I mentioned the Hugo Award winners for fiction a few days ago, but I missed noticing that Galen Dara won a Hugo as Best Fan Artist.  I first encounter Ms. Dara’s work in the Dagan Books’ Cthulhurotica anthology.  The cover for that book is creepy, erotic, and simply stunning.  She also created the covers for other Dagan Books anthologies, each different and beautiful in its own right.

She’s been doing illustrations at Lightspeed Magazine for a while now, and she provided the stunning illustration for the “The Schrödinger War“—in fact she was working on this illustration when she won the Hugo!  I’ve spent quite some time staring at that artwork, seeing more and more details, and appreciating how effectively she captured the heart of my story.  If you need more proof, her illustration for “The Ballad of Marisol Brook” captures what I like about Ms. Dara’s work; it’s powerful and haunting.  Ms. Dara has quickly become one of my favorite artists working in speculative fiction—it doesn’t hurt that she tweeted some kind words about “The Schrödinger War,” too—and I hope that she’ll have the opportunity to illustrate more of my stories in the future.