Description - also on the back cover:
Part science fiction, part fantasy, part retrospective, Impland presents a future vision from a child's eyes, reinterpreted through that child as a man 40 years later. The descriptions are fanciful, and not always consistent with science of the 1960s and 70s when the bulk of the 20-year project was done, but they are also prescient, anticipating the current search for worlds by decades. Meticulously laid out in writing and illustrating, Impland depicts a radically different species, raising questions not only of adaptation, but of how a utopia should be defined.
Appealing to children and adult world-builders alike, Impland traces the progression of the Imp world as well as the author through childhood, as well as the troubles with trying to publish a genre-busting book in the early 1980s.At once micro-focused on diet, households, social relations and spirituality, and macro-focused on planetary and moon orbital dynamics, ecology, life in a cavern, and governance, Impland asks questions that all sentient readers can learn from, no matter what their species.
I began drawing Imps when I was 3, though the "Imp Sketchbook" as it came to be known by the time I abandoned it at age 6, has been lost. The current version of "Impland" does, however, contain some pages from the first edition of The Imp Scrapbook, before I abandoned that and started over as a teenager with the second edition: Impland: An Alien Utopia.
This year, I was finally able to find an industrial scanner to scan the whole portfolio of 13" X 17" (the size of my mother's typewriter) over-sized illustrated pages with embedded type, then augment them with about 25% new material to link together, explain further, and reflect upon, those pages made 41-51 years ago (or longer in the case of the selectively scanned pages from the first edition).
I wasn't able to find any self-publisher who could produce a book larger than 8.5" X 11", except for one "Coffee Table" publisher who wanted me to do such a large run of 500 copies that it would have been completely cost-prohibitive. There is a significantly missed market in the self-published book publishing industry.
So much for technical details.
The content is entirely my own: part science fiction, part portfolio, part memoir. It was time to do this, for posterity and legacy, and for myself. I am surprised how well the more than 3 dozen original pages have held up, considering I was considering alien civilizations when science had not even confirmed the existence of other planets outside our solar system. Yes, there were many science fiction books in the early 1960s-early 1980s, but a lot of them seemed to just transpose human-like aliens to another world, with poor explanations about how that actually worked. I wanted to explain all of that and illustrate it too, in an age before personal computers or digital effects were accessible to the public, let alone children on a tight budget. Everything in Impland is hand drawn and typed, so, apologies for the typos and shaky lines in advance.
Kirkus Reviews gave me a nice review:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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