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Read Part One here.
The high-octane terrorist thriller, Deep Ice, centred on a world held to ransom, was published by BeWrite Books in 2003. His Young Adult novel, Joko, also from BB, tells the story of a runaway teenager and his Big Foot friend coming to terms with their individual versions of civilisation. It was released in 2006 and was shortlisted this summer for the international Dream Realm Award. A sequel is already in the pipeline, as is a new SF trilogy.
Karl said: “The muse wrote Deep Ice. I just sat there and enjoyed the process. Some scenes were total surprises. I write stream-of-consciousness and can’t use an outline to save my life. Indeed, I started with a mere idea.
“That idea came in the late 70s reading a National Geographic article about the Ross Ice Shelf – if it collapsed it would raise the world’s oceans and instantly flood some of the greatest and most heavily populated cities on earth.
“It was written very quickly and sometimes as I read over it I don’t remember writing it at all, and it seems like someone else’s prose. My wife assures me I did, however. But I must say, it is indeed a strange thing to have the Muse take hold. That was the biggest surprise during my first few writing experiences.
“Joko is an examination of man’s place with nature. Both characters – the runaway boy and his hunted Big Foot friend – become strangers in an alien world … or different worlds alien to each of them. All my work contains that Stranger in a Strange Land element.
“I also have a science fiction trilogy that I am just finishing. Each book is a different type of tale. SF is my chosen field but I wanted to do traditional works first to prove my writing skills before I attempted SF prose.
“My current work, the stand-alone in a series called The Diver Trilogy, is Farthest Reef and takes a maiden voyage to an extra-solar gas giant to see if another reef of life exists on those gas giants as it ‘does’ in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – the place called Jupiter’s Reef. The story is sweeping and chock full of alien worlds.”
But, perhaps, Karl’s most ambitious and unique work is the Galactic Geographic Annual 3003 – a thick and glossy coffee table book in magazine format to grace the living room of a home that still has coffee tables and coffee table books … a thousand years from now.
Karl explains: “In 1976 I said to a friend, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if publishing used its skills to uncompromisingly produce a book that appeared to be from the future? Wouldn’t that make a great thing to have on your coffee table?’
“Thirty years later I finally got it done. By that time I had the computer and I was able to do it all. My publishers, Chrysalis, received twenty-six match-print spreads and 9 CD ROMs that they handed directly to production. The only other hands on it were Paul Barnett’s who did a brilliant editing job. I am very proud to be able to say, when people ask me ‘who did all this art?’ to just raise my hand and smile. It is a marriage of all my skills. Artist, designer, illustrator.
“The point of the book is to utterly suspend disbelief. Many artists and authors have tried that, but when they have their names HUGE on the cover it immediately destroys the illusion. SF publishing, I think, has missed that obvious truth so these types of books didn’t work before.
“Having myself behind the curtain and headlining only Galactic Geographic on the cover completes the illusion that it’s a news-stand periodical, a kind of National Geographic, from the year 3003 … but it does confuse those who think genre; the Library of Congress had a lot of trouble trying to place it in a convenient slot.
“It’s an art book, it’s a graphic novel, an artifact from the future, and everyone who sees it says, ‘What a cool idea. Why didn’t somebody do this before?’ I like to point out the 3003 date and say, ‘they’ve not even done it yet.’
Below the title, there’s a list of ‘topical’ articles to be found inside: The Passing of the Airwhales, Diving in Methane, Music of Other Worlds, The Rope Makers of Betel 2B, Harvest on InsandorAt Home With the Tsailerol. Inside, there’s breathtaking illustration … and ads for off-world tours, extraterrestrial zoos and 31st Century must-haves. And this is just Earth Edition!
But the seemingly unrelated ‘news’ articles weave themselves into a coherent story of space exploration, adventure and contact with three intelligent races, a ripping yarn that reads more like fact than fiction when you enter Karl’s world of 31st Century reportage with its utterly believable, textbook-like detail and its list of intergalactic journalistic contributors and editors.
Jan Pagh-Kofoed is named as Inter-species Editor, perhaps a distant descendent of Janet Kofoed, Karl’s 21st Century wife. If so, she’d have the background.
Mrs Janet Kofoed is the daughter of a NASA engineer, lived near Cape Canaveral and witnessed first hand the beginning of the US space program, through to the moon landings.
She had completed most of a PhD in psychology when she abandoned academia for art and is now a successful jewelry designer and maker whose work bears a strikingly futuristic resemblance to Karl’s.
Janet said: “Although our respective work medium is very different, Karl and I often help each other. He has done several jewelry designs for me, and I proof and rough-edit his writing. We both find it valuable to have someone we can show things to whose judgment we respect and who we can trust to see both the good and the not so good.
“Karl is one of the most universally curious people I’ve ever known, interested in almost everything. That’s a trait I share, and we delight in bouncing ideas off each other. We’re equally capable of keen insight and analysis and delightful flights of fancy. We’re seldom bored.”
“Amen to that!” says Karl. “Without Janet my Galactic Geographic or my other two books would exist.”
Sci Fi and Fantasy artist Karl Kofoed can reveal with a magic brush-stroke what it takes a writer tens of thousands of words to say.
And in over three decades as a world-class pro - illustrating and covering work from Isaac Asimov to Twisted Tongue Magazine - he's earned an international reputation as the author's best friend; the guy who sells stories at a glance.
Because Karl works to a golden rule that would make any other salesman's hair curl … he allows himself only three seconds to hook a potential book buyer.
"Maybe you can't judge a book by its cover," he says, "but the cover is what sells it. If I can't grab the browser within three seconds, his eyes drift further down the aisle. I've lost him."
With a working lifetime in sharp-end publishing, advertising, marketing and artwork, Karl applies his rounded experience when it comes to instantly catching the buyer's eye and steering him from the shelf to the checkout counter.
To do the job successfully, he'll use any medium that will work to best effect; everything from old fashioned oils to sophisticated computer software and even clay models he painstakingly sculpts and photographs.
"I strongly believe that a book cover has a three second maximum sell time. The message should jump out, so simplicity is the watchword. They say you can't tell a book from its cover, but most people do (unless they are already aware of its content). The cover designer's job is to persuade someone in a flash that an author's work is worth many hours of reading time."
Two-time Hugo Award-winning best-selling author and renowned art director John Grant agrees: "There's no doubt about Karl's selling power. He's one of the best there's ever been."
And among other glittering awards, Karl's contribution to the continued popularity of SF and Fantasy was crowned when he was named Artist Guest of Honour at the prestigious Philadelphia Science Fiction Society Congress in the US.
But Karl's uncanny knack of projecting the message of thousands of words at a glance took an unexpected turn when he got so deeply under the skin of his writers that he decided to turn his own hand to the keyboard.
First he published the lavishly self-illustrated Galactic Geographic 3003, and then he got an even firmer grip on the pen and produced his first two novels, Deep Ice and Joko: cover art by … Karl Kofoed, of course.
He said: "I guess my late mother made me try my hand from the author's perspective. She was an English teacher. Both parents were educators. Literature they understood, but art? Nope. She begged me to try prose. I am thrilled that her hunch was somewhat redeemed."
Karl believes his earlier work groomed him for the writer's bench. He told Twisted Tongue: "A lot of skill that I possess was learned on the job, handling promotional materials and advertising. Editing to fit text for ads is often left to the Artist or Art Director who is also best at wording headlines. Artists are conscious of eye-flow - how the text looks and reads - while writers and editors are more conscious of what it says.
"Typography has always been one of my secret loves and it is clearly an art that most take for granted. A graphic artist composes text. After a long career that experience is perfect training for a wordsmith.
"It is often said in the ad game that writers make the best art editors and art directors make the best text editors. The truth is that it takes two orientations to create great text that is readable and gets read. My working life has been an apprenticeship for a publishing Jack-of-all-trades. Writing books is another string to the bow"
The tricks of the illustrator/cover artist trade Karl picked up and honed, he applies to his writing - the value of knowing that a wink's as good as a nod; the art of producing the subliminal hint that stimulates a reader to use his own imagination.
"An artist works within the framework of the medium. Great artwork, even illustration isn't too finely detailed. The best painters know that brush suggestions look better than finely detailed work. Same, I think, in literature. You have to allow the reader to fill in the details himself. Suggestion works best. 'Always leave them wanting more,' as Barnum famously said.
"Artists who write often are asked how they choose to express an idea; in words or image. I think; why choose at all? Why not do both if you can? Everyone is creative if they create something, and there are no limitations on our forms of expression. Words and images speak of an idea in different ways, that's all."
Karl was born in Westfield, New York State late in 1942. As a child, he first showed talent drawing with his cousin, Pete, when the family got together. The youngsters were impressed by the early Disney movies, but what fascinated Karl most were books like the Time/Life series, The World We Live In and Bonestell's work in Conquest of Space.
"I learned later that those days were probably the great days of publishing," said Karl. "If my work was stimulated by anything it was them - and being raised during the Space Race, of course.
"My dad was trained as a scientist, my mom; English. Pop taught me the Scientific Method and mom fed me literature. I read more science than fiction. That's where I get most of my ideas.
"By college I'd chosen to be an illustrator and attended the Philadelphia College of Art. I was there when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I found myself to be more of a general artist and designer than one with just one style or vocation. Art Direction seemed to suit me. And illustration was a lucrative sideline.
"Becoming multi-talented over the years meant I could fall back to being a house artist if illustration failed or got slow as it often does at times for illustrators. This helped pay the bills but it cost me as an illustrator. If you want to be one, you have to stick to it through thick and thin.
"But I later found that my diversity all came together under one title - The Galactic Geographic."
Galactic Geographic helped make Karl one of the most popular SF artists/writers on the planet. He was first text published in 1979 with the words that went with his groundbreaking Galactic Geographic illustrated series in the hugely popular Heavy Metal magazine. Also a series called Music on Other Worlds appeared in Music and Sound Output magazine. But becoming a novelist was his personal giant leap.
Part Two
Interview by Alexander James
Interview first appeared in Twisted Tongue Magazine
Matabele Gold by Michael J Hunt
Deep Ice by Karl Kofoed
The Stones of Petronicus by Peter Tomlinson
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