Good Is Dead.

The genesis, if you will, of the design and art direction of Brian Greene’s Icarus at the Edge of Time represents (for me), a prime example of problem solving at its purest and most exhilarating. What happened is that in the spring of 2007, Marty Asher (Brian Greene’s editor at Knopf) brought me a short manuscript by Brian for which he was having trouble finding a home. It was a fable, a science fiction tale of a teenage boy-genius (Icarus) who lives on a starship heading back to Earth after a generations-long mission and, against the stern warnings of his scientist father, commandeers a sort of pod-ship to go explore a black hole. When he returns from doing so, he finds that everything he knew has changed, and he learns a devastating lesson.

The problem was that traditional children’s book publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Marty came to me in hopes of figuring out how to turn it into a graphic novel. That certainly could have been attempted, but what occurred to me instead was something more conceptual. The story takes place in deep space, and as I was reading it, my mind instantly flashed to those incredible images that have been beamed back from the Hubble telescope. A quick investigation into the Hubble websites bore out the fact that a) these images are in the public domain, and b) you can literally download good, high-resolution files of them from the site. Honestly, this discovery made me feel good about paying my taxes for the first time in decades.

Anyway, the answer became a way of illustrating the text metaphorically rather than literally. Although it is a fantastic tale, Brian grounds it in very real science, so the most appropriate thing was to show actual pictures of space (which happen to be jaw-droppingly gorgeous) as opposed to having someone draw or paint them. In that sense it became like designing the cover of Jurassic Park all over again—you start with something concrete and real (a diagram of an existing T-Rex skeleton) and apply it to a fictional conceit. So you end up with what just might be outside Icarus’s window as he hurtles through space. Added to that is a graphic element that represents the approaching and receding black hole, which is literally that—a small black circle appears smack dab in the center of the second spread and slowly grows as you read the book. Then, when it’s so relatively large it threatens to completely consume everything, it slowly starts shrink (as Icarus pulls the pod-craft back away from it), until by the end of the book it disappears and is replaced by the Earth. If you have trouble picturing that, you’ll just have to see the book (which landed at Knopf, by the way).

Ultimately, it’s almost impossible to categorize it, which I think is for the best. I thank Brian for the opportunity to work on it, and urge you all to check it out. Learning scientific space-physics was never so beautiful.

SEE ALSO: An up close and personal look at the inside and outside of Brian Greene’s Icarus at the Edge of Time.

“Icarus’s”

Dear lord, you’re a man who who knows how to use apostrophes!

I literally was setting out (well, online) to buy this book tonight - after finishing The Cheese Monkeys this evening - then came to this site and saw you and Brian Greene combined. (I would say ‘joined together’ but that’s distractingly erotic.)

And just this morning I read an article about my cousin’s astro-phys team discovering new data about an exploding galaxy by studying images from the Hubble. Sorry, just freaked out by day’s freakishly connected events.

Beautiful, beautiful cover...can’t wait to see the rest of it.

I am fond of reading, especially I like English and American classical literature. Unfortunately have no much time for reading, thus read whenever have a free minute (usually on my way to work and back home). Ebooks have become my good friends - http://www.ebook-search-queen.com/ (ebook search engine)