There are critical moments in the evolution of any book from manuscript to market, when things can go very well or very badly. For a first time novelist one of the most suspenseful is that period spent waiting for a glimpse of the cover art.

Sure, there are other stressful times: editing disagreements, print run decisions, that first review...

But the cover art.

The cover art is different from anything else. It's not just business, it's also interpretation. It demands that an outsider get inside the story and create an image that will represent the book -- not only in the minds of readers, but of might-have-been readers too, who would have picked the book up if only....

Oh nevermind.

For a first time novelist this is serious nail-biting season because after all, we know we must take whatever we are given. We don't have any say in the matter. All we can do is sit at home and wonder: Will the artist get it? Will the artist blow it? Not that we're expecting much. We are too used to hearing other writers gripe about their covers, so we know we can't expect to like ours. We accept disappointment ahead of time and beseech the fates with minimalist prayers: "Please just don't put any big-breasted half-naked women on the cover." We wait.

I waited.

Until one day in late 1994 a FedEx truck pulled into the driveway to drop off an envelope from Bantam. I opened it in all innocence, never suspecting what it contained. Out fell the cover flat of The Bohr Maker, created by an artist named Bruce Jensen. I stared at it, stunned by the beautiful, haunting imagery, by the exquisite detail, by the choice of subjects. This was not a scene at all. It wasn't abstract either. Instead it was a graceful assembly of exquisite images that deftly illustrated the mood, the feeling of the book. Most of all, there was the image of the moth. This moth occupies a fleeting place within the novel, but it represents a pivotal point in the evolution of the story's protagonist. Not every reader notices. But this artist, this Bruce Jensen, he noticed. All the struggle that had gone into this book suddenly seemed worthwhile. I let loose a whoop of triumph and went leaping gleefully through the living room. In writing there are few moments of pure, unadulterated joy. This was one.

Nine months later my second novel saw print, with another Bruce Jensen cover. A year after that #3 hit the shelves, and again, Bruce was "my" artist. But who was he, really? I had no idea. I'd never met Bruce Jensen, never corresponded with him. I knew he'd done covers for writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Charles Sheffield, and Joe Haldeman's Hugo Award winning Forever Peace, yet the man himself was a mystery. I'd never met him, or knew anyone who had outside of New York publishing. I'd never seen his work exhibited at the conventions I'd been able to attend. Net searches turned up a few Bruce-Jensens in various trades, but there was almost nothing on the Bruce Jensen who practiced art.

By this time people were emailing me, sure that I must know Bruce and how he might be contacted. The situation was getting embarrassing. By the spring of '98 I knew I couldn't let things go on this way any longer. The new cover flat for my fourth novel had just arrived with Bruce Jensen's signature, and it was gorgeous. Perfect. I would be an ingrate if I did not communicate my sentiments to the author. So I sat down and did what I should have done three years earlier. I wrote a thank you note and sent it to Bruce via Bantam. Within a week I had an email from Bruce. Contact had been established! But with an odd footnote:

Bruce confessed he did not own a pc. He picked up his email mid-week at a cyber-cafe, and weekends, when he works as an art director with the CBS EVENING NEWS. Life without a pc -- for a writer this is a fact to boggle the mind... but then artists are supposed to be eccentric, aren't they?

Just a few months later I had the pleasure of meeting Bruce in person, along with his charming wife Yoshie Odaka, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore. Bruce's paintings stood out in the art room. Different, intricate, cyber, cool....

Where did this stuff come from anyway?

As it turns out, it's the fallout from a kid in Indiana, who, at an early age, fell in love with Star Trek and E.E. "Doc" Smith. Like most of us, Bruce did not bother with a gradual flirtation with SF. He got his hands on Smith's The Skylark of Valeron, with its enticing cover by Jack Gaughn, and fell instantly in love with the genre. Even then Bruce was an artist. He'd been drawing pictures from a time before his earliest memory. Birds and dinosaurs were favorite subjects, but thanks to TV and the space program, the imagery of science fiction was also part of his portfolio. Discovering science fiction -- and science fiction cover art -- quickened his ambitions. By high school Bruce knew: He was going to be a science fiction artist, and luckily for all of us, his parents encouraged him to follow this dream.

Bruce started painting, using as subjects both his own ideas, and images suggested by the books he was reading. After high school, he followed his love of painting to the Columbus College of Art and Design, which he describes as "an intense and rewarding experience." He took his lessons to heart. This was Art and it commanded all the formidable intensity that youthful passions can provoke. He learned the basic craftsmanship and skills needed by any successful artist -- and more. He was turned on to new ways of thinking about art that went beyond the usual assumption of representationalism -- that a painting should depict a "photographically" rendered scene. Instead he discovered how a painting might be imbued with complex dimensions, opening perspectives that could not be contained in a straightforward scene. Bruce still painted SFnal imagery whenever he could, and in a representational mode -- but now his art was supported by more abstract concerns of composition and color use.

In the summer of '84, with a degree in fine arts and a portfolio of SF Illustration, Bruce left Indiana for New York City, seeking employment. It didn't take long to find: In August of '84 Beth Meachum gave Bruce his first book cover assignment... although it may be that employment came a little too soon. Bruce modestly confesses that the cover "didn't come out too well" -- though apparently it came out well enough to earn him additional assignments. Over the next six years he created a dozen book covers, all of them in the familiar, representational mode. He also illustrated a graphic novel, and spent a couple of years working in television full time.

Painting is like writing in that improvement in the basic skills comes only with time and practice. By 1990 Bruce's journeyman years paid off when he succeeded in securing enough work painting science fiction book covers that he could consider it his full time profession.

1990 also saw his art divide into two distinct tracks. He continued working on representational covers: aliens, spaceships, guys and gals with guns, and "rock 'em sock 'em robots." But he also embarked on a new style of painting that left representationalism behind.

Bruce had been assigned a series of covers by Byron Preiss Visual Publications when they sold a four book series to Bantam referred to as "The Next Wave." Betsy Mitchell, the editor at Bantam, requested something "really different" for their covers. Of course Bruce figured "really different" was editor-code for "pretty much the same," so he offered up sketches of representational scenes that were at most mildly surrealistic. Everyone of them was rejected. Bruce found this a great incentive to finally let loose with some compositions that he truly believed would make for striking covers, though he didn't think for a minute they would be accepted. Happily he was wrong.

What made these covers so different? They had abandoned any attempt to re-create a scene from the books. Instead they pulled out images suggested by each book: slick, technological, emotional, contrasting pieces that combine to give an impression of the story, more far-reaching than any single scene could be. Over the years this mode has grown in popularity, and since the mid-'90s it has become Bruce Jensen's signature style.

So the next time you're in a bookstore and encounter a striking cover with a startling melange of SFnal images -- perhaps gleaming light, reflecting metal, mathematically perfect curves, precisely rendered foliage, haunting, abstract faces, or bisecting terrain that seems to be bleeding over from another world -- check the artist's signature. "Oh, that's a Bruce Jensen cover," may be the best description of this evolving art form.