I wrote Detonator twenty years ago. It was my first novel. Although it has most of the defects of first novels, it has some virtues too. My writing peers of the time were all writing novels, so I felt I better do it, too. The only way I could think of to do that was to write it as quickly and as colloquially as possible. It reads sort of like a letter to a close friend. Despite its flaws, I always liked it. For a short time there was a possibility of it being made into a film, but that fell through despite some positive feedback from the studio. Ultimately, Detonator was never published other than in serialized form in a "little" magazine (no, not a fanzine). I eventually put it away and moved on.
Then, a couple of years ago, I was talking to John Cullen of Clocktower Books about follow-ups to my three earlier Clocktower book publications. I mentioned Detonator. He showed some intererest. I hadn't thought about the book, other than in passing, for years. When it was written I didn't even own a personal computer -- no one did, there weren't any. By the time I got one I wasn't interested in sitting around re-typing an old novel. But by 1999 the development of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software meant that one could scan typed pages into the computer. I happened to have an OCR program that came with my HP printer. I made some tests, and realized that I could scan Detonator into my computer in a relatively short time. There'd be some (well, a lot) of editing necessary, but still....
Long story short, I scanned the novel, sent the files, unedited save for re-formatting) to John, and sat back to await his decision.
While I did, I pondered the book. There were rough spots and infelicities in dialog and plotting, but all that could be fixed. The book would never be anything other than passable entertainment, but there was nothing wrong with that. In due time John's reply came back in the form of a lonnng critique. I agreed with about 98% of what he had to say, so I applied butt to seat and tore through the manuscript making changes -- knitting the ravelled sleeve of expository care, as it were.
Detonator is now a healthier beast, leaner and meaner. It is a book about anger and frustration, but it also has a lot of humor in it -- not to mention sex and violence. It is the sexiest and most violent thing I have ever written. It ought to do well!
Came time to do the cover, at last. I had originally wanted to do a painting in the manner of Leo and Dianne Dillon, who had produced some of my favorite sf book covers in the 1970s, but at that point in my life (just a few months ago!) I was not painting and had no paints -- a situation that has changed rather dramatically in the interim. So I opted to do the damn thing on the computer. Here you see the result.
I knew I wanted something dramatic and as colorful as possible. Probably not a specific scene from the book, because the action scenes were just too gory (and complicated) and I didn't want to do anything that lacked at least some drama. I had originally intended to paint a mood scene of Ken, the anti-heroic protagonist, standing behind a set of drums near a ruined cityscape, with a busty babe next to him and helicopters overhead and motorcycles... oy, very complex. Too complex for my limited time. (Another reason why I decided to do the cover on the computer.)
Once I had made that decision, my thinking about the art changed. I decided to let some of the cover design do my work for me, so I came up with this eye-catching three-section layout unlike anything I had done before. I built the word "Detonator" out of 3D text in trueSpace, then imported it into a mesh-disintegrator utility aptly named Exploder. (Appropriate for a book about a guy who can make things explode.) I "exploded" the text, but the result was all but unreadable -- so I layered an unexploded version on top of the shattered image and blurred the shattered one to impart a feeling of motion to it (thank you, radial blur filter in Photoshop). Not bad. Then I turned my attention to the artwork itself.
I knew I wanted to try to get across the idea of Ken's telekinetic powers without being disgusting. (In the book, you see, he makes living things blow up, like the John Cassavetes character does at the end of Brian de Palma's 1978 film The Fury. In fact, I have always described Detonator as being half Brian de Palma and half Monty Python.) Too explicit for a book cover, obviously. So I decided to put him into a basic sort of superhero-uses-powers pose. The basic figure was therefore built in Poser 4. I did a fair bit of work on the face to make it look like the character in the novel. I think he came out pretty well, but he should really be stockier. Anyway, I exported the rendered (and lit) figure from Poser to Photoshop. There I made layers to add extra hair and the beard. I put the figure itself into two layers. To one I added the greenish glow. To the other I added some additional lighting effects.
There are also two layers of that curlicue blue thing. What that is, is the track of a decaying particle taken from an image of a cloud chamber. I cleaned it up, re-colored and distorted it in Photoshop, then worked on the layers -- one below the figures of Ken, one above -- to give the effect of transparency. The original conception of this cover art had been essentially vertical, but this one is forced into a horizontal space by the area reserved for the title and author's name. Using two main elements -- Ken and the particle-decay "power" burst -- simplified things for me. I think the result is nicely dramatic and colorful.