Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

They're out! My beautiful new B format paperback editions for the UK backlist.

Still not showing very high on the Amazon lists, presumably while the remaining MMP stock works its way through the system, but I'm starting to see them on the shelves in bookshops. And my webmaster has just kindly added images of them to the site. Following some static over the previous redesign (where it seems I'm in a tiny minority who actually loved the matt shades and generalised motif approach) Gollancz have stuck with the same Chris Moore artwork. But now the logotype has changed - it's shrunk and metallized, looks blunt and scuffed and eaten back like some hard-used, sanded and wind-whipped sharp-edged aluminium sign on a centuries-old desert gas station. Better yet, the shrinkage has peeled my name and the title back from Chris's glorious scifi-scape panoramas on the Kovacs trilogy and his more photo-real work for Market Forces and the completely awesome Black Man cover. Looking at the front of the new Altered Carbon is weird - like going back to your hometown after twenty years of absence.

See, I knew that tilting jet-in-the-sky future cityscape, I was shown it numerous times during the early design stages five years ago. But then it disappeared behind the bars of my name writ brutally large and logotyped so you knew my books instantly from a hundred metres out in any given bookstore that shelved them - and I pretty much forgot all about that tilting view. Same with the massy, looming bubblestuff starship on the front of Broken Angels, so foregrounded that you can almost feel its rolling orbital weight coming off the cover at you. And the angel's eye glance cast across a bleak coastal spine by night and the moon-blocked horizon of Harlan's World for the front of Woken Furies.

Now I've got them all back.

And it's B-format! Not quite first time around for me on this - the one-off Future Classics edition of Altered Carbon, with its wry da-Vinci-drawing evocation of the phrase "muscular fiction", the dizzying, unspooling DNA spiral cover of the first Black Man paperback, first and only exemplar in that aforementioned unpopular matt and motif redesign, now aborted - these were both B format too, but neither hit the way this full re-jacket has.

B format. Big enough to look like serious literature on your shelves. Big and bulky enough to buy someone as a gift and not feel stingy about it (yeah, sure, you can buy someone an MMP for their birthday, but it always seems a bit small when it's wrapped, you really have to get them two or three to stave that feeling off). The same size as Iain M's Culture novels, which I bought like sweeties in bulk as soon as I'd tasted just one. The same size as my paperback editions of Ellroy, Block, Burke and Sallis, for which I had the same consuming compulsion. Same size as all that stuff from the high-lit end of my library; Murakami, McCarthy, McInerney, Pynchon, Burroughs et al. Same size as all my non-fiction paperbacks: Pinker, Dawkins, Ridley, Pilger, Holland, you name it.......

B format. Who says size doesn't matter? Who'd have thought you could get that much pleasure out of twenty extra millimetres length and width?

Eeek.