A Journey Round My Skull joined Feuilleton and Arthur Magazine in posting a slew of new covers and illustrations from the beguilling German magazine. Here are a few of our favorites, and you absolutely must check out the rest over at the individual sites.

And then in a further paroxysm of art-inspired debauchery, AJRMS sponsored a contest to create bookplates similar to the Orchideengarten style, and the results are fantastic. I would never dare steal a book from your library if it bore one of these insignia. Here are a few of the best, but they're all worth checking out.

The magazine's artwork ranged from representations of medieval woodcuts to the work of masters of the macabre such as Gustav Dore or Tony Johannot. Two issues of the magazine were devoted to detective stories, and one to erotic stories of cuckolds, but the rest of the time, it was all fantasy stories, including pedestrian German originals as well as fantastic reprints from abroad. A Journey Round My Skull has a terrific collection of the magazine's covers, a few of which are here. Click over there to check out the rest.

I love this scene from the season finale on Tuesday, where Special Agent Dunham tells her underling to get her information on "any incidents related to science, biology, or unexplained phenomena." And then she discovers that all the science things make a neat star pattern - and that is the solution to the mystery! It's completely ridiculous, but strangely satisfying.

When I was among a group of reporters who talked to JJ Abrams about Fringe last year at Comic-Con, one of the things he emphasized about his new show was that it was supposed to be in the mold of 1970s scifi. He and show creators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman grew up with psychedelic scifi movies like Altered States, and wanted to recreate that sense of trippy fun.

With all of mad scientist Walter's references to LSD and various other drugs, I think they've got the 70s vibe nailed. But what's really made this show gel reminds me more of old pulps like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, where writers like H.P. Lovecraft launched their careers. As Jeff Prucher reminded me with his science fiction dictionary Brave New Words, so-called hard science fiction, obsessed with "realism," didn't exist until the 1950s.

Before that, authors just let their imaginations run wild. Astrogaters piloted ships to the stars, fighting with heat rays and eating food pills, completely unperturbed by things like how they would get to another galaxy moving at less than the speed of light. Nobody tried to come up with bullshit explanations about gravity wells and chemistry and how biology really works. As a result, we got some incredibly imaginative stories about the unknown.

Fringe is also explosively, weirdly creative, and I think that's because its creators really don't care about what's scientifically possible. We get multiple versions of Earth at war with one another. An underground cabal of renegade scientists is secretly experimenting on the masses, causing us to explode or making the skin on our faces grow so fast it plugs up our mouths, noses and eyes. Kids are being dosed with a drug called cortexiphan that allows them to see other dimensions. There are pale, alien-like creatures walking among us, machines that let people swap memories, and teleportation is easy (though it does have some nasty side-effects).

There are no dreary explanations like we get on Eleventh Hour or House about how there is really, truly an Actual Scientific Reason why a woman's skin suddenly peels off or a guy is dying of the bends even though he's never gone diving. I don't mean to disparage hard science fiction, because done well it's one of the most glorious things in the world. But done badly it becomes a mess of awful, badly-written data dumps that wind up having about as much scientific validity as a spy ray.

On Fringe, Walter's science experiments sound like the magic they are. "So you see, we can transfer his thoughts to your mind," he'll say. Or "So you've heard of pyrokinesis." Then Peter, his son, will explain that he can retrieve sound waves from melted glass, recreating the noises that occurred near the glass when it was melted. That way, they can find out how a person next to a melting window was kidnapped.

Goofy! Absurd! And yet, exciting. Somehow Walter and Peter's mad science manages to capture a truth about real science that "hard SF" rarely does: The sheer, awesome plunging-into-the-unknown of it.

It's Alive! 2008 Zombie Fest

The eighteenth variation of Rachmaninov's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" always seemed sweet and romantic to me, but it means something very different to this Weird Tales author:

WeirdTalesMagazine.com has more. While you're there, don't forget to download that free issue, because it has enough marvelous fiction, poetry, and book reviews to fill an entire afternoon — not to mention an exploration of sleep terrors and funky masks, a guided tour through Lovecraftian Dreamland, and an interview with Hellboy's Mike Mignola.

[WeirdTalesMagazine.com]

My favorite of his creations is the above-pictured "Growth and Remission," but Archer (with Lovecraft up his sleeve) has so much more to showcase. Check out the thrilling images below, and then head over to WeirdTalesMagazine.com to see the rest. This is the sci-fi art gift that'll keep on giving 'till May 2009.

Stephen Segal from Weird Tales writes:

You’ve seen the latest wave of spam — you know, the faux outrageous news headlines: “Osama trains goats for tactical bombing.” “Laika the Russian space dog returns to Earth.” “Children admit to being little shits: Video.” Isn’t it a shame the headline is all we get? So here at Weird Tales we’re inviting YOU to turn this spam into… um… spam-ade!

Write a flash-fiction story — under 500 words — based on a spam you’ve received. Send your story to this address before 9 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 4, along with the headline that inspired it. The Weird Tales editorial team will judge them, and three winners will be announced at the Weird Tales reception on Friday, Aug. 8 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver!

Image via Weird Tales.

Weird Tales Writing Contest [via Weird Tales]

The magazine's creative director Stephen H. Segal writes to tell us about the anniversary issue, which among other cool stuff features 85 of the weirdest writers from the past 85 years. And it's an eclectic bunch: everyone from freaked-out filmmaker Wim Wenders and electro-musician Laurie Anderson, to cartoonist Charles Addams and scifi writer Madeleine L'Engle. Segal says:

We think the diverse range of honorees is not only awesome, but also representative of Weird Tales's 21st-century evolution — we've spent the past year assembling a new creative team, rethinking & reenergizing & revamping, and now we're doing our damnedest to make a magazine that really reflects the crazy cosmic mashup of aesthetics that can be fantasy/SF/horror today.

Weird Tales [85th anniversary issue]