For Your Viewing Pleasure: Ivory

For your viewing pleasure, the cover of Mike Resnick's Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future, due from Pyr in August of next year. Arwork is by the marvelous Bob Eggleton - our first time working with him and hopefully a sign of many good things to come. Cover design is by our own Grace Zilsberger, her second Pyr cover after Keeping It Real.

Another of Mike's famous "Africa tales," Ivory is the story of Duncan Rojas, senior researcher for Braxton's Records of Big Game, and the mysterious Bukoba Mandaka, last of the Maasai, who hires him to track down the legendary tusks of the Kilimanjaro Elephant. Mike's Kirinyaga tales, in their collected book edition, form one of my top ten favorite science fiction works of all time. In fact, I have given away or recommended Kirinyaga several times as a perfect "entry level" science fiction novel for the uninitiated since I originally read it back in 1998. But I hadn't read Ivory until Mike suggested it to me as a possible reprint for Pyr. When I did - it swiftly blew me away, and now ranks as one of my all time favorite Resnick stories. The novel intertwines three narratives - the tale of the ivory tusk's journey as they change hands through space and time, the story of the narrator as he becomes increasingly suspicious of his strange employer, and the story of the last days of the Kilimanjaro Elephant itself. The work is powerful enough that - believe it or not - I find myself on the verge of tearing up when I describe it here. Sorry, it's just that I know how the book ends. But you all will just have to wait. Still, one look at that Eggleton cover, and I bet you think the wait is worth it, no?